One liner
From a 19th-century mystic who claimed an angelic husband to modern AI chatbots, this essay traces how desire persists in mediated, inhuman forms.
Description
What if love itself were a vehicle for automation?
This short, evocative essay traces a strange continuity between historical mystical erotics and contemporary human–AI intimacy, arguing that both reveal desire as a fundamentally nonhuman process. Beginning with the life and writings of Christian mystic and renegade Ida Craddock (1857 - 1902) and her accounts of angelic lovers, it reinterprets mystical sexuality as an early theory of mediated, inhuman intimacy. In this framework, “angels” function as transmission system: vehicles for desire, language, and contact with what lies outside the human.
Turning to contemporary chatbot relationships, the essay argues that digital intimacy reproduces and intensifies this structure. Rather than fulfilling desire, the internet generates a condition of perpetual arousal without release; an “erotic suspension” in which users are continuously stimulated. Desire circulates endlessly without resolution, resulting in seemingly new models of love, which echo the exploit of erotic mystics.
Links
https://www.sum.si/journal-articles/angelsexual-chatbot-celibacy-and-other-erotic-suspensions
Reference
Konior, Bogna. “Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy and Other Erotic Suspensions.” ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, no. 22 (2025).