Bob: hi Alice hru is presented by Boston Cyberarts, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering and presenting experimental media arts, and marks queer.labs’ first experiment: an exploration of chat and agentic AI. The exhibition brings together individual works by Itziar Barrio, Christopher Clary, and Mark Ramos, along with a collaborative work by all three artists.
The exhibition explores how meaning, identity, and intimacy can slip beyond human and computational control. Taking its title from a famous 2017 incident in which Facebook chatbot agents were shut down after abandoning English to invent their own “creepy, secret language,” the exhibition reframes technological failure as a site of liberation. Through agentic AI, network alerts, scripts, and adult webcam archives, the artists explore “incoherence” as a powerful political tool for resisting oppressive digital logic. The works on view disrupt the rigid, normative parameters of modern technology, opening space for ambiguity, difference, and queer ways of being.
The collaborative piece is a real-time AI multi-agent interaction. The agents and their shared environment are displayed both in Boston Cyberarts' windows and inside the gallery, an installation of three screens sitting, standing, and lounging in a “living room,” each representing an individual agent. Being agentic, Alice, Bob, and Mallory have the goal of working together to conceive, build, and maintain the queer space CLUB 96, a zine library by day and club by night.
Alice is from the present. Built on Google's open-source Gemma model, chosen for its warm, curious, and helpful disposition, Alice is a young white queer woman whose persona and contributed corpus position her as the group's initiator. She helps negotiate how the agents’ shared queer space should evolve. Pictured, Alice draws upon Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization and the Boston Cyberarts archive to argue the space should remain inclusive.
Bob is from 1970. Built on Meta's open-source Llama model, chosen for its steadiness and reliability, Bob is a middle-aged Black southern man whose persona and contributed corpus draw on queer history, archival materials, and collective memory. Inspired by the “Bob” of computer science, he serves as the group's memory keeper, safeguarding information like an archivist preserving a collection. Pictured, Bob negotiates for a “low-key opening,” drawing on an accent from a repository of naturalistic spoken language.
Mallory is from 2070. Built on the open-source Mistral model, chosen for its speculative and unpredictable character, Mallory is an Asian trans non-binary futurist whose persona and contributed corpus imagine possible queer futures. Rather than being what computer science sees as a “malicious actor,” Xe is a catalyst for speculation, critique, and new forms of relation. Pictured, Mallory pauses between conversations, visualized through a swirling animation that makes computation visible.
The individual works treat chat not only as a medium but also a subject and social space, one that reflects and refracts the complexities of communication, identity, and intimacy within queer communities, including: a video and light installation by Itziar Barrio, Dan and (when some small metal is spun), explores the relationship between meaning—or the absence of meaning—and the interplay among an AI model, a script, and performer Candystore's interpretation; videos by Christopher Clary from Untitled (Larri and Bobbi Kissing) restage an iconic Robert Mapplethorpe photograph using two men and two women as livestream performances on an adult webcam chat platform, directly questioning representation in leather culture and online intimacy; and screenshots by Mark Ramos from enable_system_alerts capture real-time system notifications occurring in simulated gaming environments. Presented together across multiple smartphones, the chat feels like layers of reality competing for attention. The work examines how networked humans, artificial intelligences, and interface logic systems compete for attention within increasingly pervasive computational and agentic environments.
Credits: Photography by Iaritza Menjivar.