Child of Silk

Judith no longer loves people. She uses her inheritance to buy herself an ice cream parlor and a sex robot, known as a milkmaid: an “artificial stupidity”, smarter than AI, endowed with early childhood traumas, vulgar language and a will of her own. To Judith, this is love, but she had imagined the whole free will thing differently. When her milkmaid unexpectedly leaves one day, Judith is devastated and promptly lodges a complaint with customer service. After all, she aimed to demonstrate that love could transcend species boundaries, whether lithium-ion or red blood cells, silicon meat or fat cells! Yet, the protesting public disagrees. Is the desire for an artificial counterpart love or merely consumerism? What does  free will mean for a machine anyway? Can a product withdraw from availability? Are machines ultimately freer than their creators? And where does love fit between the pressure to justify oneself and corporate interests?

«It is one of the great strengths of Leonie Ziem's text to evade unambiguousness... Theory takes place in the same beautiful and repulsive, coarse and delicate language that gives this text its surface, which you can't quite see through and that's why you love looking at it.» (Nachtkritik)