A visual exercise from a slow-AI visual project focused on a speculative Peking Opera, a Chinese performance art featuring heavy costume and makeup symbolism, expressive acrobatics, and minimal set dressing. The project follows a backwards pipeline – teaching generative AI the meaning behind visual signifiers to test if it can replicate cultural meaning when prompted through text, rather than duplicating visual patterns. As the network is being trained, the artist learns alongside it, not only to understand her own diasporic cultural heritage, but the fragility of replicated visual culture, and the living, breathing nature of an artform incorrectly seen as frozen in time.

Here, the bespoke network created images of a female opera character with a purple robe and green face -- a combination that does not exist in a traditional narrative. Working from the meaning of the colours and patterns, we can pull a narrative out of the images, creating a new character rooted in traditional convention. The AI's ignorance to cultural meaning is celebrated within this context, rather than seen as a bug when in the context of larger responsibilities.

The artist prioritizes slow movements, small datasets, and approaching training as handcraft. Images in the dataset have been hand-scanned or individually captured from physical books, in-person image archives at the Toronto Reference Library's Picture Collection, and online video documentation; these raw images were then cropped, renamed, and organized individually before being tagged by hand. This approach, while time consuming, is vital as it allows the artist to touch, physically and digitally, every part of the process.

The project is ongoing and currently supported by Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The visuals here were created as part of the Wilding AI residency with CTM Festival.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Evangeline Y Brooks is a postcyber artist interested in how we coexist with computers, working to maintain sustainable, accessible, and DIY artist communities against cultures of immediacy. Her practice engages with digital imagery bridging IRL, passing data back and forth over mediums and celebrating lost information. She is the Programming Manager at InterAccess and co-hosts the A/V showcase ponyHAUS. Her work has been featured at the Luminato Festival, TIFFxInstagram, Images Festival, and Geary Art Crawl and supported by the Canada Council of the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council.