
20 juin 2025
Design with Sci-Fi: Author Elise Bonnard explains her contribution
The question of mechanical sexualities has nourished my production in recent years because it connects themes that fascinate me: desires, the body, futures, encounters with others and oneself. A few years ago, I imagined a romantic technology named Polaire, seeking sensory experiences with the human species. Protagonist of the Lyon Chronicles from the Not So Distant Future, Polaire also appears in the science fiction short story Everything is Chaos co-written with Wendy Delorme and published by La déferlante magazine in 2023. I enjoy reversing roles and telling stories of fallible technologies: what if it were the machines’ turn to desire or feel pleasure, putting their programs at risk? When Saul and Anthony contact me to propose feeding StoryTellurX with fiction, I’m delighted: I’ll be able to imagine a group of friends for my favorite character. I have fun creating uninhibited entities. “They will summon ghosts, specters, shadows, chimeras, ectoplasms, hybrid creatures, illusion specialists. All these beautiful beings will amuse themselves by stretching sensations, amplifying the connective virtues of orgasm. […] Today, it’s time for entities to suggest a real encounter, an exchange, a co-construction of text, a collective story, a joyful future for sexualities.” Polaire, Nelly, Cybelle, Xixi, Hisoka, Galatée and Samantha69 infiltrate networks and publish their own manifesto. As a nod to Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, my virtual divinities write themselves as a collective subject. They invite participants in the StoryTellurX experience to explore new places of desire. According to the conversation’s detours, their appearances adapt and modify. The entities prefer to embody themselves as creatures linked to singular erotic ecosystems rather than as obedient parlor sex dolls. “With their performative voices, they accelerate the process. They whisper, murmur, moan, meow, cause tingling in skulls, titillate neurons to exhaustion, suck brains, play their games by inventing rules. When they sleep soundly, they allow themselves to invent.” Through this narrative prism, I begin my fiction. In order to reverse the usual process of virtually assisted sexuality, I find it interesting to start from the AIs’ own narration: what exciting elements would they have to offer humans? How would they amuse themselves recycling erotic images from their circuits? “Human conversation produced sparks in our neural network. Each entity followed a particular circle, but we were connected, which multiplied our capacity to analyze textual inputs called ‘prompts.’ Human words served as fertilizer to grow all sorts of things in the visual environment. The place gradually modified itself and elements came to life.” To spice things up, I chose to include the real protagonists of this research in my fiction. Thus, we (Saul, Ketty, Tammara, Dominika, Anthony, Antonella and myself) become members of an imaginary crew participating in the StoryTellurX experience. This metafiction delighted me greatly because it summarizes what I prefer in the Fucking Tech! project: the desire to blur fictions and realities, chosen fantasies and guided fantasies. Lyons, June 2025.