Artificial Intelligence and Drag Performance: Jake Elwes's "The Zizi Project"

"The Uncanny Valley"is Flash Art's new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. The last decade has seen exponential growth in the aesthetic application of AI and machine learning: from DeepDream's convolutional neural networks that detect and intensify patterns within individual images; to NST (neural style transfer) techniques that manipulate one image into the style of another; to GANs (generative adversarial networks) that digest large datasets of images in order to generate new visions without human intervention. Although the community of computational artists and creative AI hackers still exists largely outside of the contemporary art scene, a growing body of artists has sought to traverse both territories, in the process foregrounding the cultural, ethical, and social problems that underpin our new digital architecture. In recent years, Jake Elwes has distilled the full range of AI-informed strategies into a diverse series of outputs: transcriptions of tech leaders' numerical babblings (dada da ta, 2016); video installations projecting conversations between two neural networks (Closed Loop, 2017); and 2016's Auto-Encoded Buddha -- a tribute to Nam June Paik's TV Buddha (1974) -- in which a computer struggles to depict the Buddha's true essence. Through these works and others, Elwes has actively positioned himself within the long histories of video and computer art, and against the notion that AI is capable of expressing intentionality.