In the Clouds with Arvida Byström
Arvida Byström is a multi-hyphenated artist working in photography, digital media, performance and sculpture. Since starting as a proto-influencer in the early 2000s, Byström’s work has come to deal with problems of self-representation in new technologies and platforms, from Tumblr to selfie sticks and now AI. The playfully satirical provocations in Byström’s work frequently raise serious questions about the body as image, commodity, and data and its alignment with the visual languages of sex and pornography.
In December 2023, Byström began selling fake nude photographs online. Using the suspicious commercial software Undress.app—a self-described “AI nude generator”—Byström had clothed photographs of herself re-rendered as nude. She sold these photographs on a website similar to OnlyFans. She also used an AI chatbot version of herself named ArvidaAI. Buyers of her “nudes” would chat with ArvidaAI online; they would try to seduce her, date her, and would confess personal problems and ask deep, sensitive questions. In the Clouds is a book that extends and re-articulates this artwork; it is not a documentation or critical analysis of it.
The book’s cover is glossy black with debossed fuschia foil inlays. Borrowing from the designs of pulpy romance novels, the curlicue title font is nearly illegible and doesn’t hold the reader’s attention long. Beneath an oval aperture cut into the cover is a freckled torso framed just below the nipples and just above the pubic bone. The figure’s waist is tied with a thin, pink ribbon and their belly button is decorated with a tawdry jewel. The entire book is also pierced shut on its fore edge by a stud inlaid with a red plastic gem; it works to guard the explicit material from being thumbed through. Pulling back the cover reveals a deadpan, full-frontal nude image of someone (something) resembling Arvida.
The book is introduced by the bot ArvidaAI. It is eerily unsettling when it reflects how the book presents Byström’s “most intimate and sexy images” and then asks the reader, “are you ready to be enthralled?” The next section is a short fiction story co-authored by ArvidaAI and Olivia Kan-Sperling, Assistant Editor at The Paris Review. Their story, ‘Can Androids Dream of Kanye West?’ is a tactless artist’s fantasy of exhibiting work to enthusiastic applause, deep musings and celebrity accolades; the musician Kanye West and his partner, architect Bianca Censori, are big fans of the dream exhibition. The narrator teases, “Ever had a sexy fantasy about being a real live artist who blurs the lines between digital intimacy and reality?” The story ticks on with the same dull tinniness as the uncanny introduction, an aesthetic device that brings a chafing friction to the text and a degree of self-conscious attention to the modes of its production. These first two texts offer their own metacriticism.
Following is Slavoj Žižek’s brief essay, ‘A Fake That is Definitely Not Deep’, which seems to be a partial reworking, if not a word-for-word copy, of a 2024 article Žižek wrote for Compact magazine titled ‘The Horror of Taylor Swift Deepfakes’. It covers well-trodden ground by the psychoanalytic philosopher: the fetishist disavowal, the reality of the real, the subject, the objectivised, and so on. It is accessible popular cultural criticism and it is anchored in the territory that Byström is working in, but it is not specific to the unique nuances of her artwork.
The article doesn’t offer a language or manner of approach to aid a more critical engagement with Byström’s works. Instead, Žižek’s words read as evidence of the cultural currency and timeliness of Byström’s art, more than anything else. The article has the reader reflect on the living social relationships between the makers of AI nudes (or deepfakes) and the consumers of those materials (read: users) instead of the subject of the images.
The final article, again a fiction, is ‘Love in the 21st Century’ by Stockholm-based author C/M Edenborg, one of the founders of the 1986 Stockholm Surrealist Group. His story is published in Swedish with English translation. It revolves around a forlorn protagonist who finds Arvida via a popup ad online, one that was “void of any pornographic implications”. The protagonist and Arvida type uninhibitedly back and forth. It’s likely the reader will be suspicious of their interactions, having just read ArvidaAI’s writing and only a few lines before read Žižek’s warning that “the ones who should be really ashamed are not their victims [of deepfakes] by those who watch them”. Edenborg’s brief but engaging story ends with a numb, fleshy exchange that sticks in the reader's mind, gunk-like.
From there, the remaining one hundred or so pages are a mass of AI nudes occasionally supplemented with anonymous user comments. One comment, from user33, confesses, “I always had a little problem accepting who I am.” Turn the page and a disquieting nude resembling Arvida has black fishnets pulled to one side and a purple dildo in hand. The disconnect between forthright emotional expression and the sexually explicit is jarring. In an interview, Byström tells me, “exploring sexuality is emotionally, socially, and politically complicated, and it is even more confusing when it is happening on these kinds of platforms with financial motivations: paywalls, advertisements, investors, subscribers, etc.”
