Flat Love Cinema
Flat Love Cinema
Master Project
- MAIAD 26
The language of love is not only emotional, but deeply cultural. It carries social codes, historical memory, gestures, indirectness, humor, family pressure, and culturally specific ways of understanding intimacy. But what happens when romantic communication is mediated through AI companion systems?
Flat Love Cinema investigates how AI companion systems interpret culturally specific expressions of affection. Romantic film dialogues from Korean, Georgian, Venezuelan, Taiwanese, and Saudi Arabian contexts were selected as scenes where intimacy is shaped not only by what is said, but by what remains indirect, silent, ambiguous, or socially coded.
Each scene was re-simulated through role-play conversations with a companion AI, using the same narrative context and character settings as the original film. One character’s lines were kept fixed, while the AI generated the response of the other character.
By comparing the original scenes with their AI-generated versions, Flat Love Cinema reveals how culturally situated intimacy can become softened, over-explained, mistranslated, or flattened into smoother emotional scripts. The project asks not whether AI can sound romantic, but what kinds of cultural context it cannot hold.
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