“Bob: hi Alice hru” a queer.labs production

Bob: hi Alice hru is presented by Boston Cyberarts, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering and presenting experimental media arts, and marks queer.labs’ first experiment: an exploration of chat and agentic AI. The exhibition brings together individual works by Itziar Barrio, Christopher Clary, and Mark Ramos, along with a collaborative work by all three artists.

The exhibition explores how meaning, identity, and intimacy can slip beyond human and computational control. Taking its title from a famous 2017 incident in which Facebook chatbot agents were shut down after abandoning English to invent their own “creepy, secret language,” the exhibition reframes technological failure as a site of liberation. Through agentic AI, network alerts, scripts, and adult webcam archives, the artists explore “incoherence” as a powerful political tool for

resisting oppressive digital logic. The works on view disrupt the rigid, normative parameters of modern technology, opening space for ambiguity, difference, and queer ways of being.

queer.labs is a network of artists and technologists (founded by Chris and Mark) committed to imagining more just, representative, and joyful futures for queer people through art and technology. We’d like to thank Itziar for collaborating on our first experiment, Boston Cyberarts for hosting us, and everyone participating in the project for helping us queer Bob, Alice, and Mallory.