The Zizi Show

Jake Elwes and The Public Universal Friend (AKA The PUF) present: the Zizi Show! In this fantastical performance merging drag, music, artificial intelligence (AI), and experimental video art, audiences will be transported into a techno-futuristic world beyond the boundaries of screens and infused with queerness. The PUF traces back to folklores about creating artificial life for telling the prophecies of the digital age. What can we learn from these stories of desires and pursuits of greater intelligence in our technology-saturated world today? Through comedic and interactive storytelling, the performers will demystify the construction of deepfakes, explore AI’s ethical problems, and invite us to imagine a reclamation of exploitative technologies.

About the Artists

Jake Elwes (b.1993, London, United Kingdom) is a conceptual artist, hacker, radical faerie and researcher living in London. They have been making critically engaged art exploring the aesthetics and ethics of machine learning systems since the very first generative AI models in 2016. Across projects that encompass moving-image installation, sound, and performance, Elwes finds unusual ways of demystifying, mapping, and subverting technology. Their work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Somerset House, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Ars Electronica, Austria; Onassis Foundation, Athens; among other venues.

The UK’s favorite mournful ghost, The Public Universal Friend (AKA The PUF) has no pleasure in this life greater than ensnaring audiences in its horrible web of mid-apocalyptic performative scrawl. Since the moment of its grave inception, The PUF has been enthralling the London drag scene with its baleful mélange of debris puppetry and as a postmodern miracle clown. When not cobbling together wild extrapolations on the horrors of technology and their relation to the denizens of mythic time, The PUF can be found eating wax! In a barrel.
 

The Zizi Show is part of Electric Movements, a performance series curated by Karen Cheung, interim assistant curator, media, technology, and culture. Performances are produced by Bella Mello, manager of public engagement with Andrea Melara, public engagement coordinator.