The Zizi Show

For one evening only, in its North American debut, THE ZIZI SHOW!  A unique, interactive A.I. Drag Show, presented on a giant, 14 x 26 foot screen in Anvil Centre Ballroom….open to the street for all to share. 

UK Artist Jake Elwes has created The Zizi Project and The Zizi Show, an interactive, deepfake, virtual cabaret, that welcomes drop-in audiences. Drag performers, filtered through AI, are chosen by the audience to perform captivating moments of deepfake chaos and imperfection; queering the data.   Zizi explores what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about A.I.

The idea came about through a collaboration between artist Jake Elwes and one of London’s top drag queens – Me the Drag Queen.  Elwes wondered how the world of A.I and art could collide with the world of live drag cabaret acts. For a few years Elwes had been exploring the concept of queering artificial intelligence to tackle bias.  He did this by injecting images of drag kings, drag queens and drag things into training datasets to shift the neural network into a space of otherness, a queer space. Working together with the Edinburgh Futures Institute they created artificial intelligence as a performance tool; exploring how lip-syncs and movement could be incorporated into computational systems.  The AI was trained on video footage of thirteen well-known drag performers, filmed at a London cabaret venue during the Covid-19 lockdown.  

The Zizi Show is a series of constantly shifting faces and bodies where lipstick, lashes, liner and bodies break down in an unpredictable, uncontrollable and fabulous way.