amour fou

AMOUR FOU (2022)
(Feat. Scharmien Zandi & Sarah Scherer)

Love Within the Code

„I will lick over your face, sleep with your best friend, caress your amygdala, sew myself a dress out of your beard, want to drink you, love you, strangle you.“

Love is contradiction. Wild desire and quiet devotion, tenderness and destruction, passion and despair. In AMOUR FOU I explored this chaotic spectrum through an AI-driven visual experiment, testing both the potential and limitations of artificial creativity.

The award-winning performance by Scharmien Zandi (Austrian Music Theater Award 2020) merges music, literature, and artificial intelligence. Anonymous texts, performed and directed by Sarah Scherer, collide with AI-generated visuals I live-performed, creating a visual dialogue between human emotion and machine interpretation.

When AI Dreams of Love

The images in AMOUR FOU are the result of text-to-image prompting — an AI translating language into visual form. But here lies the gap: love, longing, and obsession cannot be truly captured by an algorithm. The AI recognizes words, patterns, and correlations, but it does not feel. It does not understand the tremble in a voice, the hesitation in a touch, the ache behind a lyric. It only suggests, based on datasets and statistical probabilities.

Humans, on the other hand, translate emotions across mediums—from feeling to text, from text to music, from music to image. We interpret, we feel, we layer meaning upon meaning. A love song carries not just words but a lifetime of echoes, a history of longing, a personal resonance. A machine does not experience heartbreak. It does not remember the scent of someone leaving. It does not dream.

The Tension Between Machine and Emotion

In AMOUR FOU, this tension is laid bare. The AI-generated visuals exist as a fascinating, alien interpretation of human passion — an emotionless mirror reflecting back a distorted image of love. The songs, blending Pop, Oriental, and Experimental soundscapes, bring back what the machine lacks.

The project goes beyond personal emotions to question how AI and technology shape our cultural narratives. When machines generate art, who defines meaning? Who controls the aesthetics of emotion?

In the end, AMOUR FOU is a confrontation: Can love be digitized? Can desire be reduced to data? And if machines are rewriting art, will we still recognize ourselves in it?