A 3-channel video installation and 45-minute performance-lecture featuring drag persona ‘Dr. Jacobs,’ a professor approaching retirement.
Dr. Jacobs is reaching the end of his career and joins a corporate AI program that allows him to make an attractive and younger AI clone of himself. As Dr. Jacobs sets out to make the AI-professor, a mishap occurs in the lab and the cloned humanoid disappears. We follow Dr. Jacobs on a voyage to find his double, who is said to live closeby waters.
I have taken inspiration from ancient East-Asian and old European myths about human-animal hybrids who rule the waters, such as the Greek Nereids, ‘The Wet Ones,’ tiny nymphs who purify waters and travel in packs. The artwork also comments on our painfully transforming AI bodies exploring and preserving inclusive sex and gender-identities. The artwork references Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel in in which a cutting-edge and pessimistic scientist looks for his flawed creation, who escaped from the lab, in the Alpine mountain regions.
This fictional and artistic project also complements my forthcoming book, Deepfake bodies: The Sexual Politics of AI.
+++ 3 screens, a looped 7 minute-video on each screen. Sound comes from the large middle screen.
The story unfolds over 3 screens, but these can be accessed in any different order. While most visitors may opt for a restful, immersive
experience on the chaise longue, others can get detailed storytelling from the two 2 smaller screens (through headphones). The left small screen brings the perspective and voice of Dr. Jacobs as indignant whistle-blower who brings his testimony. The right small screen observe Dr. Jacobs on his walks in Grenoble and near the Isère river.
Screen 1 (SMALL Left) 7′ Dr. Jacobs brings testimony about the Afterglow programme. This programme recruits ageing professors of excellence to retire while extracting and synthesizing all their knowledge, life works and cognitive functions into full-body robotic humanoid scholars.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1182156114
Screen 2 (SMALL Right) 7′ We follow Dr. Jacobs looking
for his creation and AI clone who has escaped from the lab, named Jeli Jacobs. Jeli is residing somewhere along the Isère river but Dr. Jacobs does not have the cognitive functions to communicate with him.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1182157249
Screen 3 (LARGE Middle) 7’ The life of hybrid human-vertebrates who swim and protect rivers and oceans while seeking out each other through erotic gestures. One of them is Jeli, the fugitive AI clone created by Dr. Jacobs. The middle screen is positioned in front of a chaise longue in which visitors can recline and rest to take in a story amongst water scenery.
+++ Two short videos to explain my AI process:
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BACKGROUND (PHASE 1 of the project)
In 2024 I received a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship to do an artist residency in the coastal town of Bogliasco, Italy. I made a video about Phase 1 of the art project.=
We stayed in the Bogliasco Center’s phenomenal old mansion right next to the Ligurian coast. I made a short video about the research process.
I started to walk along the coast and was able to take many swims there, together with the other visiting artists. I was able to hear and feel the sea’s humidity and incredible roar constantly, while I also staring at many swimmers in the small pebbly beach of Bogliasco. I conceived of the idea to rethink futuristic AI bodies as wet and playful ‘mythical’ water-beings with healing qualities.
The Wet Ones are hybrid creatures inspired by different myths and histories that I keep finding as I develop the project. First of all, there is the Greek mythology of Nereids, as 50 water-nymphs who were seen as ‘escorts’ protected the different qualities of the sea, such as calming the sea, enabling the spawning the fish, creating sea-foam, looking after the sea’s ‘bounty’ by mixing water with brine, enabling a safe voyage for fisher(wo)men, etc. For instance there is the Nereid, Erato, one of the 50 Nereids. Her name means ‘the awakener of desire’ and she is part of a group of 50 who all together protect the ocean.
In Belgium, an exhibition and formidable catalogue entitled Hybrids: Composite Creatures from Fables. Myths and Legends (Hopper & Fuchs, 2024) examines the topic of composite human-animal creatures within different cultural histories. In the introductory essay by Leen Huet, we see examples of such creatures in Jacob Van Maerlant’s medieval encyclopedia (1340-1350 of fauna and flora, entitled Der Nature Bloeme. There is an example of a sea-monk, a sea-deer and of course mermaids, who according to Van Maerlant are repulsive and harmful creatures with sharp claws and fish scales. They lure seamen with their beautiful voices and music, then drown them and eat them. Seamen are aware of their presence and cover or put plugs in their ears when they hear them.(p. 17)
These creatures were also as reproduced as little objects and sold internationally for the Wunderkammer (“Room of Wonders”) where functionaries and entrepreneurs would collect objects and curiosities, including animal-skeletons, fossils, stones, shells, drawings from conquests around the world. The city of Antwerp, Belgium, was an important industrial hub in the 16th century that also supported this trade. For instance, there were little mermaids made by Japanese Fishermen based on their belief in Ningyo “humanfish”and consisting of actual fish skeletons and pieces as well as paper maché. The Antwerp merchant and maker of maps, Abraham Ortelius, also possessed one of these Wunderkammers and below is a 1655 drawing of one in Copenhagen.
My work wants to interrogatre homogenizing AI imaginaries. If one would search online for common imagery or AI generated sea nymphs or mermaids, one would find very clichéd animated drawings of cute curvy girls with big eyes and fish tails.
This is almost as sad and predictable as the common exploitative images of deepfake porn, in which celebrities and public figures who have gorgeous faces, are remixed onto the template-bodies of advertising and commercial pornography.
But it is also reassuring to know that people are interested in using GenAI to generate the less predictable and consumable composites. An example of given by Gabriele de Seta in his essay “An algorithmic folklore: Vernacular creativity in times of everyday automation” when people using genAI collectively produced a monstrous figure ‘The Crungus’ after somebody posted one on Twitter. According to de Seta, it transformed from an individual creation to a collective myth-making effort. More and more Twitter user shared their own experimentations with different prompts across models, such as, ‘friendly crungus’, ‘soft crungus’, ‘crungus birth’, ‘Baby Crungus’, or ‘anti-crungus political poster’ adding both detail and legitimacy to the emerging Crungus myth. (1)
Hence the task upon me is to create queer and erratic swimming creatures that steer away from AI platitudes that have hijacked our imagination. One other example would be the East-Asian myths of sea-hybrids, such as Hong Kong’s Lo-Ting– a creature with human limbs and fish-like head and torso.
Or there is the Japanese mythic reptile-figure Nure-Onna (Wet Woman) who was also turned into animation by the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen in his animations, Night March of Hundred Monsters.
Details from Ho Tzu Nyen’s catalogue of Night March of Hundred Monsters
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(1) Gabriele de Seta, “An algorithmic folklore: Vernacular creativity in times of everyday automation.” In C. Arkenbout & I. Galip (Eds.), Critical meme reader III: Breaking the meme. Institute of Network Cultures, 233-253.