Queer as the Ocean is an experiment with generative AI as a device for climate fiction. This portrait series investigates interspecies relationships within aquatic environments. To make this series, I worked with Midjourney to imagine a time when human and water ecosystems have become one. By queering their relationship and staging it as a fictional fashion shoot, this experiment wants to create a playful space where the boundaries between human and more-than-human dissolve; both can face each other, enjoy moments of intimate connection, and find acceptance in a future in which they both will change. The visual research is an opportunity to engage with questions on authorship and ethics of using generative AI: are we looking at images co-created by a human and a machine, or were they just uncovered from the machine’s latent space? Can AI be employed as a queering tool, despite its inherent biases, and support climate imaginaries, despite its opaque environmental impacts and problematic hidden labor?
In my artistic research within the Visual Methodologies Collective, I play with fiction to evoke reflections and conversations about our interconnectedness with nature and other beings. I curate and explore audiovisual collections from the Institute for Sound & Vision archives and online spaces to understand how bodies of water of the Netherlands and their ecosystems are presented in the collections. Using computer vision, visualization techniques, and generative AI, I facilitate participatory workshops to collectively explore interspecies relationships within the collections, uncovering predominant, underrepresented, or missing media representations of nature. Following this collective scrutiny, a process of climate fiction-making occurs, where narratives from the collections are amplified, countered, or recombined to imagine alternative human interactions with the more-than-human.
Queer as the Ocean has been developed as part of the artistic research studio on Interspecies Inquiry, a collaborative venture of the Visual Methodologies Collective (AUAS), Art & Spatial Praxis (Rietveld Academie), and DAS research (AHK) as part of their collaborative program Climate Imaginaries at Sea. The program, running until 2024, makes use of artistic and participatory research practices to envision futures related to water. Climate Imaginaries at Sea is part of the Art Route NWA-project 'Bit by bit, or not at all' funded under the 'Small Projects' scheme by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and also supported by the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoECI) and ARIAS platform for artistic research in Amsterdam.
