As AI tools train on millions of images, unpredictable possibilities allow for a queering of the imagery where bodies easily morph one into another, or into animals or objects – undoing normative representations of gender, kinship and embodiment.
Writing & AI Art By Jess MacCormack
We Talk AI
With Dissociative Dreams
Generating AI images through natural text prompts and image extension mechanisms create complex uncanny, neo-surreal images that can shift artistic styles seamlessly. As AI tools train on millions of images, there are endless, unpredictable possibilities of aesthetics and content. This allows for a queering of the imagery where bodies easily morph one into another, or into animals or objects – undoing normative representations of gender, kinship and embodiment with ease; and simultaneously illustrating the dissociated affect inherent in both mediated relations and traumatised individuals. Nonetheless, there are limitations to what this technology can produce as historical biases often related to race and gender are embedded in AI learning, and specific content is blocked by filters due to the companies’ ethics policies, including violence, disease, sexuality, and more. Trying to work around these limitations and find new ways to express these subjects is similar to the emergence of repressed trauma, or to queer culture for that matter; despite barrier mechanisms, these buried themes find subversive ways to express themselves.
About The Artist & Author
Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Working with communities and individuals affected by stigma and oppression, they use cultural platforms and distribution networks to facilitate collaborations which position art as a tool to engender personal and political agency.
Jess Mac’s digital work has been shared through various online platforms, such as VICE Creator’s project, PAPER Mag, and Art F City. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Inside Out, Imaginative Film Festival and International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA).
They have an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University (2008) and were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010-2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
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