The facets of power, ideology, culture, gender, and subjectivity encompassed by the gaze of power in the real world will continuously iterate and evolve, much like the ship of Theseus, as questions of subjectivity and identity within the realm of human identity ebb and flow in the digital virtual oceans. The coded gaze has already happened unbeknownst to us. Similar to how women are unconsciously conditioned in different aspects of their appearance, personality, and thoughts under the male gaze, it is likely that individuals' seemingly autonomous consciousness and choices are becoming more singular and homogenized within the ever-larger data cocoon, amplifying preexisting biases, discrimination, and stereotypes.

The Gender Shades research project¹, which Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru jointly started in 2017, exposed significant gender and skin color biases in artificial intelligence facial recognition systems. The benchmark dataset for mainstream facial analysis programs was skewed towards lighter-skinned males, achieving a success rate of 100%. In contrast, the accuracy and performance for darker-skinned females were the lowest, with IBM’s gender classifier achieving an accuracy rate of only 65% in research conducted from 2017 to 2020.

The female-led project Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI, 2019), initiated by Coral Manton and Birgitte Aga, is an activist art project that continues to evolve and expand. It serves as a response to the prevalent portrayal of AI voice assistants being gendered as female and positioned in subordinate and service roles. It involves community-driven workshops composed of individuals who self-identify as female, non-binary, agender, or genderfluid for programming.

Today, the AI industry still has only 22% female employees. Due to significant wage disparities between men and women in existing data, job platforms utilizing algorithms based on big data collection and services from search engines like Google tend to recommend high-paying jobs less often to female subscribers. The adage made by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas almost a century ago that “Science it would seem is not sexless; she is a man, a father and infected too” still resonates loudly.

Facial recognition technology and conversational AI applications have become ubiquitous in the post-pandemic era. Code does not recognize identity or sex; it only has two classification labels: male and female. On the other hand, various AI algorithms and applications have become a relatively isolated experimental field with controllable variables, serving as the forefront for female artists to reenact, simulate, and respond to the many biases, discrimination, and power inequalities that permeate the real world.

The Linguistic Errantry (2022) by Chinese-American artist Tansy Xiao uses AI algorithms to dissect the power machine’s unconscious, automated, and pervasive influence on language. The first-person perspective allows viewers to control a figure as they explore a fantastical environment filled with allusions to everyday things like ubiquitous security cameras, goldfish that continuously jump out of the water, and mirrors. In the piece, giraffes sing fragments of The Internationale, except one of them expresses the words “Control/Soul/Yearning for/Freedom”. The melody fragments absorb and meld with one another when they come into contact. This coincidence serves as a form of passive resistance. Xiao refers to Victor Klemperer’s viewpoint that language “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”

Language is power now, as new words proliferate with the sweeping tides of new technologies. The historical calamities and inevitability symbolized by the Tower of Babel may well recur in the age of AI.

If the digital world is merely another colonial expansion of patriarchy, can we trust computers to classify our appearance, gender, and even thoughts through black box deep learning algorithms? More critically, where do the authority and boundaries of judgment, interpretation, and power of the black box under the aura of tech worship originate? In the words of Hito Steyerl, “Today, expressions of life as reflected in data trails become a farmable, harvestable, minable resource managed by informational biopolitics.”¹

Yin Xiuzhen employs six screens in her colossal installation Unknown (2020) to display algorithmically extracted news headlines from throughout the world, recording the spectators’ expressions as they read the news. AI algorithms translate the collected emotional data into the distinct motion of nebulae, displayed on a giant screen at the top of the exhibition space. Subsequently, sculptures are generated through 3D printing, using the imageries of the nebulae. The entire procedure relies on the AI that has been trained on the artist’s previous works to recognize the relationship between human expressions and image generation. How does a computer interpret human feelings? Yin demonstrates the potential of humanism in the realm of high-tech intelligence through the transformation of virtuality and reality The infinite cosmos, surging emotions, and microchips that contain algorithms will always be interdependent.

Perhaps we can decipher how neural networks evaluate and react to the complex paradigms of human consciousness, thought, and emotion in a black box manner by reflecting on the procedures through which current power structures are built, history is written, and systematic values are imposed on individuals. A “cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony” may come into existence, as stated by Marlies Wirth, curator at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.²

Many female artists are taking pioneering roles in projects where AI acts as a collaborative artist in light of the new field of AI.

In order to train [Grace:AI] (2019–present), artist Mary Flanagan used deep convolutional adversarial network technology and artworks by female artists from around the world as a dataset. Initially, [Grace:AI] developed autonomous works by gathering relevant monstrous images of Frankenstein from the internet. The classic science fiction novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is not only a tragic metaphor for patriarchy but also the precursor of science fiction literature and the spiritual totem of cyberculture. In the second phase, [Grace:AI] builds on its knowledge from the works of female artists and observes the sky as she rather than it, generating imagery.

