Over the pars few years I have been working with the topic of transgressive art, online censorship and state/institutional censorship and reflecting it back on human experience and experience of an artist.
I am discussing some of the experiments with AI text2image policies and content moderation of art by Instagram.
One of the experiment was built around crafting prompts for text-to-image LLM to coax them into producing “sexually suggestive” images. I have been exploring what the limits of “sexual imagery” are since from the human (especially queer) sexuality perspective, many visuals can be sexually loaded for one individual but not for another (and not for the AI). In that experiment I also argue that the process of interacting with generative AI such as Midjourney or ChatGPT is play: there is an element of ambiguity, chance and unpredictability, all, human and non-human actors, are playing with boundaries and rules and the interaction is turn-based.
Blind Spots is an artistic intervention challenging AI algorithms and online censorship. Nine pieces were created as a “puzzle” for Instagram to solve. The painting is losely based on a glitched AI generated image. Through this experiment I am exploring the experience of an artist engaging in a playful interaction AI in order to reclaim the agency and power. This and other experiemnts were showcased at my exhibition Mechanisms of Care (October 2023, Malmö, Sweden).
Finally I reflect on artist's experience/phenomenology of creating an artwork knowing that it will be censored or deleted from public view (online or physical). How is our artistic practice affected when we are working while being subjected to (self-) censorship (based on my personal expereince and interviews with other artists)?
Liza Shkirando (Swe/Rus, b.1986) a painter, a visual artist and an interaction designer based in Malmö, Sweden.
I primarily work in oil painting, using traditional media innovatively through transgressive experiments and conceptual projects. For me, painting transcends aesthetics; it serves as a means to research, conceptualize, and communicate complex ideas. Through video, I foster a direct and unfiltered conversation with the audience.
My art draws from my lived experiences, exploring identity, paradox, and binaries while navigating diverse cultures, political views, sexualities, and genders. The transgressive, the queer, and the anarchist embody a moving utopian horizon, while mourning the lost culture I grew up in. Through my practice, I challenge the norms, pushing the boundaries of taste and symbolism. My work exposes raw emotions, expressed through the body as a vessel, a prison, and medium. My body is central to my art—serving as a reference in my oil paintings and as a canvas for video and performance.
I have exhibited throughout Europe and Canada, including Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, Denmark), FRANK Gallery (Malmö, Sweden) and Duplex Gallery (Lisbon, Portugal). Currently I am focused on the topics of identity and censorship, researching them through the prism of transgressive art. I’ve been a guest lecturer at Linnaeus University (Växjö, Sweden) and Malmö University (Malmö, Sweden) speaking about my artistic practice and research. I am involved with the art-based research group led by Professor Susan Kozel at Malmö University.
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