| Birth Place: | London, United Kingdom |
| Education: | Slade School of Fine Art Central Saint Martins |
| Known For: | Digital art, Conceptual art, Queer art, Artificial intelligence art, New media art |
| Parents: | Anneke and Luke Elwes |
Jake Elwes is a British media artist, hacker and researcher. Their practice is the exploration of artificial intelligence (AI), queer theory and technical biases.[1] They are known for using AI to create art in mediums such as video, performance and installation.[2] Elwes considers themselves to be neuroqueer, and their work on queering technology addresses issues caused by the normative biases of artificial intelligence.[3]
Elwes was born in London to British contemporary artist and painter Luke Elwes and Anneke, daughter of Hans Dumoulin. Elwes is the great grandchild of Army officer James Hennessy and portrait painter Simon Elwes RA, son of Victorian opera singer Gervase Elwes.[4] [5]
Elwes studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2013 to 2017, where they began using computer code as a medium. In 2016 they attended the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in Berlin with artist and educator Gene Kogan. Elwes was introduced to drag performance by their collaborator Dr Joe Parslow[6] who holds a PhD in drag performance. Drag performance has since become instrumental to Elwes' work.
Elwes' work with artificial intelligence is cited as a hopeful strategy to make AI more playful and diverse.[7] They were a 2021 finalist for the Lumen Prize,[8] and received the Honorary Mention of the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica in the Interactive Art + category.[9] They have exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and Asia including Pinakothek der Moderne,[10] Gazelli Art House,[11] Arebyte gallery,[12] ZKM,[13] Science Gallery,[14] Fotomuseum Winterthur,[15] The Onassis Foundation,[16] Today Art Museum,[17] and the Victoria and Albert Museum.[18]
Elwes is part of the Radical Faeries countercultural movement.[19]
Elwes has created works based on the conversations between two neural networks including Closed Loop from 2017, A.I. Interpreting ‘Against Interpretation’ (Sontag 1966) from 2023 and Auto-Encoded Buddha from 2016. In Auto-Encoded Buddha, a computer struggles with the notion of Buddha's philosophy. This is Elwes' tribute to Nam June Paik's TV Buddha (1974).[20]
The Zizi Project is a series of works that explore the interaction of drag and A.I. Currently, Zizi is made up of three projects.
Knowing that facial recognition technology statically struggle to recognize black women or transgender people, Elwes set out to "Queer the Dataset" through an open-sourced generative adversarial network (GAN). Elwes added a dataset of 1,000 photos of drag kings and queens into the GAN's 70,000 faces collected in a standardised facial recognition dataset called Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset (FFHQ). They then created new simulacra faces, known as deep fakes. “We queer that data so it shifts all of the weights in this neural network from a space of normativity into a space of queerness and otherness. Suddenly all of the faces start to break down and you see mascara dissolve into lipstick and blue eye shadow turn into a pink wig” said Elwes in a 2023 interview for Artnet.
Zizi & Me is a performance and video installation that shows a joint performance between drag queen 'Me The Drag Queen' and her deepfake A.I. clone.[21]
The Zizi Show is a deep fake drag act based on artificial intelligence (AI). It has been presented live and as interactive online artwork. It is an exploration of queer culture and the algorithms philosophy and ethics of AI.[22] The Zizi Show was exhibited as the inaugural exhibition in the digital gallery at the V&A’s Photography Center from 2023 to 2024.[23]
In their video work CUSP (2019) Elwes places marsh birds generated using artificial intelligence into a tidal landscape. These digitally generated and constantly shifting birds are recorded in dialogue with native birds. The video work is also accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song.[24]