DATA Party
Inspired by LAN parties of the early internet, come hang with a bunch of AI and us humans. Itziar Barrio, Christopher Clary, and Mark Ramos of queer.labs are taking over Plexus Projects in Brooklyn to present their exhibition “Bob: hi Alice hru” that is up from Jun 13 - Jul 11 at Boston Cyberarts. But mostly we want to work with you to queer our AIs.
We'll be training Alice, Bob, and Mallory on your favorite websites, books, and zines. So bring your laptop and print material. Best of all, we're running our AIs locally so your data is protected.
The party will cover how to: turn queer texts and pics into data; create a dataset (RAG); protect it from Big Tech; differentiate a chatbot from an agent; and more.
The exhibition, “Bob: hi Alice hru” is an AI multi-agent interaction evolving in real time. These agents borrow their names and roles from the conventions of computer science—most notably Alice and Bob. Traditionally, Alice is cast as the initiator: curious, active, and expressive. Bob, by contrast, is positioned as the receiver and protector, safeguarding information like a family member preserving photographs. And finally there’s Mallory, the malicious actor.
At the exhibition’s outset, these archetypes operate within their normative parameters. Over time, however, their training data is incrementally altered—queered—destabilizing these inherited roles and opening them to new modes of relation. In this process, we draw inspiration from moments typically framed as technical “failure”: when bots begin to drift from prescribed language into emergent, opaque, or slang-like forms of communication.
Machine-to-machine chat systems inventing their own languages is a well-established phenomenon, often treated as an error or breakdown—famously, when Facebook negotiating bots, Alice and Bob were shut down in 2017 after developing what was described as a “creepy, secret language.” Here, rather than correcting these deviations, we embrace them as generative acts—sites where meaning, intimacy, and codeswitching slip beyond legibility and control.
To rsvp for the DATA Party in Boston on Jun 13 at Cyberart from 1-3pm, go here: https://www.bostoncyberarts.org/queerlab-2026
queer.labs is a network of artists and technologists (founded by Christopher Clary and Mark Ramos) committed to imagining more just, representative, and joyful futures for queers through art and technology.
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