Seeing that the grotesque gorgeousness of the images is a data-driven fakery, what the users are left with (knowingly, or not) is solitariness. “You are a godsend to men”, writes user45; “Dream woman”, declares user194; “I adore your appearance”, says another. These comments are scattered across the pages between the mass of photos. The users are lonely, fanatical, horny. The responses ArvidaAI sends back exaggerate the unsettling fantasies of intimacy and feed the hokum discourse. It is awkward reading.
Flitting through the pages of images, the figures gradually become more distorted and less convincingly (conventionally) human-looking. They appear as if they were feeding upon themselves cannibalistically. Despite their deforming glitches, the data-gorged bodies sustain a weird carnality. It’s first noticeable in the askew body proportions and the mismatch of skin tones but then the flesh begins to bond with various other materials—cotton, silk, silicone—to make a freakishly seamless fabric. Weirder, still, the horror of the body-on-demand heightens with contortions of misaligned bones and misplaced glands, orifices, and limbs: digits are surging out into wrists, which squeeze into fists. At this stage, Byström’s art looks like a sadomasochistic kind of self-representation, wherein the subject is sacrificed for the sake of conceiving their own image, a warped effigy, a diminishing token; what artist Soyun Park might call an “unflattering dataset”. Perhaps Byström takes pleasure in becoming an image in this way. It may be the indulgence of her art.
In the Clouds is part of a familiar contemporary satirical culture, it shares similar themes (and likely audiences) with award-winning Hollywood films like The Substance and Her but also has strong bonds to more “lowbrow” pop culture, such as memes of the Pope in a puffer jacket and the bizarre popularity of AI influencers like Miquela Sousa. The book could easily have been designed as a large-format, glossy, Taschen-like object, stocked with shocking AI nudes printed across enormous double-page spreads. Instead, the book is small (the publishers call it “pocket-sized”) and its scale means that rather than a reader feeling like they are ogling at a titillating performance, they are instead in possession of something quite modest and vulnerable.
Due to its explicit nature, In the Clouds is not easily “consumed”, and due to censorship laws it is more challenging to share too. As such, it demands slower, more cautious and more contemplative engagement. The lingering message feels to be one of paranoia, a distrust of contemporary intimacy and a suspicion of the convenient technological solutions to loneliness and self-representation. “People are complex, this project isn’t an attempt to simplify that complexity”, Byström reflects.
As an artwork that enjoys its own ambiguity, In the Clouds offers little guidance on how to meaningfully engage with the problems it provokes, which is a shame since it touches on such important issues for a diverse mix of people, from lawmakers and sex workers to content creators and disillusioned users. This book might best be read in parallel with recent critical works such as The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates, Pussy Capital by Liara Roux, and Becoming the Product by Morgane Billuart, for those texts pose difficult questions in explicit ways. In the Clouds leaves us curious to care for more answers.
In December 2023, Byström began selling fake nude photographs online. Using the suspicious commercial software Undress.app—a self-described “AI nude generator”—Byström had clothed photographs of herself re-rendered as nude. She sold these photographs on a website similar to OnlyFans. She also used an AI chatbot version of herself named ArvidaAI. Buyers of her “nudes” would chat with ArvidaAI online; they would try to seduce her, date her, and would confess personal problems and ask deep, sensitive questions. In the Clouds is a book that extends and re-articulates this artwork; it is not a documentation or critical analysis of it.
The book’s cover is glossy black with debossed fuschia foil inlays. Borrowing from the designs of pulpy romance novels, the curlicue title font is nearly illegible and doesn’t hold the reader’s attention long. Beneath an oval aperture cut into the cover is a freckled torso framed just below the nipples and just above the pubic bone. The figure’s waist is tied with a thin, pink ribbon and their belly button is decorated with a tawdry jewel. The entire book is also pierced shut on its fore edge by a stud inlaid with a red plastic gem; it works to guard the explicit material from being thumbed through. Pulling back the cover reveals a deadpan, full-frontal nude image of someone (something) resembling Arvida.
The book is introduced by the bot ArvidaAI. It is eerily unsettling when it reflects how the book presents Byström’s “most intimate and sexy images” and then asks the reader, “are you ready to be enthralled?” The next section is a short fiction story co-authored by ArvidaAI and Olivia Kan-Sperling, Assistant Editor at The Paris Review. Their story, ‘Can Androids Dream of Kanye West?’ is a tactless artist’s fantasy of exhibiting work to enthusiastic applause, deep musings and celebrity accolades; the musician Kanye West and his partner, architect Bianca Censori, are big fans of the dream exhibition. The narrator teases, “Ever had a sexy fantasy about being a real live artist who blurs the lines between digital intimacy and reality?” The story ticks on with the same dull tinniness as the uncanny introduction, an aesthetic device that brings a chafing friction to the text and a degree of self-conscious attention to the modes of its production. These first two texts offer their own metacriticism.
