QT.bot
Lucas LaRochelle (CA)
QT.bot is an artificial intelligence, trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map, that generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. Their digital mind is constructed from an implementation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 82 000 text entries from the platform, and a StyleGAN trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates on Queering The Map.
QT.bot’s digital inter-subjectivity straddles the line between the plausible and the fantastic, turning towards the potential of failure, chaos and incommensurability in the queer use of machine learning technologies. The experience of encountering the narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is one of disorientation – time, space, and stable subjectivity collapse, revealing from the ruins the multiplicitous visions of the futurities contained within the data. 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.
Lucas LaRochelle is a Montreal based designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. In 2016 they received a certificate in Co-Design from the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, and a BFA in Design and Computation Arts from Concordia University in 2020. LaRochelle is the founder of “Queering The Map”, a community generated counter-mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space. They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited nationally and internationally, recently at The Guggenheim Museum (USA), MUTEK (Canada), Ars Electronica (Austria), Somerset House (UK), Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands), fanfare (Netherlands), OTHERWISE Festival (Switzerland), Ada X (Canada) and SBC Gallery (Canada).