Biography(ies)

Lucas LaRochelle [they] is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.

They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited internationally including at: the Guggenheim Museum (New York City); PHI Center (Montreal, Quebec), Gallery Tata (Tokyo, Japan); arc en rêve (Bordeaux, France); Digital Writers Festival (Melbourne, Australia); MUTEK (Montreal, Quebec); Ars Electronica & LINZ FMR Festival (Linz, Austria); Somerset House (London, England); Onomatopee Projects (Eindhoven, Netherlands); fanfare (Amsterdam, Netherlands). They have published widely, a variety of paper and online contexts: Dreaming Beyond AI; Network Imaginaries; Futuress; MIT’s Immerse; Queer Sites in Global Contexts; Atlas Menor #1; QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK #3; Diagrams of Power; and Perfect Strangers. In 2023, QT.bot was awarded an Honorary Mention for the Prix Ars Electronica in the Artificial Intelligence and Life Art category.

A######### I########### | LUCAS LAROCHELLE

Lucas LaRochelle

15.09 — 21.10 / 2023

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

QT.bot – Sitting here with you in the future

2021

Video, 8 min 20 s

QT.bot is an artificial intelligence that is trained on the dataset of the community mapping platform Queering The Map (www.queeringthemap.com). It generates speculative queer and trans narratives and images of the environments in which they might unfold.

QT.bot’s first video output, Sitting here with you in the future, elucidates the parallel possibilities of transnational queer and trans life. The generated narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA+ life negotiate the plausible and the fantastic, reveling in the potential of failure, chaos, and incommensurability inherent to the queer use of machine learning technologies.

The work is constructed from adaptation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 400,000 entries from Queering The Map, and a StyleGAN model trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates from the platform. QT.bot offers an ethical implementation of AI rooted in the amplification of the lived experience of transnational queer and trans communities. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.

Photo credit: courtesy of the artist