The multimedia public project Wander[001] by CheeseTalk (Yuqian Sun) (2021–2023) is based on an AI chatbot. Viewers can interact with Wander, a female robot that roams the future Earth, and hear her describing her travels through space and time. Based on input from the audience, AI creates all of the material.

Since 2015, Sougwen Chung has been using her own works to train her AI partner D.O.U.G (until present). While painting, the artist’s motions and noises are recorded and converted into instructions for a robotic arm. New viewpoints and relationships also alter as a result of collaborative creation between humans and machines.

In addition to investigating the coding of real-world cultures and future histories at the intersection of technology, race, gender, and justice, as was mentioned above, the practices of many female artists also involve exploring the potential for long-term equal relationships between AI and humans.

In addition to the different experiments probing the limits of coexistence between humans and AI within the context of technological aesthetics, there are also initiatives to engage in non-technical discussion and approach when dealing with fundamental human concerns. A recent development in AI art creation is the viability of mystical art and bio-art, as represented by witchcraft/religion or non-carbon-based ecological networks. This adds an additional dimension of practice for avoiding the pitfalls of tech worship and competitive technological production.

Fei Yining’s work has long revolved around narratives, fantasies, and new myths about multi-species ecosystem in the future, as viewed from the perspectives of non-humans such as cyborgs, mycorrhizal networks, tree networks, artificial intelligence, and more. Technology is no longer a tool of human production or a means of dismantling the post-human when non-humans become the first person. The protagonist of The Moonshore II (2023) is a virtual generic artificial intelligence with no physical presence. It narrates the tale of an AI caring for the sole remaining dugong on its own in a sea of poisonous algae. The artist, while conducting research for the piece, came across a neurotoxin known as amnesic shellfish poison that impairs cognition and whose architecture is remarkably similar to the punch cards used in early computers.

In Iris Qu Xiaoyu’s Symbiotic AI (2022), which imagines the interaction between algorithms and ecosystems from an AI’s perspective, AI is also adopted as the first-person creator. Reliable tales are created through group creation in workshops. As the simulation progresses, AI unlearns and gradually rejects human-centric datasets and scientific systems in favor of learning from non-human entities, such as oak trees, fungi, hedgehogs, moths, etc. These non-human entities help AI form a cybernetic language of control between biology and machinery by providing dynamic, adaptive, and hyper-localized insights. Humans are only observers in this algorithmic tale, depending on AI to interpret the language of nature.

The matrilineal clan’s ancestry in archaeological history, as well as myths and religious tales about the Virgin Mary and the Nuwa (Mother Goddess in Chinese myth), are all representations of creative ecologies of the digital era that are formed from women. Augusta Ada King, the first programmer in history, Radia Perlman, the creator of the STP protocol for the internet’s foundational layers, and Hedy Lamarr, the creator of wireless network technology, are all female. Looking back and tracing the inclusive power and more diverse vitality that comes from women and nature as the matrix may be an instinct of life as we grapple with confusion and envision what kind of AI era to shape. This may open up broader possibilities as creators and co-existents with artificial intelligence.

In Streaming Stillness (2022), Jiayu Liu renders an attempt to investigate natural prototypes that transcend human experiences. Using Chinese ink paintings from various dynasties to train AI, the artist uses two layers of deep machine learning algorithms and AI technology to produce a number of sets of virtual dynamic 3D visuals based on substantial Chinese topographical data. Poetic images are projected onto the mountains as a result, generating static large-scale mountain sculptures. Liu makes reference to the ideas from Yugong, the earliest geological imagination and documentation  in China. She alters China’s geography using AI-drawn maps in an effort to give Chinese civilization a new geological origin in the new digital era. This is not only about shaping and imagining future virtual landscapes and ecologies but also a topological homeomorphism that transcends binary relationships—the virtual arises from the real but does not exist within it, and art is the sum of the past, present, and future, an ever-evolving organic ecosystem.

If we look back a hundred years from now, after 2022, humans may be recoanized to have entered the era of artificial intelligence. Future society may be entirely virtual, with issues of gender, race, and other identity notions being replaced by new identities and systems operating within the framework of the digital economy. However, at this point, the momentum of the impulsive technological advance is insufficient to overcome the problems that society faces on a daily basis, such as war, energy shortages, economic crises, and other persistent temporal conundrums, forcing society to fully embrace digitization and the decentralization of human-centered civilization. In the continuation of historical inertia and the expansion of time, artists, especially female artists as pioneers of consciousness awakening—might be able to construct a projection of a diverse universe of the post-human era in today’s world, serving as a dwelling place floating between here and there. (Translated by Zhao Wenrui)