Some Questionable Revelations from the A.I. Neural Net as Presented by an Indeterminate Man

A couple of years ago, the artist began creating hundreds of thousands of digital images using A.I. programs from the internet. He is going now to re-create some of them IRL (“in real life”) in an attempt to convey a little bit about a) what drove him to obsess over A.I. image-generation and why he stopped, b) what he learned about his gendered psychology and desires for control, fluidity, transgression, and rampant self-reproduction in a quixotic quest for digital male identity, and c) whether or not any of this was a good idea.

The images that the performance is based around emerged from the network as a series of Questionable Revelations (aka “QRs”). They were made from pixels of light, computationally morphing the socially coded representations of our world into new signifying formations and spat out at industrial speeds by a sophisticated new computer architecture that threatens to upend how we interact with our world and with each other. The meaning of an image and indeed, of any performance itself is indeterminate, suspended in the present moment before a firm interpretation can affix itself onto the questionable representation and subdue it into a binarized, “fixed”, and socially circulatable encoding.

For this performance, the artist will be there with his indeterminately signifying body, his questioning/questionable mind, some tangible and intangible materials he has assembled to re-enact the images as they appeared to him, and some possibilities for textual and physical interventions we can all make in the space. The rest is yet to be determined.

trigger warning - nudity, sexual themes, potentially disturbing imagery

Joseph Gold Hendel is a performance artist, theatremaker, electronic music composer, and intermediate python coder from New York living in rural Western Ireland. He is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Burren College of Art (University of Galway) where he researches how performance and AI-assisted art can represent, critique, and critically analyze contemporary masculinity and male power under networked digital capitalism. Recent work includes the AI-based video piece “Solstice/Greenman” at 126 Gallery in Galway, a participatory Instagram-based performance “Tomorrow 404” at the Laneway Gallery in Cork, Ireland, and “xxXtedXxx, an anti-Ted Talk” at the Neither King Nor Fish artist-researcher symposium in Vilnius, Lithuania.