Marie Sutter

In her new short video, It Was Always You (2019), Marie Sutter explores the notion of new scientific developments in AI that are amplifying our connection with the digital world. She plays with the idea of the natural and the artificial, the real and the unreal. She uses digital face masks and robotic female voice-over to accentuate the unspoken relationship between a machine and the emotional response it triggers, to create the eerie feeling of the uncanny.

Written, edited and performed by herself, Sutter plays with the idea of the connection we have to our own carefully created digital image, and its emotional weight. She further highlights this connection in the title, It Was Always You.

Sutter wants the audience to enter her world by questioning the nature of empathy, that ability to imagine and honour the interior states of others. Maybe it is love, maybe it is not — maybe you are human, or you are not— but if you can’t tell the difference, what is the difference? What makes us human and what does not?