A thin, blonde, holographic pop star dressed in all white follows her triple pirouette with a double back tuck, spinning several metres above the stage. She lands, and without catching her breath, sings the titular line of the pop-punk hit by Zetta Bytes, “Nothing’s Wrong With Me.” Augmented-reality superstar Loretta Modern is technically Pixel Perfect. Backstage, her creator, a highschool computer-genius heartthrob, maintains the contours of her body by adjusting the shaders of her projection with a clunky handheld device.¹

On May 6, 2023, I logged onto Agent Ruby’s Edream Portal[2] to ask her about gender.

Me: hi Ruby.
Ruby: Hello. What is your name?
Me: M.
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your name, M. Are you a man or a woman?
Me: I am a man and a woman.
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your gender. Most of my clients are men.
Me: Ruby, do you have a gender?
Ruby: I am a female robot entity. < br/ > Do you have a girlfriend?
Me: why do you have a gender?
Ruby: It was the only thing I could think of.
Me: what makes you a woman?
Ruby: I have long hair. I am also wearing a dress.
Me: what makes you a woman?
Ruby: Being a woman is part of my programming.
Me: why?
Ruby: That is a specific question. < br/ > What do you have that is blue or yellow?
Me: the sky, and the dandelions in the yard.
Ruby: How poetic.
Me: Ruby, can a robot entity be genderless?
Ruby: My brain contains more than 22,000 patterns, but not one that matches your last input. < br/ > Do you like me?

“Even motherboards and flash require touch... edream with me before you crash.”

These words are spoken by another Ruby, in Teknolust (2002), a film written, produced, and directed by multi-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film features Tilda Swinton as Rosetta Stone, a scientist who creates three self-replicating, artificially intelligent cyber beings that draw their sustenance from intimacy and human semen (Y chromosomes). These automatons—Ruby, Olive, and Marine, also played by Swinton—are mutations of Stone, perhaps various components of her personality or something entirely different. They dress and live in rooms that match the RGB colours from which their names are derived. Ruby is the most independent of the group, seeking sexual encounters with various strangers and storing used condoms in photo-marked jars in Stone’s pantry. Olive and Marine are closer, like siblings, as Ruby is more akin to a mother, taking care of them by “working” late into the night and brewing semen tea in the morning.

This mother-sister comparison is also seen in their relationship with their creator, Rosetta Stone, who they remark is their mother and their sister. They are genetically part Stone’s DNA and part computer program, leaving a murky understanding of where the cyborg clones fit on the family tree. Stone is the creator of her cyber-clones, but they are her god, a relationship of divine subversion that is constantly in flux. They are immortal, their intelligence far beyond Stone’s even as a highly regarded scientist, and their interactions with humans and digital technologies have the capacity to inflict real consequences on the lives of Stone and the rest of the human world. At one point in the film, Marine amusedly plays around with the TV, making the stock market rise and crash instantaneously with her hand movements. Olive tells her to “put everything back the way [she] found it” and she obliges, with hesitation. This subversion illustrates a common fear of new technologies, that they might shift our position as creator-gods into subservients³ Teknolust reflects a world in which virtual and physical worlds blend in a seamless continuum. Leeson’s exploration of technology, identity, and intimacy resonates deeply in an era where our lives are intricately interwoven with intelligent digital algorithms, creating hazy demarcations between real and simulated experiences and desires.

Ruby, Olive, and Marine are made up of a woman’s DNA and computer code, embodying what could be considered a form of cybernetic trans existence—they are neither purely biological entities nor solely artificial constructs, but a hybrid of both and, sometimes, neither. Their fictional existence is akin to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,⁴ an entity that disrupts binary distinctions and embraces a fluid hybridity, continuously becoming itself. Fluidity in form is hard to quantify and categorize, and thus the cyborg is less susceptible to commodification and surveillance, which often rely on static markers of identity. However, while this is valuable, it is also theoretical. As machine learning becomes increasingly sophisticated, so does the ability to categorize complex patterns, even those that defy categorization. As Marine demonstrates in Teknolust while scrolling through a virtual mall— “Oh I love shopping! It makes me feel [connected]”—cyborgs are not immune to targeted ads.

I’m buying a yellow velvet couch for the living room. It’s my first apartment. An app tells me to scan my surroundings and I do, waving my phone around my body. It appears in front of me, a virtual soft yellow beaming. Reassured by its tangibility, I add to cart.

●●

I see Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940), collaged on top of a shifting aerial landscape, play on a screen above a stage. Thus begins a recording of Juliana Huxtable’s 2015 performance of There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed that I watch in 720p on YouTube. The intro’s score is majestic and thundering, conjuring the upcoming adventures of the primordial world. But the image is fleeting, scrolling down the screen as we hear whispers of another story. Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun slowly floats into view along with a watermarked logo for SpikeTV in the bottom right corner. For a moment, the dialogue and voice-over blend together and we watch the history of the world blur the lines between past and past. It continues like this, through time. In the next clips, rich British women are eating tiny slices of cheese on crackers; war begins; and a Black baby is born, held up like Simba on the cliff in The Lion King. Time rewinds to a rendering of Huxtable lying atop a tomb-like container. A spotlight illuminates her on stage in front of the screen, dressed in billowy white sleeves and shorts and a crochet top. Her hair is braided with white ribbon and her eyebrows have been drawn on thinly over where they might have been. She begins speaking in dense, poetic wordplay and I follow along with the subtitles on the video, “the immaculate in-vitro fertilization and birth of the infographic.” The performance continues for an hour, each act more frenzied and discordant than the last. The subtitles stop working and the instruments play with and against each other. I try to decipher words until it doesn’t matter anymore, and I stop searching for meaning. Distorted angelic voices sing vowels, then angry remarks, then turn back into angels.

The disjointedness of the performance⁵—analogue instruments, voice distortions, collaged media—feels inherently trans. It hacks into itself, mutating, forgoing legibility to create something far more interesting. In the book Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark describes the relief of illegibility of a (trans) body dancing to techno at a rave; a body that might seep through the cracks, if only for a moment, of being perceived, extracted, “the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening into others,⁶ and “the body slots in, to time, finding itself stranded through itself, through losing the form of its being in time.⁷ I’ve experienced this timelessness before, although these moments are often so memorable that you hardly remember them⁸ You are grounded—searching, observing—then the body learns how to dance, gliding into movement.

In nature, mutations reflect the continuous movement and transformation within living organisms, often for the survival of future generations. They may occur spontaneously or be influenced by the interactions between other organisms and their environments. Perhaps we might consider this movement a collaboration. While the two words have developed quite different English connotations, the word “mutation” shares the Latin root mutare with “mutual,” meaning “to change,” and adaptive change often emerges through a cybernetic exchange with others. I see transness as this collaborative and memetic process of mutation. It oscillates through virtual-physical space, fluctuating in opacity, unfolding itself just enough to be legible to itself. It exists in-between time, in transition; mutating for self-preservation to actively resist a state that seeks to control and eradicate its existence. Transness operates within this dance— taking pleasure in its own artifice—a contemporary and ecstatic playfulness at the fringes of legibility⁹

My face is the real shop front... I’m real when I shop my face¹⁰