SPACE HEROINES, 2022/23

Series of female superheroines who maintain law and order in the universe and fight against space debris. Based on text descriptions, the series was generated with the open source AI system DALL·E 2. It is conceived as a commentary on male-dominated space travel and of male-determined self-conceptions of space conquest. It was created in the context of an artist residency at European Space Agency (ESA/ESOC) in Darmstadt in collaboration with Kultur einer Digitalstadt that I held in 2022. Since then, I have continued to further develop the work, which simultaneously questions the practice of AI in which “heroines” are standardized as white, young, slender, mostly blond, scantily clad, over-sexualized women. The project explores what happens when artificial intelligence is prompted to generate alternative protagonists. I wanted to confront these dominant male figures with bold female counterparts. Yet what initially appeared empowering soon revealed itself as a reconfiguration of patriarchal fantasies. Trained on decades of male dominated science fiction, gaming culture, and cinematic imagery, AI reproduced narrow and exclusionary ideals of femininity. The heroines appeared hypersexualized and homogenized, with exaggerated proportions, standardized beauty ideals, light skin, able bodied physiques, and heteronormative coding. Their strength seemed aestheticized rather than emancipatory.

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