Biography(ies)

Dayna McLeod is a queer artist engaged in a performance-based practice. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. Her video and performance work have been presented at: the Impakt Festival (Utrecht Netherlands); the Mardi Gras Festival (Darlinghurst, Australia); MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity (São Paulo, Brazil); the Modern Art Museum (Warsaw, Poland); Le Centre d’art contemporain (Paris, France); the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs); Centre PHI (Montreal, Quebec).

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.

A######### I########### | DAYNA MCLEOD

Dayna McLeod

15.09 — 21.10 / 2023

Opening reception : Friday, September 15, 2023 ‑ 5 p.m.

Open to all

limited seating | reservation —> lysanne@sporobole.org

DaynAI

2022

Video, 51 sec

DaynAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s gibber

2023

Video, 1 min 16 s

For the past year, Dayna McLeod has been working with artificial intelligence tools to explore human to non-human collaboration, embodiment, and performativity. In September 2022, the artist hired a company to make her into an AI actor she named “DaynAI.” Upon receiving the prototype in December 2022, she noted that her physical representation was evident, but not her voice. Disappointed, she later made two one-minute prototype videos that detail and describe some of these hurdles: DaynAI (2022) and DaynAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s gibber (2023). She also observed that her AI “self” had a difficult temperament – she was outright mean.

In producing herself as an AI actor, using arts-based research-creation methods, the artist questions her ethical responsibilities to human actors used to produce this technology. This has led her to examine the affective uncanniness of AI actors in the ongoing DaynAI project that, as a whole, engage with facets such as queer AI, aging AI, and AI labour practices.

Photo credit: courtesy of the artist