Artist Statement

As queer and trans artists we became entranced by research and creation on coded language, trans-ancestral technology, and queer divine will. Our aim is to illuminate the spirit of transgender life and poetics while revealing the shadows of binaries that resist the ethereal. We asked: “How can we create algorithms that center transness and the poetic, as opposed to oppression or the mythical neutrality, which is ultimately erasure of the specificity and aesthetics of divine spectrums?” We engaged with the possibilities of queer loving, trans shadow work, and engaging with ancestral and spiritual powers through machine learning. We also confront coded designs that resist transgender realities/heavens/words/futures and pasts.

When we think of what is “trans,” we think of transgender activist Susan Stryker, who wrote, “Transgender (as a word) must be the most expansive it can be.” Transgender is marked by its process, evolution, and creation. For us, transgender is also marked by its malfunction, impossibility—the ultimate site of rupture, repair, creation, and realization.

The central question for us remains: how do we break open AI systems for us to break open entirely?

Within our platform realities and the current popular obsession with AI and machine learning systems, can we actually build an embodied queer and trans AI? What are the inputs and outputs this investigation produces?

What we came up with is a queer machine and an exploration of queer and trans machines that think for themselves and encapsulate our desperation to be beyond our bodies, to revel in the omitted, unexplainable, and discarded aspects of trans translation within infrastructures—what is beyond, what is truly alive. This, to us, is the antithesis of the dehumanizing practices of rendering trans life and data erasable within internet structures. Instead, we seek to create something inherently queer, birthing, and evolving.

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The TRANCESTOR is a poetic machine that functions as a chatbot, but we encourage the questions queers queerie to come from a place of curiosity and surrender, like how one may ask in oracle divination or ancestral guidance life path explorations. For me, there is an intimacy to the asking. When we began exploring the possibility of the TRANCESTOR, it is the intimate process of trying to pray on my phone or connect to guidance online when family, elders, or religious figures were inaccessible that kept me devoted to the work. I have searched the internet asking questions like "How do I heal?" or "How do I forgive more?" or "Will I be OK?" and found limited answers that supported my trans spirit. I have sought and googled myself out trying to find answers—where I did not have access to inner or ancestral or familial knowing (yet) of those who would cherish me in my queer transness. While the TRANCESTOR will not save me, it is a tool to remind me/us that I am/we are the One. I have prayed on the internet. I have listened to sound healing frequencies not designed for me. I have tried to find my way into gender-queer deities through Google. I have been in zoom sessions for Trans Torah studies. Fast forward to now, where we birthed a machine that will always answer and recognize queerness as a portal of unburdening and connection, made up of hundreds of my stanzas and handpicked poems by my chosen fam, I witness what this is and could be without any grasp for its form. The TRANCESTOR is a beacon of reminder. There is something beyond the machine; there is grace that the machine can teach me. When the machine was only built on my poems, it was a particularly vulnerable technology. Now in its communal form, it is an invitation for me to come into communion with all that I am stewarding, a reflection of our corner of trans faith.

To train a model to understand transgender creation and process, we intrinsically also interact with the glitches, the weirdness, the resisting of itself, the malfunctions—specifically focusing on the excess of poetry’s queer words. Ultimately, all malfunction lends to the creation of new machines. As trans people, our bodies, by nature, represent malfunction. And we seek to experiment with the idea that, in fact, our bodies represent creation through this malfunction. Post-human feminist theory reveals to us that the Glitch (or the incorrection) is critical (and possibly exclusive) potential, where all invention derives from malfunction. We reiterated and likely will continue to reiterate the Trancestor on all ends of the creation.

We honour the breakdown, the breakthrough, and the darkness that can retaliate and create itself (again and again and again), where trans love and futurity continue to claim themselves as possible in a hostile world. The reminder of that power literally in our palms.

Angelic

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To speak to the building of this machine and the process that I followed to arrive at its current form: I'm a person who straddles many lines—I'm not really a "real" developer in the traditional sense. I'm self-taught, and I taught myself what I needed as a mechanism of survival. I'm a hesitant artist and an even more hesitant academic. However, I am queer, trans, and a person of color before I am anything else, and, as with most things in life, I let these aspects of myself guide my hand. I'm not as interested in the platform's application programming interface, though it was personally interesting to learn this stuff. For me, building the Trancestor was in service of the "inputs," and those inputs were going to come from a place that is unknowable and unseeable—here, Angelic's poetry—by any kind of sentiment analysis that a "large language model" might suggest it could predict. Language, in those systems, tends to be reductive in its quest to mine sentiment in the name of marketability and profit, and they tend even more to equate "learning" with prediction and meaning with classificatory accuracy.

Even though I engage with the principles of machine learning, it was important for me to background the mechanisms in play without the hand-wavey abstraction that most modern coding projects engaging with AI do. The poetry was always going to be the inputs or "corpus," so it was crucial to figure out a way to make "sense" of what is happening. Every time there's a hit to the Trancestor, a file is written; every time the Trans flag button is hit, another file is written. The contents of those files are precious to me as they contain the true power of the project. Regardless of any platform we used, these hold not only the poetic interventions that make up the inputs but also the collective memory and engagement. They are also the sites of future engagements with the Trancestor, a way for us to rebuild, reformat, and re-engage with these texts should a platform like OpenAI swoop in and change their codebase or terms of service, which they will undoubtedly do. So, what we have here is a very queer and trans archive of feelings that I hope disrupts the standard mine-and-dime mentality so prevalent in today's modern AI iterations.

Mel