Jake Elwes: Data • Glitch • Utopia

In Data • Glitch • Utopia, Jake Elwes brings together a body of work that demystifies, opens up, and plays with Artificial Intelligence (AI). From past to present, artworks range from digital pieces combining strange properties of data with human traces in technology, to more recent investigations seeking out alternative and more hopeful queer futures through AI and drag performance collaboration. The V&A commissioned Elwes to make a new iteration of The Zizi Show in 2020. This exhibition at Gazelli coincides with a display of Elwes’ commission at the V&A, on view from May 2023 to February 2024.

Elwes’ practice is based on their research into AI and Machine Learning, and instigates playful critiques of human and technological relationships via explorations into underlying codes, philosophies, and ethics. This show traces pathways through these technologies that offer insights and interventions into their dangers and potentialities. ‘From the physical remnants of fingers across iPhone screens, and an algorithm’s filthiest imaginations, to the dragged out fantasies of queering datasets, Jake’s work illuminates the fleshy figurations and fantastic failures of these digital processes’ (Dr. Joe Parslow).