NEOTRIBE

Neotribe is a series of AI-generated portraits that represent my personal attempt to compose a digital tribe. This project evokes the contemporary phenomenon of online bonding communities that embrace the face as an omnipotent signifier. I defend that far from purely narcissistic forms of expression, these practices are embedded in neotribal dynamics of communication and tactics of gathering.

As a sensitive, almost intimate act, it is a gesture of belonging. By painting the faces of a community that only exists in the virtual, my aim is to actualize becomings through visual representation. This is why the portraits are disseminated as urban posters, blurring the distance between my digital fantasies and my actual community, potentializing non-innocent AI tools as vehicles of gender-bending fem queen primings.

Indeed, on a different level, this research allows me to study the ways in which queer aesthetics collide with developments in machine learning and the politics of database collection. The artistic process consists of a creative ping-pong between myself and the algorithm, central to which is my struggle to circumvent its multiple biases based on a western, silicon valley delirium of racial, national, sexual and gender visual codes, simultaneously uncovering my own biases on similar axes.