Elaine Byrne: Love without lack: AI, Desire and the Artificial Other

Love Without Lack develops from Elaine Byrne’s ongoing research project PLAN C, which asks what is missing from dominant accounts of our AI future when questions of care, dependency, intimacy and human formation are largely left out.

As artificial intelligence moves beyond the role of tool and enters increasingly intimate areas of human life, familiar distinctions begin to become less certain: between care and service, intimacy and transaction, emotional and physical labour, and between those who provide attention and those who receive it.

Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas of desire, attachment and the Other, Byrne considers what these changing relationships might reveal about our need for other people. Rather than asking whether machines are becoming more human, Love Without Lack asks a different question: what might our relationships with artificial others be changing about us?

Elaine Byrne is an Irish visual artist working across film, photography and sculpture. Her research-led practice examines the systems that shape how we live, from borders and sovereignty to technology, labour and human relationships. She holds a PhD in Film and Media from Temple University and studied artificial intelligence at the University of Oxford. Her current research project, PLAN C, considers what is missing from dominant accounts of our AI future, particularly questions of care, dependency, intimacy and human formation. Byrne is an Associate Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and was awarded the 2026 RCSI Art Award, in association with the RHA and The Irish Times, for her photographic work Alessia. Her work is held in many public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Collection of Ireland.