Dayna McLeod
Dayna McLeod is a queer video and performance artist who uses autoethnographic methods to work on, and with the concept of representation that is based on her own lived experience. For the past several years, she’s been working with Artificial Intelligence tools to explore human to non-human collaboration, embodiment, and performativity. Her work has been shown at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, Agora Hydro Québec, PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina.
More specifically, McLeod has presented her work with, and on AI at a public talk for Creative Commons Canada in their series Watch Me Work: a look behind the screen of digital artists and creators and in an interview with Heliotrope (both in 2022). Her video essay Capitalism Machina, which pairs “The Pleasure Panic”, an AI generated essay narrated by an AI voice actor, with an excerpt from “Ex Machina” (directed by Alex Garland, 2014) was recently published by the Society for the Anthropology of Work.