Jake Elwes is a British media artist. Their practice is the exploration of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

(AI), queer theory and technical biases. They are known for using AI to create art in mediums such as video, performance and installation. Their work on queering technology addresses issues caused by the normative biases of artificial intelligence.

Education and early life

Elwes (pronounced "El-wez") was born in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

to Anneke and Luke Elwes a British contemporary artist and painter. They studied at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

from 2013 to 2017, where they began using computer code as a medium. In 2016 they attended the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in Berlin with artist and educator Gene Kogan. Elwes was introduced to drag performance by Dr Joe Parslow who holds a Phd in drag performance; drag performance has since become instrumental to Elwes' work.

Career

Zizi - Queering the Dataset, 2019 - film stills - copyright the artist Jake Elwes (52324342784)

Elwes' work with artificial intelligence is cited as a hopeful strategy to make AI more playful and diverse. They were a 2021 finalist for the

Lumen Prize The Lumen Prize is an international award which celebrates art created with technology, especially digital art. Overview The prize was founded by Carla Rapoport in 2012, The Lumen Prize has visited more than ten cities around the world includin ...

, and received the Honorary Mention of the 2022

Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...

in the Interactive Art + category. They have exhibited in

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

s and galleries in Europe and Asia including Gazelli Art House, Arebyte gallery,

ZKM The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989. and since 1997 is located in a listed industrial building in Karlsruhe, Germany, a former muni ...

, the Onassis Foundation, Zabludowicz Foundation, AIIIII Art Center,

Today Art Museum The Today Art Museum is a museum located in Beijing. References {{authority control Museums in Beijing Art museums and galleries in China Art museums established in 2002 2002 establishments in China ...

, and the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

Installations projecting conversations between two neural networks

Elwes has created works based on the conversations between two neural networks including ''Closed Loop'' from 2017 and ''Auto-Encoded Buddha'' from 2016. In ''Auto-Encoded Buddha'', a computer struggles with the notion of Buddha's philosophy. This is Elwes' tribute to Nam June Paik's ''TV Buddha'' (1974).

''The Zizi Project - a deepfake drag cabaret''

The Zizi Show 2020, montage of deepfake drag artists, copyright the artist Jake Elwes (52323113742)

''The Zizi Project'' is a series of works that explore the interaction of drag and A.I. Currently, ''Zizi'' is made up of three projects.

''Zizi - Queering the Dataset'' (2019)

Knowing that facial recognition technology statically struggle to recognize black women or transgender people, Elwes set out to "Queer the Dataset" through an open-sourced

generative adversarial network A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is a ...

(GAN). Elwes added a dataset of 1,000 photos of drag kings and queens into the GAN's 70,000 faces collected in a dataset called Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset (FFHQ). They then created new simulacra faces, known as deep fakes.

''Zizi & Me'' (2020)

''Zizi & Me'' is a performance and video installation that shows a joint performance between drag queen 'Me The Drag Queen' and her deepfake A.I. clone.

''The Zizi Show'' (2020)

''The Zizi Show'' is a

deep fake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful ...

drag act based on artificial intelligence (AI). It has been presented live and as interactive online artwork. It is an exploration of queer culture and the algorithms philosophy and ethics of AI. The work questions if AI can be used to explore and celebrate queer identities. The avatars within Zizi are deepfakes that playfully exaggerates the human form. They are generated by a hacked

(AI) system. They were made to challenge the biases that have been built into many of the most commonly used facial recognition technologies.

''CUSP''

In their video work ''CUSP'' (2019) Elwes places marsh birds generated using artificial intelligence into a tidal landscape. These digitally generated and constantly shifting birds are recorded in dialogue with native birds. The video work is also accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Elwes, Jake 21st-century British artists Living people Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Alumni of Central Saint Martins Artificial intelligence art British digital artists 1993 births British LGBT artists British multimedia artists