Bear AI

Bear AI is a photographic and moving-image work that explores the distance between embodied identity and the identities others assign us. I began by projecting archetypal images of men associated with gay bear culture onto my own body and photographing the resulting overlays. I then animated these self-portraits, transforming my body into a series of fragmented, exaggerated personas that hover between self-image, stereotype, and caricature.

The work developed through a conversation with artificial intelligence about bear identity and my own uncertain relationship to it. Rather than resolving that uncertainty, the exchange increasingly reproduced familiar assumptions about appearance, masculinity, sexuality, and belonging. Bear AI examines how cultural and algorithmic systems categorize bodies, and how those classifications can widen the gulf between lived experience and the identity one is presumed to inhabit.