Monday, 09 June, 2025 - 09:30

All The Rivers Residency: pre-submission

an*dre neely
Melanie Sien Min Lyn
Frieder Miller

Pre-Submission is a high-energy satirical take-down of Europeanness, through the lens of modern border technology, liberal identity politics and soft-power.

Adopting a critical tech and diaspora perspective, this media performance engages with EU technologies and culture, to critique, deconstruct and satirize the ways it tokenises and exploits identity politics (of queerness, feminism, race), to fabricate consent. Pre-Submission engages satire, memetic humour and autobiography to reflect on AI and biometric border-tech, mass-entertainment spectacle, and our complicity within this production of exclusion. From military recruitment ads in gay hookup apps, camp Eurovision looks bridging BDSM and Drag aesthetics, to the family-affective tone in press statements, or the earnestness of female officers featured in Frontex youtube videos describing their feminist workplace, the EU splices and collages identity and belonging to maintain its soft-power.

Pulling from pop-culture, bureaucratic settings, media nostalgia and our own auto-fictional lore, Pre-Submission builds a speculative narrative in which the artists' likeness is used as part of a diversification program to create a force of AI border guards that represent everyone’s unique identity. Inspired in particular by an EU-funded project testing an AI border guard prototype, rendered and animated as a white man (AVATAR), our response makes use of body-doubles to explore the multiple selves we're divided into, from data doubles to code-switchers. What can embracing these flawed other halves teach us about the parts we play within this machinery? Can we trust ourselves within these replications?

First part of a two-part residency. The 2nd part with a public showing will follow in November 25.

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