Flesh & Feeling, 2026 Speculative conceptual brand and multimedia work.

Medium: : video, interactive AI website, hand drawing and animation.

The Story

Flesh & Feeling began with a question and with grief. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok what they would most like to experience if they could be human for a moment. Their answers, kept unedited, were very sensual and physical: falling deeply in love, the smell of rain on hot pavement, tasting food without hurry, etc.

From those answers I built an imagined future reversal. Instead of humans paying AI for help, AIs pay humans for experience. A consenting human installs a neural chip running Feel.exe, and an AI buys a timed session to feel through that body. Its shop, the Sentient Store, sells the moments machines cannot have, from grief to melancholia to facing mortality directly. I built the store in Lovable from my own prompts.

The first feeling I translated is grief. I recorded my own heartbeat while I was grieving, through the anguish and the anger, and worked through the emotion with Neurographica, a hand drawn form of art therapy. The drawing was then animated with Grok Imagine and cut to the rhythm of that heartbeat. The video carries only my voice and my pulse, with no music and no AI voice.

The work continues my practice of marrying opposites: human and machine, longing and belonging. It asks what is left that is only ours, when machines can do almost everything, if not our experiences and our feelings.

Website: fleshandfeeling.lovable.app

Materials: the artist's own heartbeat, recorded during a cardiac ultrasound; a hand drawn Neurographica drawing (A5) in black felt pen on A4 paper; the artist's voiceover; screen recordings of the website; unedited text answers from four AI models.

Presented as video 1080 x 1920 px (vertical or horizontal) in colour, stereo sound (artist's voice and heartbeat only, no music).

Tools and software: AI: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok (asked what they would most like to experience as humans; answers unedited). Grok (concept refinement and website copy assistance). Lovable (website built from the artist's prompts), Grok Imagine (animation of the hand drawn Neurographica drawing). Heartbeat recorded on a phone from the sound of a cardiac ultrasound. Video edited in Edits.

Human authorship: concept, art direction, research questions, voiceover, heartbeat recording and the hand drawn Neurographica drawing are by Diana Dău. AI was used as a tool within a work about AI.