Glimmering Opacities: From Queering The Map to QT.bot

How might we queer the supposed “objectivity” of data by revelling in its incoherencies, and in turn imagine new worlds-within-the-world through this oblique lens? What is the role of fabulation in the marginalized digital archive? This talk explores the genesis of QT.bot, an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of the community-generated counter mapping platform Queering The Map (www.queeringthemap.com). 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 world of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is one of disorientation—time, space, and stable subjectivity collapse, revealing within its 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< (they/them)/a> is a designer and researcher whose work investigates queer and transgender digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space.

This lecture is part of the Coding Resistance lecture series:

September 24, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Outing and Outsmarting Discriminating Algorithms
with Nakeema Stefflbauer

October 01, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Back to the Future of the African Village
with Minna Salami

October 08, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Gender and Technology Beyond W.E.I.R.D.
with Maryam Mustafa

October 15, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Glimmering Opacities: From Queering The Map to QT.bot
with Lucas LaRochelle

October 22, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Emancipation Through the Virtual
with Iyo Bisseck

October 30, 2021 | 4 pm CEST
Make Time to Take Time
with Morehshin Allahyari

November 05, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Interdependence as a Political Technology
with Aimi Hamraie

November 12, 2021 | 3 pm CEST
Digital Colonialism and Palestinian Resistance
with Marwa Fatafta

November 19, 2021 | 6 pm CEST
Towards Justice, Equity and Accountability in AI
with Timnit Gebru