ML: What led you to work with AI as a tool for generating content?

RE: I have been interested in AI for a few years now. I often attend lectures at the University of Toronto and the Center of Ethics that focus on AI, and have been interested in how I can incorporate it into my practice. I recently reached out to a Canadian artist who works with AI, and learned more about his practice and how he's using it to create abstract landscape paintings, and then I had several intensive sessions with a programmer who taught me about the process of training AI and datasets. With the programmer, I got to explore the potential of AI in my practice, and how I could collaborate with existing open source tools.

ML: How did you use AI in your video for Temp Files?

RE: First, I developed the questions that I wrote in the GP2 transformer. It’s a collaborative text that you create with a trained AI. I ask it questions and it gives me two possible answers. Each answer is a part of a sentence, so for example, if I ask it “what is nationalism,” it'll say something abstract, like “nationalism is fire,” “nationalism is purity,” or I could pick the other example, “nationalism is a political movement.” Then you can generate a longer text with abstract pieces and it becomes a collaboration between you and the machine because you're giving it a prompt, and it’s responding to it. So, together we generated the text for the script!

ML: So, these prompts you were feeding the AI were the actual questions you are asking the characters in the video?

RE: Yes, exactly. And the result is a paragraph script for each of the characters. I took these paragraphs, and with Oreo – I performed it, so I actually read her script with an augmented reality face app fire effect. With Fatimeh, I used an Adobe program preset character, mostly because of lack of resources and time, and the conditions of working in the pandemic, so I have just been working with whatever I could find online that is free and what I had access to. In an ideal world and time, I’d perhaps create a new character for her. For Coco, I found another open-source AI software that’s called Rosebud TokkingHeads. With this program, you provide an image and a text to the AI, and it merges the two and animates the image. You can select a voice from a range of synthetic computer generated voices. It is cool because it uses AI in a very different way, so I used one text-to-text AI generator, one text-to-image and voice generator, and combined them for this project.

ML: Would you say your experiment with AI was successful?

RE: I feel like it has been very successful, just because it allowed me to think about my work differently and to explore poetics of the technology – something that I otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to do. Also, I found that the conversation it generated with the group, sharing and reflecting on these ideas, has been a super helpful exchange.

ML: I understand that Fatimeh, though she appears differently in this video, was the first character you created and is closely tied to your own identity as a member of the Iranian diaspora. What role has Fatimeh played in your exploration of nationalism and other isms, and how did she lead to the birth of Oreo and Coco?

RE: I created this character while still in undergrad, so nearly a decade ago! With this character, I started to use camp aesthetics and humor to explore stereotypes, neo-orientalism, and self-exoticization. Oreo emerged out of Fatimeh, but Fatimeh addresses Iranian nationalism and its self-romanticizing tendencies, whether that's performed through language, gesture, cultural garments, song, and voice. Oreo’s nationalism is performed through network technology and language, like hashtags and other coded language in nationalist discourse, used by white supremacists mostly in the Western world, whereas Fatimeh explores nationalism in the East, in a more romantic way. Fatimeh’s critique of nationalism is often overlooked in the West because it's so readable and consumable and a representation that the West expects ethnic artists to perform. Whereas with Oreo, the performance of nationalism is much more blatant, and it's the kind of nationalism that makes us uncomfortable, Fatimeh’s nationalist performance is romantic and seductive. Coco is anti-nationalist, giving more of a post-colonial critique. Coco is my anti-nationalist character.

ML: Will you please tell us more about Coco?

RE: Coco is the character I identify with the most because they are a hybrid character. Coco refuses to participate in any colonial languages, which is why this new video is different for the character because they are now speaking. Coco only communicates through gestures and dance, and uses digital manipulation  as a form of communication unique to the character. Coco is often a hologram that travels between multiple channels, explodes and disperses, and is even omnipresent in my immersive video installations. While the other two characters are frozen to the screen and limited in their ability to travel through time and space, Coco has this ability and that is exciting.

ML: You mentioned the dance style of waacking. What is waacking, and how is it used with Coco?

RE: I have always been interested in urban dance styles and have been a part of the waacking community for several years now. Waacking is a dance style that emerged in LA in the 1970’s and is sometimes confused with vogue, but it has a different vocabulary, movement, and music. Waacking is danced to disco and consists of rapid arm gestures and Hollywood-style poses and theatrics. Waacking was introduced by a diasporic, queer community. The dance style is very hybrid and resonates across cultures, so that’s what I love about it. Coco further hybridizes it through accentuated wrist rolls which is seen in Persian dancing. I merge those two styles together to create a unique gestural language for the character.

ML: Do you feel like it's a little bit of a betrayal to have the character of Coco speak in this new video you created with Temp Files, since Coco’s MO is to not communicate with words?

RE: I don't know how I feel about having the character speak. I am uncomfortable with it, but this is an experiment, you know, so why not? I've been developing another film script, and I was wondering how I could get Coco to speak, what would Coco’s voice be like? Gestural language is ambiguous, and Coco sometimes has a very clear message, so how do I get a literal message across through movement? I’m still working through this, perhaps Coco dances, and the movement is accompanied with subtitles or some sort of computer-generated audio overlayed on the soundtrack? But yeah, lips moving is not what I had originally intended for the character. I did it in this video because I wanted to try the TokkingHead Rosebud software, and it doesn't really suit any of the characters. I usually perform all of the characters, and I’m not even performing Fatimeh, so this was really just an experiment to see how they could take on a different form, or if they could take on a different form. I don’t know yet. That’s a good question, because I am conflicted!

ML: So, as an artist working with performance myself, I'm very curious to know what prompted you to start working performatively with alter-ego characters? Were there traces of this kind of invention in the earlier parts of your life that led you to Fatimeh and then the others?

RE: As far as I can remember, even when I was a little girl, I loved playing dress-up and different characters. I would put on my mom's makeup, and put on talent and acting shows. But later, in my twenties, I paid my way through university working at gay clubs. I was a bartender, and I did a lot of drag, burlesque and gender-fuck performances, for example  for charity to raise funds for the sexual assault center that was in my community, but I also was surrounded by a lot of drag performers and that really found its way into my practice, the camp aesthetics. It’s very queer, which, obviously that is something I am comfortable with. I never considered myself a queer artist, I always considered myself a feminist or anti-racist artist rather than a queer artist, but more and more, I see that my work is actually quite queer, especially because it is so inspired by drag.