Another Online Pervert

Another Online Pervert derives from a yearslong series of conversations between artist Brea Souders and a female AI chatbot, programmed by male developers. These conversations are interspersed with entries from Souders’ diary spanning two decades, and combined with photographs from her personal archive. Through her photographs and chatbot conversations, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and anxieties of the body. The result is a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can build a shared story from pieces of themselves.

The photographs from Souders’ archive include snapshots she took as a teenager, family photos, and recent images from her artistic practice. She reanimated these images by using the chatbot conversations as text prompts to select imagery from her archive, focusing especially on photographs that evoke embodied experience.

The project examines intersections between technology, intimacy, womanhood, and how personal meaning can be explored in the context of this new, AI-mediated world. Surreal and poetic tangents are combined with the material realities of the bot, its connection to capitalism, and the slippery divide between being and non-being.