Dr. Jacobs is a character that I created in the year 2000 to narrate my book Libidoc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (2005). The book had two narrators, through which I explored how people were using emerging digital cultures and avatar-personalities. As “Libidot” I traveled to different countries and had ongoing art encounters. “Dr. Jacobs” was the sedentary and philosophical academic who became a persona that I used in various performances, or to interview people for research about their online sexual adventures. I moved to Hong Kong in 2005 and carried out fieldwork in East-Asia amongst similarly performative subjects–Cosplayers, Animation Fans and Dollplayers.
During my art residency at Bogliasco in Fall 2024, I knew that I had no choice but to resurrect Dr. Jacobs as part of my ongoing project on AI and synthetic deepfake bodies. I wanted to morph and deepfake myself once again as Dr. Jacobs and started making a documentary about this process. I first scrolled through the different sites and Apps of generative AI to see what kind of text-to-image bots and avatars would be available.
There were only about a hundred of companies offering services and it was unclear how much they were going to charge. The company Synthetica, which was recommended to me by an expert, banned me immediately because I had used some vocabulary relating to sexuality in the text prompts. This was distressing as these words and concepts have been part of my research for decades.
I continued trying Face Swap Apps and AI art sites and received a mixed bag of results–often simplistic and voyeuristic gender constructs or comical avatars. This begs the question as to why people would deepfake themselves for any other reasons besides monetary gain, as for instance Chinese and Hong Kong TV hosts and Influencers have started deepfaking to save on labor costs.
These enquiries will be ongoing and lead to a documentary-essay about bodily aesthetics and genderqueer role-play in the face of the encroaching templates of Artificial Intelligence. With a critical attitude about the future reign of these LLM models, I hope to re-appear as Dr. Jacobs.