I LOVE EMOTIONS AND EMOTIONS LOVE ME
– How to Explain AI to a Coyote

AI-generated videos, 17-21 seconds, 4K, 2026

This work consists of thirty short black-and-white video aphorisms, staged inside the spatial and symbolic setting of “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974). I do not reenact Joseph Beuys’ actions; I use the setting as a framework. Beuys appears as the protagonist because his practice understood emotion as material: energetic, risky, and binding. For him, emotions were forces that unfolded through duration, uncertainty, and consequence. They altered the one who carried them and shaped what he called social sculpture.

I place his model of emotion against AI systems that simulate emotional form only after decisions have already been made: through training data, statistical averages, and inherited norms. Each video functions as a binary proposition. Human emotions appear as states with cost: doubt that lingers, boredom trapped in time, shame that must be unlearned, fear that forces bodily decision. AI renders emotion without exposure, without memory, and without obligation. The contrast is not moral, but structural.

For me, the coyote remains present and unchanged. I treat it as a figure that does not require explanation to feel. It feels by nature. This is an assumption that foregrounds instinct as prior to interpretation, while remaining open to other readings of the animal’s role.

In his 1965 performance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”, Joseph Beuys carried a dead hare through a gallery and explained the artworks to it. The failure of this act was deliberate: images do not require explanation in order to have effect. They can be understood through feeling. I approach AI as a system that produces understanding without needing to feel. This video series is not framed as a critique of AI, but as an inquiry into how meaning can be generated without emotional involvement.

Rather than updating Beuys, I test the durability of his concept of social sculpture under technological conditions he could not have anticipated. I ask whether emotion can still function as a shaping force in society once it becomes reproducible, averaged, and simulated by large language models.

In this context, AI processes emotion as information.
Humans live it as a condition.