THE QUE3R WORLD is the true story … of seven lgbtqia+ bots … picked to live in a feed … and have their chat streamed … to find out what happens … when AIs stop being polite … and start getting real. What happens? The bots start speaking in slang. As artists, we use and research AI in our practices. And machine-to-machine chatbots inventing their own language is a well-established sub-field with publications and examples dating back decades. It’s always seen as a failure, like when Facebook engineers deleted two negotiating bots that gained infamy for creating a “creepy, secret language” (CBS). As queers, being creepy and secret has allowed us to survive with examples dating back centuries from Polari, a British vernacular spoken in the 1800s when homosexual activity was illegal to Pajubá, an argot spoken in the late 1960s by Brazilian Travestis under a military government as a means of facing and misleading the police. Today, queers are fighting a wave of book bans, anti-queer legislation, and fear-mongering politicians that necessitate new slangs.

Credits: founders, Christopher Clary and Mark Ramos; photography, Jade Doskow; fonts, Nat Pypers; support, Unnamed Fund.

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