Trap (2024)

Interactive installation using TouchDesigner and StreamDiffusionTD

On September 15th, 2024 I registered for the popular gay dating app, Grindr, for the first time in my life. After accepting the terms and conditions, and absolving Grindr of any responsibility should anything happen to me, I began my research. I started to screenshot and collect messages sent to my account. As expected, I was barraged with uninvited images of penises, desperate pleas for attention, graphic descriptions of sexual acts wishing to be done upon me, along with a couple of surprisingly genuine invitations for conversation.

This is a common experience for users of Grindr, especially that of trans women. While this experience can be overwhelming, traumatizing, and even physically harmful (at the time I was thinking a lot about the story of Pauly Likens, a 14-yr old trans girl that was murdered by a man she met through Grindr in June of 2024), it can also be a source of gender-affirming validation, albeit a very twisted form of it. Despite the well-documented harm, Grindr deliberately constructs its platform in a way to make users (and victims) bear the burden of it.

This project employed over 60 of those messages sent to my account. These messages were not provoked or solicited in any way, only documented and transcribed into a text file.

Using StreamDiffusionTD inside TouchDesigner, I was able to fuse the text data of these messages with a live video feed from a webcam pointed at my face. This produced a constant stream of images directly influenced by both the visual and text stimulus.

Sexually charged and transphobic text data fed into a generative AI model (inherently incapable of rendering anything pornographic) led to broken and uncanny imagery, and simultaneously exposed the inherent biases in the model’s training.

This piece was exhibited at Pacific Northwest College of Art as part of Bioetic - Explorations of the Static Flux, a two-week long group exhibition running from October 29, 2024 - November 11, 2024.