TRANCESTOR.AI

The TRANCESTOR is a large-scale AI/AR work that speaks and sparks in defense of a transgender future worth living through poetry. TRANCESTOR as a poetic machine that speaks and sparks poetry-based divination and trancestral guidance in response to queries from queer inquirers. The TRANCESTOR is AI program built by interdisciplinary queer and trans artists Mel Racho and Angelic Goldsky on a corpus of poems by Angelic Goldsky with commissioned works by trans poets across Canada, both living and passed on on the theme of queer kinship and trans ancestral lineage repair and legacy. The central question of the project remains: how do we, trans artists, break open AI systems, for us to break open– entirely? How can we create AI systems that deeply honor the words and works of trans artists, imagining AI as a spiritual technology that, despite its challenges, guides us towards a non-binary mercy?

The Augmented Reality exploration of this work is by Future Arts, who are collaborating with The TRANCESTOR creators to express the poetic and coding roots through hybrid visual realities as its corpus expands, grows, and breathes with time.

“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.”"

Please visit https://trancestor.ai/artist-statement.html for more details