"dragging Banu Alkan"
Fantasizing through drag, hallucinating through AI
Considering deepfakes, voice cloning and lip-synch animations as "drag technologies", the sensational Turkish movie star Banu Alkan became the center of a queer re-imagination of my very own. In this hallucination, Banu Alkan was intertwined with queer-feminist scholars - was this her emancipation? I don't know, I shall keep dreaming.
✮ Recap: Workshop and Performance „Dragging the Latent, Unlearning the Model“ ✮ by Orhun Mersin (aka kekik) and Yağmur Uçkunkaya as part of the symposium Costs of (Dis)Connecting! In the workshop, the participants were able to playfully approach contemporary machine-learning systems as spaces to be inhabited, refusing fixed identities and technological closures. Merging drag and sound within their ongoing artistic research into AI technologies, queer methodologies, and disidentificatory practices, the duo brought the symposium to a close with a performance in combination with presenting the workshop results.
The students were able to dive into hands-on experimentation with AI face-filter and deepfake technologies. Participants explored how algorithmic models encode normative assumptions about faces, gender, and identity, and were encouraged to misuse, exaggerate, and destabilize these systems. Through acts of “dragging” the model, uncertainty and error were reframed as productive forces rather than failures, opening space for playful and critical engagement with artificial imaginaries.
The live performance at HALLE 14 brought together drag, spoken narration, and algorithmically mediated visuals, accompanied by a live DJ set. While rooted in the duo’s ongoing artistic practice, the performance was expanded through the inclusion of visual material produced during the workshop, creating a dialogue between professional performance and collective experimentation. This combination foregrounded AI not as a neutral tool, but as an active and contested participant in the production of meaning.
#unlearningdigitalities #hgbleipzig #costsofdisconnecting
Photos and Videos: Meghan Smith and Naomi Frank
Reimagining friedrich merz 🫰🏽
As usual I turned my body into an instrument which talks, literally, and says what needs to be said, literally.
Because if anything, y'all should be saying mashallah stadtbild.
@prince_emrah_official asked me for an upcycling outfit and I upcycled that engineering diploma 🧿
Textile sensors by me
Dress by @_soscha_
Wig @brattywhite
APOCALYPSO by Justin F. Kennedy @sophiensaele 23-26. October
***
When does the swarm become the horde? What do zombies teach us about organizing? And what can robots show us about care?
Apocalypso is choreography and speculative opera, exploring apocalypse through an Afro-pessimist lens. At its heart lies the ocean – as body, archive, and a space of both memory and becoming. Drawing from Tidalectics, a concept coined by Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the performance weaves together contemporary Caribbean mythology with intersectional and ecocritical perspectives.
The title – a blend of “Apocalypse” (Greek: “to uncover hidden places”) and “Calypso” (an Afro-Caribbean musical tradition that addresses pressing political realities in a disarmingly casual tone) signals a work that reveals social grievances while at the same time seducing its audience. Set after the fictional Apocalypso of Internal Combustion, where hyper-individualist humans have collapsed in on themselves, and hybrid beings like mermaids, zombies, and animatrons rise to the surface.
These figures embody queer Black futures, Black femmedom, fluidity, and collective resistance. They raise questions of care, embodiment, labor, and survival beyond neoliberal notions of inclusion. Apocalypso critiques hollow ideals of togetherness, often staged in European performance spaces.
***
Artistic direction, performance: Justin F Kennedy
Performance: Orhun Mersin, Corey Scott-Gilbert, Willie Stark
Composition, performance: Guillermo E. Brown, Shannon Funchess
Additional composition: Wynne Bennett
Dramaturgy: Ligia Lewis
Set design: Makode Linde
Costume design: SADAK
Lighting design: Joseph Wegmann
Prosthetic design: Una Ryu
Hair, make-up: Evan Loxton
Technical direction: Lui Marschewski
Production: Diana Paiva, Anna von Glasenapp / high expectations, Hilary Fox
Photo: Mayra Wallraff
There is a reason why she is called DAÄž KekiÄźi..
Both emotionally and, clearly, physically strongest woman in my life. She is, and has always been, foremost a character development queen - given her background and how she now thrives onstage in queer spaces.
It is a huge joy to get her involved in my creative process, and produce together. During our collaboration, I notice how certain habits in the ways I approach creativity actually trace back to her.
Here are some BTS videos from our inital experiments, accompanied by Nilüfer songs. Zor Kadınlar are open for bookings and commisions xxx
It was in the year 1975 that my mom migrated to Germany with her family - the same year when the song "Ah Nerede" hit the charts in Turkey. The two events were unrelated, yet the song stitched itself to her migration story. As a 6-years-old, she was placed in an integration class with all Turkish students to learn German. For the year-end show, the Turkish class was asked to do a folklore performance. My mom, however, refused that: she didn't want to do a folk dance, she wanted to perform to a "more modern" song. So she choreographed her own thing to the song "Ah Nerede" and gathered some other kids to do an alternative performance to the school.
Years later she returned to Turkey, had a child -me- who would also migrate to Germany and, in time, become a drag queen. Now, exactly 50 years after her arrival in Germany, we brought her rebellion back to life as a drag duet in one of Berlin’s most historic centers.
The more she understands what drag is and my perspectives as a drag artist, the more she falls in love with drag.
This was the second makeover challenge in what I like to call Kreuzberg's Drag Grace - not a race, but a grace offered to a cultural hub shaped by immigration. You'll see more of us.
Zor Kadınlar xxx
From my lecture -in drag on drag- for the film students at @ue.germany
Through drag, we talked about gender, queer failure and feminist scholarship. Thank you @latinx_cyborg for inviting me. Always happy to EDUCATE the kids.
One student actually asked: "What's your secret to your confidence?"
I said "drag."
Master thesis by Yağmur Uçkunkaya and Orhun Mersin aka kekik:
"Dragging the Latent, Unlearning The Model: Speculative Practices Within Artificial Imaginaries" under supervision of Prof. Dr. Marc Pfaff, Prof. Albert Lang and Prof. Anna Ehrenstein
Interactions with AI are shaped less by its technical operations and more by the imaginaries projected onto it—what we refer to as artificial imaginaries: socially and culturally constructed perceptions of AI’s capabilities, long conditioned by corporate and institutional agendas. The persistent disconnection between how AI is imagined and how it materially operates forms the basis of our critique. In response, we develop a speculative vocabulary and a repertoire of gestures to imagine AI otherwise. Through personal, collective, and speculative practices of unlearning the model and dragging the latent, we work both within and against these imaginaries—refusing their closures while inhabiting their contradictions. While unlearning engages nonknowledge and uncertainty as generative forces, dragging draws on disidentificatory strategies and drag practices to reconfigure encoded norms. We adapt technical methods from machine learning—such as pruning and adversarial attacks—and apply them to face-swap and text-to-speech systems. Interfaces were built to intervene directly in model architectures, exposing internal operations and modifying procedural layers of generation. By enabling continuous manipulation across multiple levels of the generative process, we disrupted the input output expectations embedded in these systems. What emerged were non-instrumentalist instruments—models no longer shaped by epistemic certainty, but opened to speculative and unstable engagements. Through the exploration and development of these processes of unlearning and dragging, a horizon for future inquiry and practice emerges—one that gestures toward unknowability, subversion, and the ongoing reimagining of artificial imaginaries from within.
