MADA NOW 2024
BFA (HONS) GRADUATE EXHIBITION
This body of work aims to address: “What is queer abstraction in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” I have used the notion of a coda, the splaying outwards and torquing of its traditional definition in music, as a framework to expand my studio based speculative research, encompassing my interests in queer discourse, image and sound practice, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). I have approached AI image making as a collaboration with the machine, a doubling. Thinking beyond traditional definitions (often a western, singular lens), is essential to considering AI as a hyper dimensional, plural form.
How can a studio-based practice develop a queer methodology within the pervasive and ubiquitous presence of AI today? I propose that one approach could be to consider AI through the lens of embodied experience, drawing upon questions posed by queer abstraction discourse, “Why does Queer=body?” and Sarah Ahmed’s Disorientation and Queer Objects. My interest lies in the slippery space of translation between the dualities of sound and image as a poetic device and a form of queer abstraction, to challenge the perceived hierarchies of prescriptive (and often oppressive), codified systems and spaces, echoed through the encounter with AI.
Ahmed argues that “disorientation involves becoming an object”. “Queer becomes a matter of how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds.” Inherent in this idea, is the bodily connection to orientation to space, surfaces, touch, proximity, community and how queer bodies are orientated towards queer moments when objects begin to slip (or when they become oblique). I think of the flatbed scanner as a stand in for Ahmed’s table, a device to support image making, with disorientation a side effect of experiencing AI and how this translates to the experience of artwork within space, both visually and aurally (moving in and out of the body).
The flatbed scanner has become a key tool to create images in my studio research. I consider the images produced to be fragments of the aftermath of a performance. Thinking of the scanner as a form of resistance to AI, using an outdated modality generally reserved for creating and archiving copies or original documents. It also serves as a device to muddy definitions within artistic mediums between photography, painting and performance, a form of dissolving delineation inherent in queer abstraction. The act of scanning also has broad reaching implications in data capture through surveillance to feed AI systems.
Quotidian objects, my body, items of clothing found in the studio and at home, are rolled and dragged across the glass surface as the LED light scans. The objects are pressed into the surface of the glass, by my body, by touch and downward pressure, implying an encounter with technology through the making process, which is often echoed in bodily traces in the final image. The glitches and accidental mark making, the visual dragging/disruption of time through these acts of abstraction, arcing back to a queer methodology. The flattening of space in the image by the scanner and the contrasting between dark shadows and light, echoing Juhani Pallasmaa’s ideas on haptics, giving weight to peripheral vision. This in turn intensifies the viewer’s encounter with the image, highlighting texture and light, moving in, out and through a body.
The images have been printed on ultra gloss, aluminium panels using a dye sublimation process. Aluminium, a reference to the physical manifestation of the AI system contained within data centres in factory warehouses. This adds a physical body to the “myth” or subliminal mystery of AI as something that exists ubiquitously without being seen. Dye sublimation as a digital printing process of fusing the image into the aluminium substrate through heat transfer. This compression, acting as fusion of bodies. The high gloss surface, an expression of desire, but also implicates the body of the viewer in the image, within the space. Pallasmaa refers to the architectural mirror that returns our gaze and doubles the world, as an “enigmatic and frightening device.” This surface quality also encapsulates the incessant pool of images spewed by the AI system into circulation, the inherent unknowing of the machinic other contained in the myth of AI. The images have been sized to match the scale of the flatbed scanner. The horizontal measurement also equates to the horizontal of the speakers used in the installation.
Double (Blue), contains the sound of the scanner, both recorded in its pure form and altered using phasing, a technique that oscillates the sound waves between two polarities, crossing in a nexus. This effect creates a nauseating sea sawing of the sound wave, which has strong bodily implications. The work also contains the sound recorded from the internal pocket of my leather jacket, doubling as a passenger to my partner, held closely, travelling via motorbike down the Eastlink freeway in Naarm. The sound plays through a vertically stacked set of speakers, resembling a body (or two bodies), which creates a horizontal sound blanket when activated. The speakers are oriented towards the blue wall at the rear of the gallery (mimicking a blue screen), painted using specific chroma key blue screen video paint. The blue screen referencing moving image post- production and editing, a luminous, almost tactile field to manifest (or project) subconscious images that the experience of sound can generate, and the long history of reference to the colour blue throughout queer theory and art practice.
