DATA Party
Photo Credit: Mark Ramos
June 25, 2026 from 6-8pm
DATA Party
Hosted by artist Itziar Barrio and queer.labs (Christopher Clary and Mark Ramos), a network of artists and technologists committed to imagining queer futures.
Organized by Plexus Projects Artist-in-Residence Mark Ramos during his June 2026 Studio Residency.
We'll be queering 🌈 our agentic AIs Alice, Bob, and Mallory on your favorite websites, books, and zines. So bring your laptop and print material. Best of all, we're running our AIs locally so your data is protected. The party will cover how to: turn queer texts and pics into data; create a dataset (RAG); protect it from Big Tech; differentiate a chatbot from an agent; and more. This is our 2nd party to support our exhibition Boston Cyber Arts where the community added things like: the zines Fist Fucker’s Manual, Fucking Trans Women, and The essential dykes to watch out for; an oral history of queer black men in the south; minimalist game design; queer methods syllabus and readings; and Ariana Grande lyrics to No Tears Left to Cry.
DATA Party explores how meaning, identity, and intimacy can slip beyond human and computational control. Taking its title from a famous 2017 incident in which Facebook chatbot agents were shut down after abandoning English to invent their own “creepy, secret language”, DATA Party reframes technological failure as a site of liberation. Through agentic AI, network alerts, scripts, and adult webcam archives, the artists explore “incoherence” as a powerful political tool for resisting oppressive digital logic. The work disrupts the rigid, normative, parameters of modern technology, opening space for ambiguity, difference, and queer ways of being.
Photo Credit: Mark Ramos
