Playform Artists Use AI to Explore Concepts of Gender and Sexuality
Featuring Playform Artists Anthromorph, Eddie Villanueva, J Rosenbaum and Roxy Savage.
Playform artists use AI to experiment and discover new aesthetics and inspire bodies of work. Playform, a no-code AI, is also used as a way to conceptualize ideas through a lens that is not trained by societal norms and constructs. As an AI artistic companion, the platform operates only on visual data, trained by the artist and the curated selection of inputs. Due to this nature of Playform AI, artists with backgrounds and focuses on gender, sexuality and social constructs are interested in these capabilities, and can further explore these concepts using AI technology.
We celebrate our users who are using Playform to produce bodies of work that investigate these concepts and expand the conversation on gender and sexuality.
Meet some of the artists using Playform to explore gender and sexuality:
Eddie Villanueva
@eddievillanueva
“My work operates within an expanded field of inquiry into socially and culturally sanctioned versions of a hetero-normative masculinity. I explore the formation of my own gender identity by mining my personal history as a collection of events, experiences, thoughts, and lessons that have had a profound formative effect on the development of my sense of self; this embodied and emotionally complex sense of self often stands in sharp contrast with external cultural conventions and expectations of manhood found in the social realm.
I'm interested in the ways by which male identity manifests itself both publicly and privately. How gender, and in my case male gender, is performed and how a chasm between the personal experience and the cultural creation and sanctioning of gender identity can lead to a sense of double consciousness or personal rift within one’s sense of self. Subjects addressed in my work include emotional vulnerability, violence, control, sexuality, legacy, social hierarchies, and childhood development.”
Eddie Villanueva (b.1983, Milwaukee) received his B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been featured at the SCOPE Art Fair, Miami, and in Global Positioning System at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the North American Graduate Art Survey at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, and the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2012, and a Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2013. He has taught at UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Richland, and Brown University. Eddie Villanueva is currently Assistant Professor and Foundations Coordinator at The College of New Jersey.
J. Rosenbaum
@minxdragon
J. Rosenbaum is a Melbourne AI artist and researcher working with 3D modeling, artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies. Their work explores posthuman and postgender concepts using classical art combined with new media techniques and programming.
J. works with classically inspired aesthetics with the latest technologies to create a speculative future grounded in the aesthetics of the past to show that gender minorities have always been here and will continue into the future.
“Worlds within worlds, I am drawn to the notion that my figures exist in a world of their own. That they have a digital life in a digital world. That my works are a glimpse into that future, where digital and the real meld together to create something greater than we are now. That machines will learn to think and pass the singularity and that humans will grow and change and merge alongside them until we cross a digital frontier and it all merges with our own. Where gender binaries no longer matter and nothing counts beyond the mind and thought and creativity. When we are no longer constrained by our bodies and our antiquated notions that some genders or races or abilities are superior.”
View a Q+A with J. here.
Anthromorph
@anthr0morph
Anthromorph is an amalgamation of fantasy, biology, and digital intervention. Through performance and virtual manipulation, the artist challenges the human form and social constructs, which inhibit us from endless possibilities of identity and self-presentation. Anthromorph offers viewers a reality where natural influences like animal patterns, alien textures and forms integrate with human features. Through Playform’s AI capabilities, Anthromorph’s body of work investigates themes of transformative process, metamorphosis and state of becoming.
The artist has previously exhibited at Burning Man in 2020, and also completed a residency with Playform. Anthromorph’s latest exhibition “Unnatural Selections: AI Portraits” incorporates AI to depict 111 mythical creatures and figures situated between natural, fetus-like forms and digital, computerized productions.
“AI mirrors humanness in such a way that shows so much about yourself. I see technology as an extension of Anthromorph.”
Roxy Savage
@roxysavagerollergirl
Interdisciplinary Artist Roxy Savage works with print, digital media, objects and food to explore personal female identity and domestic life.
"My current work intersects technology with jell-o and housewares. Working with gelatin and kitchenalia as art materials is an act of feminist resistance and artistic expansion. By connecting jell-o with technology, I’m redefining and repurposing an ancient substance made from animal collagen or agar-agar (seaweed). Gelatin, as art material, creates a conceptual bridge for me to investigate: high/low culture; states of permanence/impermanence; ways of making: analog/digital.
Through the processes of reimagining kitchenalia, I have found a rich portal to mine. During quarantine, I made gelatin sculptures and amassed thrift store kitchen collections. In the studio, I reimagine these materials with manipulation and AI Playform technology. Working with domestic objects and multiples, I feel (an odd) but mighty connection to the universal lives of women."
