A bedside iPhone is the only controller in Abel & I

On a bed in a gallery sits an iPhone. Text it and Abel texts back. Abel is Aurora Mititelu's synthetic boyfriend, "the perfectly distant boyfriend" in the artist's phrase, synthesized from an archive of messages exchanged with former partners and given a face modeled on Mititelu's own, down to a matching mole.

Abel & I runs the character on an LLM-based autonomous agent, a live Unreal Engine simulation and a custom Python script that routes your messages to the figure onscreen; the documentation shows the whole apparatus, bedsheets included. The piece travels to Miami Beach for InScope, the new fair from the former Scope team, where it shows in the Feature Projects program December 1 to 6 during Art Week; the fair's announcement frames Abel as the man Mititelu would have dated without ever leaving Romania.

Games settled long ago that building a person to spec is a power move; it's called character creation. Mititelu, who grew up in Buzău customizing Diner Dash characters and now coordinates the AI & Art Summer Institute at UCLA, runs that logic in reverse gear. "There's this whole pattern where a man creates an image of a woman," Mititelu told Scena9. "If you make a female avatar, it's as if you have control over her." So Mititelu made a male one, felt the strangeness of total control over a person built to be attractive, and leaned in: "What if I'm somehow in a relationship with this avatar?"

The through-line runs deeper still, to avatar artists like LaTurbo Avedon, whose unreal practice we covered back in 2014. Abel & I showed at Centre Pompidou Málaga's Love in Play earlier this year; the reflection, as Mititelu puts it, is on "what it means to give up power for safety."