QT.bot by Lucas LaRochelle
QT.bot is series of posters produced by an artificial intelligence of the same name. QT.bot is trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map (queeringthemap.com), that digitally archives LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.
QT.bot 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 generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. 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.
Biography
Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited internationally, recently at the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), Museum of Design Atlanta (USA), The PHI Center (Canada), Interaccess (Canada), Gallery Tata (Japan), ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (Australia), Digital Writer’s Festival (Australia), MUTEK (Canada), LINZ FMR Festival (Austria), Somerset House (UK), Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands), fanfare (Netherlands), OTHERWISE Festival (Zurich), Ada X (Canada), and SBC Gallery (Canada). They have presented research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras School of Architecture, University of Cambridge and Stanford University, amongst other academic institutions. Their project, QT.bot, was awarded an Honorary Mention for the 2023 Prix Ars Electronica in the Artificial Intelligence and Life Art category. Their project, Queering The Map, was awarded an Honorary Mention for the 2018 Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Communities category, nominated for the Lumen Prize for Digital Art and the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, and is included in the Library of Congress LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive.