Qt Bot
QT.BOT – LUCAS LAROCHELLE
an artificial intelligence+ is an artificial intelligence, trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map, that generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. Their digital mind is constructed from an implementation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 82 000 text entries from the platform, and a StyleGAN trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates on Queering The Map. ’s first output, Sitting here with you in the future, is a deep dream into the collective (cyber)spaces of possible queer and trans narratives and landscapes of speculative LGBTQ2IA+ life generated by straddle the line between the plausible and the fantastic, revelling in the potential of failure, chaos and incommensurability in the queer use of machine learning technologies. ’s hivemind is an organism for generating glimmers of futures that emerge at the point in which singularities flow into the common. The experience of viewing the machinic narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA+ life that propagates is one of disorientation—time, space, and subjectivity collapse, producing multiplicitous visions of the many futures contained within the data. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.
an artif icial intelligence+ is an artificial intelligence, trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map, that generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.
QT.bot | Lucas LaRochelle | Studio XX
RESIDENCY |
Artist: Lucas LaRochelle
Sound design: Rouzbeh Shadpey
GAN programming: Mattie Tesfaldet
November 1st to December 13, 2019
Public presentation: Thursday, December 12, 6 pm
At Ada X
As part of its Slow Tech programming, Studio XX welcomes Lucas LaRochelle, in residency from November 1st to December 13. They are developing, an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of Queering The Map, a community-generated mapping platform of 80 000+ stories of LGBTQ2+ experience, that produces an endless stream of speculative queer futures.
“Queer story perhaps does not need to exist as a ubiquitous truth, but rather as a mechanism of making visible the intimacy and absurdity of collective world-building, both by humans and artificial intelligences. Imagining the traversal of queer spaces, physical and digital, how can we mediate, maintain, and assess a relationship between lived experience and the propagation of machine generated LGBTQ2+ auto-narratives?
Grounded in a desire to explore and embrace the il/legibility of queer existence, Lucas LaRochelle and their collaborators will develop a neural network, dubbed, to generate speculative queer spaces using the broad dataset of Queering the Map to build upon and self-initiate possible cyberfutures. By employing textual and visual content from over 80 000 submissions to the platform, will be engaged to trouble the autonomy and validity that an AI might have in creating a more opaque lineage of queer narrative. Tending to the actualities of holistically queer-made machines, there is a push to assert both a categorical collapse in how queer history is defined and the function of representation to go beyond that of human kin, once again, into the application of an AI informed exclusively and inclusively by queer people.
is the rogue offspring of Queering the Map, an online community mapping project that highlights anonymously submitted queer moments. Queering the Map was founded, created, and designed by Lucas LaRochelle in 2017 and has reached global popularity, now including tens of thousands of pins in 23 languages. With both projects flirting along similar trains of inquiry into queer worldmaking: works to deepen the negotiation between physical and digital space, through the incubation of an AI designed and trained with queer knowledge as its axis.
Where will turning away from truth and legibility as an apparatus of worldbuilding lead us? Dare the machine imagine futures compatible with queer realities? Are ’s in/coherent presents and futures in/accessible projections of our own?
The residency will come to fruition through a series of speculative documentaries traversing through the worlds initiated by and will be accompanied in the gallery by silk prints of these digital spaces. A series of public programs will be offered in conjunction with Lucas LaRochelle’s Slow Tech residency, including a vernissage, artist talk, and a series of machine learning workshops. ” – Rudi Aker
Glimmering Opacities: From Queering The Map to QT.bot
How might we queer the supposed “objectivity” of data by revelling in its incoherencies, and in turn imagine new worlds-within-the-world through this oblique lens? What is the role of fabulation in the marginalized digital archive? This talk explores the genesis of, an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of the community-generated counter mapping platform Queering The Map (). ’s digital inter-subjectivity straddles the line between the plausible and the fantastic, turning towards the potential of failure, chaos and incommensurability in the queer use of machine learning technologies. The experience of encountering the world of LGBTQ2IA+ life that propagates is one of disorientation—time, space, and stable subjectivity collapse, revealing within its ruins the multiplicitous visions of the futurities contained within the data. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work investigates queer and transgender digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space. → Register here for the Coding Resistance Lecture Series to watch the lecture synchronously and asynchronouslyThis lecture is part of the Coding Resistance Lecture Series:September 24, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
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