#SOPHYGRAY/Nadja Verena Marcin (DE)
Feminist Audio Bot & Multimedia Project — Honorary Mention, Ars Electronica Citizen Science Prize 2023
Abstract
#SOPHYGRAY is a multimedia project by German artist Nadja Verena Marcin, developed between 2021 and 2024 as an installation, performance, and mobile application. At its core is a feminist audio bot that engages audiences in humorous and philosophical dialogues, challenging the gendered and submissive roles assigned to virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Drawing from intersectional feminist theory and collective workshops, the bot’s knowledge base is constantly expanded by participants who act simultaneously as users and co-developers. The project manifests across multiple formats: as an immersive installation with dual projections referencing Metropolis (1927), as a live performance combining dance and spoken word, and as a mobile app that extends feminist AI narratives into everyday life. Conceived during an EMAP residency at Onassis Stegi, the work has since toured internationally, including exhibitions at IMPAKT Media Art Center, La MaMa Galleria, and transmediale. By foregrounding how technologies reproduce cultural biases, #SOPHYGRAY proposes counter-narratives that reimagine the relationship between artificial intelligence and feminist subjectivity in contemporary art.
Jury Statement
It’s long been known that our technologies are not neutral. The fact that they encode their developer’s world views, politics and prejudices is nowhere more apparent than with AI. With the #SOPHYGRAY audiobot, artist Nadja Verena Marcin forefronts the impact of human values by inviting participants to contribute to the bot’s development based on their interaction with its intersectional feminist canon.
Reference
https://ars.electronica.art/citizenscience/de/sophygray/
https://nadjamarcin.com/work/sophygray/
Presentation
