leona.jpeg and LeonaChat (2023)
4” x 5”, cyanotype on cotton yarn, AI trained ChatbotC:\Users\keelyhopkins>leona.jpeg
>>>Leona Gladys Coates
Born May 19, 1900 in Nappan, Cumberland County Nova Scotia. In 1916 her parents died of tuberculosis, and she went to live with her Aunt and Uncle at Fort Lawrence. She moved o Truro shortly afterwards to complete training in education of the Provincial Normal College. On September 13, 1919 she boarded a train at Amherst and eventually ended up in Purple Springs, Alberta. Leona was the first school teacher in the Kinniburgh district of Alberta. She had to give up teaching in 1921, and was married a few months later. She is my great-grandmother on my mother’s father’s side. She died from post-operative complications after an appendectomy at the age of 41. My grandfather was 15. He died before I was born, in an automobile accident. I never met anyone who knew Leona. leona.jpeg is a compulsive return to the image of my great-grandmother’s portrait, which has been the subject of my interest at many different points in my artistic practice.
>>>textiles, computers
the punch cards engineered for Jacquard looms that could make designs so intricate they were capable of producing imagery that was nearly photographic were the same punch cards that fed data to the first computers. Women’s work is the common thread.
>>>cyborgs
glitch, cyborgs, and cyberspace reimagine the matrices that gendered bodies exist in. Using Artificial Intelligence to create an entity not quite Leona, not quite machine, unable to answer questions based on context information provided. “Late 20th century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.” (Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto” pg. 152). Use your phone to scan the code. Use your hand to decode, to look.
>>>chatGPT
trying to get any answer from LeonaChat is difficult, because her journalling is so impersonal. The impersonal writing mirrors my disconnected feelings. I am fascinated, maybe even infatuated with her, but I have no feelings of familiarity. Frustration with the inability of technology to give answers, insight, or real emotion accompanies the use of the Leona ChatGPT.
>>>jpeg
Leona’s face is unravelled and re-knit, just as the pixels are reconfigured from binary code and compressed each time I open leona.jpeg. The image was given to me on a USB stick from my aunt, who has taken on being the family historian. Unfortunately most of the archive she has collected is stored in jpegs, and are not named. The studio portrait of Leona that places her body firmly in the turn of the 20th century via the tone, lighting, and pose is one of the few files that is named in my family’s archive; leona.jpeg.
>>>artifact
an artifact is left behind.
An institution, ideology, or system of values that is no longer appropriate or relevant.
A piece of data in an image that is not translated correctly due to compression.
>>>CTRL + f
I feel my repeated looping back to her image is oscillating between between searching for something and consuming something. There is a hunger. I am looking for meaning, but I am still detached. I am using her face as a placeholder for all things I am angry about.
>>>simulacra
I’m not sure if there’s always a real that comes first and a simulation that comes after. The “real” Leona cannot exist for me, because our connection is fully mediated by oral history, written and translated records, and digitized archives. My only relationship with her is through copies and transcriptions and corrupted stories that gather dust as data. Copy, paste. That’s all I know of Leona. Sitting in the glow of the monitor, monolithic, waiting for answers I could only possibly know by knowing the original of the copies.
>>>decode
Leona is and will always be a source of unknowing that will not resolve, despite all my efforts to decode her.