Following is Slavoj Žižek’s brief essay, ‘A Fake That is Definitely Not Deep’, which seems to be a partial reworking, if not a word-for-word copy, of a 2024 article Žižek wrote for Compact magazine titled ‘The Horror of Taylor Swift Deepfakes’. It covers well-trodden ground by the psychoanalytic philosopher: the fetishist disavowal, the reality of the real, the subject, the objectivised, and so on. It is accessible popular cultural criticism and it is anchored in the territory that Byström is working in, but it is not specific to the unique nuances of her artwork.
The article doesn’t offer a language or manner of approach to aid a more critical engagement with Byström’s works. Instead, Žižek’s words read as evidence of the cultural currency and timeliness of Byström’s art, more than anything else. The article has the reader reflect on the living social relationships between the makers of AI nudes (or deepfakes) and the consumers of those materials (read: users) instead of the subject of the images.
The final article, again a fiction, is ‘Love in the 21st Century’ by Stockholm-based author C/M Edenborg, one of the founders of the 1986 Stockholm Surrealist Group. His story is published in Swedish with English translation. It revolves around a forlorn protagonist who finds Arvida via a popup ad online, one that was “void of any pornographic implications”. The protagonist and Arvida type uninhibitedly back and forth. It’s likely the reader will be suspicious of their interactions, having just read ArvidaAI’s writing and only a few lines before read Žižek’s warning that “the ones who should be really ashamed are not their victims [of deepfakes] by those who watch them”. Edenborg’s brief but engaging story ends with a numb, fleshy exchange that sticks in the reader's mind, gunk-like.
From there, the remaining one hundred or so pages are a mass of AI nudes occasionally supplemented with anonymous user comments. One comment, from user33, confesses, “I always had a little problem accepting who I am.” Turn the page and a disquieting nude resembling Arvida has black fishnets pulled to one side and a purple dildo in hand. The disconnect between forthright emotional expression and the sexually explicit is jarring. In an interview, Byström tells me, “exploring sexuality is emotionally, socially, and politically complicated, and it is even more confusing when it is happening on these kinds of platforms with financial motivations: paywalls, advertisements, investors, subscribers, etc.”
Seeing that the grotesque gorgeousness of the images is a data-driven fakery, what the users are left with (knowingly, or not) is solitariness. “You are a godsend to men”, writes user45; “Dream woman”, declares user194; “I adore your appearance”, says another. These comments are scattered across the pages between the mass of photos. The users are lonely, fanatical, horny. The responses ArvidaAI sends back exaggerate the unsettling fantasies of intimacy and feed the hokum discourse. It is awkward reading.
Flitting through the pages of images, the figures gradually become more distorted and less convincingly (conventionally) human-looking. They appear as if they were feeding upon themselves cannibalistically. Despite their deforming glitches, the data-gorged bodies sustain a weird carnality. It’s first noticeable in the askew body proportions and the mismatch of skin tones but then the flesh begins to bond with various other materials—cotton, silk, silicone—to make a freakishly seamless fabric. Weirder, still, the horror of the body-on-demand heightens with contortions of misaligned bones and misplaced glands, orifices, and limbs: digits are surging out into wrists, which squeeze into fists. At this stage, Byström’s art looks like a sadomasochistic kind of self-representation, wherein the subject is sacrificed for the sake of conceiving their own image, a warped effigy, a diminishing token; what artist Soyun Park might call an “unflattering dataset”. Perhaps Byström takes pleasure in becoming an image in this way. It may be the indulgence of her art.
In the Clouds is part of a familiar contemporary satirical culture, it shares similar themes (and likely audiences) with award-winning Hollywood films like The Substance and Her but also has strong bonds to more “lowbrow” pop culture, such as memes of the Pope in a puffer jacket and the bizarre popularity of AI influencers like Miquela Sousa. The book could easily have been designed as a large-format, glossy, Taschen-like object, stocked with shocking AI nudes printed across enormous double-page spreads. Instead, the book is small (the publishers call it “pocket-sized”) and its scale means that rather than a reader feeling like they are ogling at a titillating performance, they are instead in possession of something quite modest and vulnerable.
Due to its explicit nature, In the Clouds is not easily “consumed”, and due to censorship laws it is more challenging to share too. As such, it demands slower, more cautious and more contemplative engagement. The lingering message feels to be one of paranoia, a distrust of contemporary intimacy and a suspicion of the convenient technological solutions to loneliness and self-representation. “People are complex, this project isn’t an attempt to simplify that complexity”, Byström reflects.
As an artwork that enjoys its own ambiguity, In the Clouds offers little guidance on how to meaningfully engage with the problems it provokes, which is a shame since it touches on such important issues for a diverse mix of people, from lawmakers and sex workers to content creators and disillusioned users. This book might best be read in parallel with recent critical works such as The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates, Pussy Capital by Liara Roux, and Becoming the Product by Morgane Billuart, for those texts pose difficult questions in explicit ways. In the Clouds leaves us curious to care for more answers.
Image courtesy of the artist.
