Winnie Soon, Helen Pritchard: Recurrent Queer Imaginaries

Artist(s):

Title:

Recurrent Queer Imaginaries

Exhibition:

DAC Online Exhibition 2020: Digital Power: Activism, Advocacy and the Influence of Women Online
More artworks from DAC Online Exhibition 2020:

Artist Statement:

Recurrent Queer Imaginaries is an exhibition of queer manifestos, motto writing, and urban dreaming. It features the new artificial intelligence entity, the “Motto Assistant”, available as a browser-based artwork by Pritchard and Soon. “Motto Assistant” is a machine learner, who continuously writes mottos for revolutions, anti-fascist guiding principles of living, queer love ethics, authoritarian resistances, political movements, class struggles, municipal identities, city planning, art practices, joyful engagements and violent direct action. “Motto Assistant” applies the mottos, as a method of questioning, revising, imagining, and developing, considering historical circumstances and cultural conditions. The exhibition takes as its starting point the histories and uses of manifestos and mottos as operational instructions/guidance for living together and organizing urban space. Recurrent Queer Imaginaries explores how queer and feminist manifestos have been used to propose imaginaries for life in cities that “could be” or “could have been”. The artwork explores that when these manifestos, these words, are read together they might as Ursula K Le Guin speculates, “activate our imaginations” to rewrite living. The artwork was developed using manifestos and zines for queer and intersectional life as a source text for machine learning and generative processes. It uses recurrent neural networks to train and process sequences of collective voices, as well as the “diastic” algorithm to establish a poetic structure. Such a queer model opens up new imaginaries and forgotten language beyond the confines of accurate prediction and effective generalization. The seed text “Not for Self, but All” is used in different parts of the text generation. This seed text, which at first was mistaken for a corporate slogan, is Camden Council’s motto for their municipal identity, which hangs prominently next to the Google offices in the heart of the new development of Kings Cross. Recurrent Queer Imaginaries is a call to reclaim queer spaces from corporate neo-colonial imaginations, operational injustices and reimagine them differently for all, as a commitment to queer liberation.