Bear AI is a photographic and moving-image work that examines the relationship between self-representation, physical appearance, and assumed identity. For the project, I projected archetypal images associated with gay bear culture onto my own body and photographed myself within them, creating a series of layered self-portraits in which my image is both absorbed into and disrupted by an existing visual vocabulary.
I then animated the photographs and put them in dialogue with a large language model AI, using conversation to test how identity is read, categorized, and reproduced. Rather than clarifying my relationship to an identity, the AI’s responses increasingly relied on stereotypes and generalizations, creating greater distance between me and an identity frequently assigned to me because of my physicality. Bear AI considers the tension between embodiment and belonging, and how images, cultural archetypes, and algorithmic systems can construct identities that do not necessarily correspond to lived experience.
