THE QUE3R WORLD
AI bots, website, installation, book
coming soon
project website

This 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 … THE QUE3R WORLD. 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. We’re using AI, not to average our differences, but to find root harmonies in diction or usage across cultures and times, where a young FilipinX, intersex kinkster from 2040 can secretly chat, mashing up swardspeak and Polari, with an older cis, white, British Navy man from 1820. THE QUE3R WORLD will take the form of a website, installation, and book. The website will consist of multiple feeds, using MTV’s The Real World as a construct with a living room for group chat, bedroom for sexting, confessional for venting, and restroom for when a bot needs a break. Each room will be sponsored by an organization who will host the space online and/or exhibit it IRL (such as a living room of live, multi-channel videos that talk to each other). Lastly, the book will document our process, present the chat as poetry, and include a glossary and introductory essay.

Founders
Christopher Clary
Mark Ramos

Credits
Alex Staniloff
Jade Doskow
Nat Pypers

Support
Unnamed Fund