Digital Design

Caroline's Digital Design Site

Website Evaluation: Everything is Going to be OK

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Everything is Going to be OK is a digital interactive zine by digital artist and game maker Natalie Lawhead that uses animation, drawings, and a video game format to explore themes of mental health and recovery.

Before viewers have even downloaded the game, Lawhead sets up an interactive homepage where users can leave comments, an artist statement that outlines her mission, and an updating log of changes she’s made to the site. Her intended audience, she says, is anyone who might relate to her own journey with mental health, particularly those who find solace in online communities and through digital art.

This initial site provides crucial background information for the project and allows space for external voices, rather than simply making viewers download and play a game alone. Lawhead gives context for the zine’s dark humor and abstract storyline, encouraging viewers to see it as equal parts zine, game, and fantasy narrative. The zine itself follows a rabbit-like character who learns to survive despite abstract and gruesome trials.

This layout makes sense for the intended audience, grabbing attention with it’s retro design, flashing colors, and shifting text. Resembling the disorder of a Myspace or Tumblr page, it becomes instantly recognizable as something creative and non-professional, appealing to younger generations who were raised on internet games.

The site adheres to Williams’s principles of proximity and repetition. Fonts, colors, and images are consistent throughout, helping to build a theme that will continue in the downloadable part of the zine. Likewise, related elements are grouped together on the page, with clear distinctions between the comments section, the log, and the expository text.

While it’s chaotic design helps set the tone for the zine, the site departs from Williams’s principles of contrast and alignment. Elements of the page like the flames at the bottom of the screen grab attention with unnecessary movement. Font sizes and colors repeat without much variation or white space, and coupled with sporadic animation of the text, this makes reading the page somewhat difficult and distracting.

To improve this design, I would suggest cleaning up the page and making sure that every movement, graphic, and color serves a deliberate purpose rather than making a deliberately extravagant and chaotic tone. More blank space on the page and a stronger contrast between colors and fonts would improve overall design.

I’d like to incorporate a similar combination of art and animated text to our project, using images to tell a story rather than forcing viewers to sift through heavy background information. I also like the idea of a comments section and a preface to the project that allows complete transparency between viewer and creator.

Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Queer Narratives: A Digital Zine

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This project will examine emerging artificial intelligence technologies and how they use queer narratives to raise questions about the nature of identity and personhood itself. We plan to tackle this question through the lense of a digital influencer and self-identifying queer robot called Lil Miquela, who emerged as a digital presence in 2016 and whose narrative is controlled by a California startup. It’s important that we approach our research of this topic from two angles: the journalistic think-pieces that provide context and commentary surrounding Lil Miquela, and academic sources such as the cyborg manifesto, which provide a larger history and context to the study of artificial personhood. 

We want to present our conclusions about artificial personhood and queerness in a zine format. Zines are already associated with queer media, and digitalizing this format aligns with our project’s theme of digitalizing queerness itself. We want to present scholarly information such as Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in an interactive and accessible way. Scholarly sources should be in direct, side-by-side conversation with journalistic sources on Lil Miquela and AI startups using queer narratives. By using a zine format, we also hope to open this discussion to people outside of the world of GSS and academia.

In order to convey our message, we could include: 

  • Examples of Lil Miquela’s tweets, vlog entries, and Instagram posts that demonstrate her borrowing of queer narratives.
  • A place for viewers to enter the discussion via live chat, where they can comment on our input as well as the sources. 
  • Artistic breakdown of background information from both journalistic and scholarly sources, animation of key quotes to introduce the viewer to the world of queer AI. 

We are researching the implications of artificial personhood on queer identities because we want to know what the future of this technology means for LGBTQ+ people. We want our audience to question the ways in which companies use queer stories and bodies for profit, how an artificial identity is created through coding and storytelling, and how these ideas could evolve in the future. 

Some questions we plan to explore are: 

  • How does artificial intelligence challenge our assumptions about identity and personhood? 
  • Why does someone like Lil Miquela, who claims multiple marginalized identities despite being a robot, attract profit for ad companies? 
  • How do robots and artificial beings bring out a fear of the “other” in society and how might this be compared to fear of actual queer people? 
  • What does it mean that Lil Miquela’s content is written by a team of creators rather than by coding? How does this make her different than a fictional character?

Lil Miquela and Artificial Intelligence: Works Cited

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Chambers, Ross. “The Queer and the Creepy: Western Fictions of Artificial Life.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, pp. 19–35. 

Hollinger, Veronica. “ʹSomething Like a Fictionʹ: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology.” Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson et al., 1st ed., vol. 37, Liverpool University Press, 2008, pp. 140–160.

Ruberg, Bonnie, et al. “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2018, pp. 108–128.

Sauers , Jenna. “Life After Fiction: The Future of Lil Miquela.” Cultured Magazine, 25 Apr. 2019, www.culturedmag.com/lil-miquela/.

Thweatt-Bates, J. Jeanine. “Artificial Wombs and Cyborg Births: Postgenderism and Theology.” Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement, edited by Ronald Cole-Turner, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 101–114.

Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “Virtual Influencers Have Got to Be a Fad – Right?” Vox, Vox, 3 June 2019, www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/6/3/18647626/instagram-virtual-influencers-lil-miquela-ai-startups.

Annotated Bibliography

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Works Cited

Chambers, Ross. “The Queer and the Creepy: Western Fictions of Artificial Life.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, pp. 19–35. 

This article examines how the rise of artificial intelligence could change our definitions of personhood and identity. Rather than looking immediately forward, Chambers imagines this phenomenon by interrogating the long history of artificial intelligence and it’s intersections with queerness in science fiction novels dating back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Through science fiction, we can locate the ways in which queer narratives have always shaped cultural dialogue around personhood. Chambers’s definition of queer is synonymous with the ‘other’, raising debates about what queer actually means in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality. 

Hollinger, Veronica. “ʹSomething Like a Fictionʹ: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology.” Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson et al., 1st ed., vol. 37, Liverpool University Press, 2008, pp. 140–160.

Hollinger also interrogates modern questions surrounding artificial intelligence and queerness by looking at various pieces of fiction, including Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” in which a robot is programmed to perform a fantasy version of femininity. She examines the ways that sexuality manifests itself visually and talks about the idea of gender and sexuality as performative, visual concepts. This raises questions about how a creator might be able to “program” AI to be queer when queerness isn’t something that can be calculated by appearance and mannerisms alone. 

Ruberg, Bonnie, et al. “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2018, pp. 108–128.

While this source doesn’t deal directly with questions of artificial intelligence, it does help us better understand how a project about queer bodies translates to a digital humanities format. Ruberg takes time to define what “queerness” means, linking it to unconventional forms of education, visual learning, and non-linear narratives. She also makes connections between queer studies, intersectional feminist studies, and race theory, all of which are crucial fields to factor into the study of AI bodies. 

Thweatt-Bates, J. Jeanine. “Artificial Wombs and Cyborg Births: Postgenderism and Theology.” Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement, edited by Ronald Cole-Turner, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 101–114.

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