Queer African digital art offer interventions into ongoing conversations about the political and colonial dangers of AI.
Long abstract:
Artists in Africa have increasingly used augmented and virtual reality and other digital rendering tools to produce art that creatively and safely express queer identities. Digital spaces and tools have enabled a kind of “queer agency” that protects queer creators from censorship, stigma, discrimination and/or violence in the real world (Mwangi 2014). This talk surveys several queer digital artworks and the kinds of challenge they pose to the structures of digitality, including the binary code. In producing art that move beyond the gender binary, African queer artists practice a (de)coding that enables safer and more inclusive digital relationships. Such safer and more inclusive digital practices are drawn from existing queer experiences that require discretion, anonymity, and self-preservation as part of survival (Sloan 2023). This paper also considers how might queer interventions by African artists can contribute to discussions about the increasing "irrelevance of the human" (Nhemachena 2019) as AI renders people inconsequential through automation, or reducible to data points for extraction (Zuboff 2019). Queer African digital art offer interventions into ongoing conversations about the political and colonial dangers of AI (Birhane 2020; Kwet 2019).