QUEENR
"QUEE(n)R" was premiered by a French Ensemble Proxima Centauri at Music Biennale Zagreb in April 2023. The work draws inspiration from "Bohemian Rhapsody," a renowned song by the iconic band Queen. The band's frontman, Freddie Mercury, known for his flamboyant presence and attire that resonated with camp aesthetics, emerged as a queer icon who exerted significant influence on the queer theories that emerged during the 1990s. The utilization of Stable Diffusion, an AI tool capable of generating imagery that undergoes continuous transformation, immediately established a compelling association between visual flux and queer identity. “By itself, the queer body introduces the highest degree of subversion of traditional cultural models: it fits neither of the two categories devised by traditional Western thought and thus suspends them both.” (Sirețeanu, 2019) The same could be said of the faces that Stable Diffusion generated, as it was often hard to assign a specific gender to them. In his acclaimed book “Cruising Utopia” José Esteban Muños says that “[t]he aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.” For me the ‘forward-dawning’ futurity is here with AI and given that AI has no gender it is by default queer. In creating QUEE(n)R I wanted to playfully engage with this idea by creating morphed facial variations of the Proxima Centauri performers.
Credits
Sound | Me |
Light | Me |
Catering | Me |
Composer, Researcher, Curator of Contemporary Music
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Composer, Researcher, Conductor of Contemporary Music