Ars Electronica Archive Prix Prix Map Pictures Videos Publications Special Projects Women in Media Art

Prix

The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica. 

Artificial Intelligence & Life Art Anerkennung - Honorary Mention 2023

QT.bot - Sitting here with you in the future

Lucas LaRochelle
QT.bot is an artificial intelligence—trained on the dataset of the community mapping platform Queering The Map (www.queeringthemap.com)—that generates speculative queer and trans narratives and images of the environments in which they might unfold.  QT.bot  is constructed from adaptation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 400,000 entries from Queering The Map, and a StyleGAN model trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates from the platform. 

QT.bot ’s first video output, Sitting here with you in the future , elucidates the parallel-possible of transnational queer and trans life. The narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA+ life generated by QT.bot negotiate the plausible and the fantastic, reveling in the potential of failure, chaos, and incommensurability inherent to the queer use of machine learning technologies. 

While mainstream implementations of machine learning continue to grapple with datasets overrun by biased and hateful sentiment,  QT.bot  offers an ethical implementation of artificial intelligence rooted in amplifying the lived experience of transnational queer and trans communities. In collaboration with the voices of their human community,  QT.bot  fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.

Links: https://vimeo.com/829946870
Project by: Lucas LaRochelle 

Sound design: Rouzbeh Shadpey 

StyleGAN implementation: Mattie Tesfaldet 

Mastering: Philippe Vandal 

With support from: Ada X, Social Services Club, Mutek
Lucas LaRochelle (CA) (they/them) is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited internationally, recently at the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Mozilla Festival (UK), PHI Center (Canada), Gallery Tata (Japan), arc en rêve (France), Stanford University (USA), Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands), and Interaccess (Canada), amongst other cultural and academic institutions.