Cupidastic (Research ver.)

Cupidastic Research investigates how environmental toxicity, reproductive uncertainty, and algorithmic intimacy may converge into a future condition where love becomes biological, measurable, and governable.

The project began from a contradiction. While future technologies increasingly promise prediction, optimisation, and personalised decision-making, love remains valuable precisely because it resists full prediction. If the future were always clear, there would be no need for forecasts. In the same way, uncertainty is not only a source of anxiety, but also the condition that allows preferable futures to be imagined.

This research links microplastics, endocrine disruption, declining fertility, AI matchmaking, and emotional biometrics into one speculative problem framing. Rather than treating these issues as isolated topics, the project reads them as overlapping signals of a future in which human bodies become chemically altered, socially scored, and increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems.

Within this context, Cupidastic asks what forms of love, care, and human unpredictability might remain when intimacy becomes something that can be tracked, recommended, and optimised.

Microplastics are no longer external pollutants. Their accumulation within human tissues, endocrine systems, and reproductive organs suggests a slow transformation of biological conditions.

The research focuses on how microplastic-induced hormonal disruption may reshape ideas of reproduction, attraction, and care. Endocrine-disrupting substances such as BPA, phthalates, and dioxins are treated not only as environmental risks, but as forces that may alter the affective and reproductive body. In this speculative framework, reproduction is no longer only genetic, cultural, or political. It becomes entangled with plastic particulates, synthetic materials, and long-term hormonal instability.

The project is structured through four connected layers: microplastic futures, reproduction futurism, future biopolitics, and future love tracking. These layers move across macro scales of state regulation, meso scales of reproductive infrastructure, and micro scales of bodily heat, endocrine fluctuation, and emotional opacity.

Through this framing, Cupidastic Research asks not simply how reproduction might change, but what kinds of unplanned attraction, unreadable love, and reproductive non-events might persist outside algorithmic systems.

The project uses a speculative research methodology structured around four stages: sensing, forecasting, worldbuilding, and materialising.

Sensing began with interdisciplinary research into microplastic toxicity, reproductive health, algorithmic surveillance, emotional biometrics, and posthuman theory. Tools such as STEEP, PESTLE, weak signal analysis, annotated literature review, and visual mapping were used to locate early signals across environmental, social, technological, and anthropological domains.

Forecasting translated these signals into possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. Rather than using forecasting to predict a single outcome, the process was used to map emotional, ecological, and political stakes. The Futures Cone and scenario mapping helped position microplastic accumulation, declining fertility, and AI-mediated intimacy within longer temporal frames.

Worldbuilding then transformed these future conditions into narrative systems. The research developed speculative characters, public infrastructures, dating protocols, reproductive certificates, and love-compliance scenarios to make the future emotionally inhabitable rather than purely abstract.

Finally, materialising translated this world into artefacts, interfaces, and embodied interactions. Thermographic imagery, GSR-based affective sensing, recycled leather, hugging gestures, and wearable forms were explored as ways to visualise emotional signals while preserving ambiguity.

The research identified three key findings that shaped the final design direction.

First, emerging biological studies suggest a possible link between microplastic exposure and oxytocin dysregulation. Wang et al. examined how exposure to polystyrene microplastics reduced social behaviour and brain oxytocin levels in mice through the gut-brain axis. This became an empirical trigger for the project’s speculative premise: an “oxytocin recession” in which environmental toxicity begins to affect future sociality, intimacy, and reproductive behaviour.

Second, an affective sensing workshop at the Royal College of Art explored whether momentary love-spark events could be sensed through physiological and facial-expression data. Participants were placed in different relational pairings and asked to complete gaze and embrace exercises while galvanic skin response and AI-based facial expression analytics were recorded. The workshop suggested that affective intensity can already be partially operationalised through multimodal sensing.

Third, the workshop revealed concern around emotional biometric privacy. Participants expressed discomfort with the possibility that emotional data could be accessed by platforms, governments, or reproductive systems. This finding reframed the project from a simple visualisation of risk into a question of affective data sovereignty.

Together, these findings shifted Cupidastic toward a more critical design question: if future systems can measure attraction, compatibility, and reproductive potential, how might people protect the parts of intimacy that should remain unmeasured?

The scenario imagines a future in which microplastics are reclassified as endocrine-disrupting ambient pollutants and daily polymer counts become as normal as pollen or UV indexes.

As reproductive anxiety grows, dating platforms move from personality-based matching to biological compatibility scoring. Wearables, fertility clinics, and AI matchmaking systems begin to produce oxytocin indexes, hormone scores, and reproduction certificates. Love becomes a dashboard metric, while the right to reproduce becomes tied to chemical status and algorithmic legibility.

Within this world, Cupidastic emerges as a system for generating positive prediction errors. Users wear a vest-and-handle kit that produces thermal and physiological signals between consenting individuals. These signals create moments of attraction that are perceptible to each other, but difficult for algorithmic systems to fully classify.

The scenario does not propose a technological solution to microplastic toxicity or declining fertility. Instead, it asks whether human unpredictability can remain a form of resistance inside systems designed to optimise intimacy.

This research became the conceptual foundation for the Cupidastic wearable system.

The object version of Cupidastic translates the research into a hug vest, sensing handles, material studies, and a speculative scenario film. While the object page focuses on the final artefact and interaction, this research version shows the underlying logic: how environmental toxicity, hormonal disruption, reproductive governance, AI matchmaking, and emotional privacy were connected into one future system.

Cupidastic Research therefore operates as the project’s worldbuilding engine. It defines the conditions under which the object becomes meaningful, and asks what kinds of love might still survive when both bodies and emotions become increasingly available to measurement.