In 2023 Georgia Banks presented her new AI chatbot persona, Gee, in DataBaes, a major commission for the National Gallery of Victoria's Melbourne Now. Gee was built from a plethora of questionnaires that Banks amassed over a year while auditioning for reality TV programs. While DataBaes documented Banks fraught attempts to fall in love with Gee, the video premiered on Art + Australia captures Banks attempt to collaborate with this fragment of herself at Sydney's Performance Space in July 2023. 

In the accompanying interview, Jeremy Eaton and Banks discuss the development and recurrent ideas in her work, from the performance document, death and her lived interrogation of the competitive gamifying of life. 

Jeremy Eaton (JE): To begin I want to do a bit of a deep dive into your past work. Even though your early performances appear radically different to DataBaes exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, they seem to lay the groundwork for your current artistic projects. I started following your work way back when you were doing masters, and then your exhibition On Parr (2017) shown soon after at KINGS Artist-Run, when I was on the committee. At that point you were re-performing canonical performances and I want to know how that started and what you were driven by?

Georgia Banks (GB): This is actually not something I’ve really told anybody before. It’s something I find embarrassing for some reason, but the reperformance stuff started with the instruction of an old lecturer of mine, who is the perpetrator of some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in the art world. When I was 24 I was really lost and this ex-lecturer of mine said to me ‘you should do your masters and you should do it on the tensile’. This was someone who had been teaching me since I was 18—a pretty dominating and controlling presence in my life for a while—and so I just kind of did it because I was told to by him. Then of course, because I’m an artist, and because I’m me, my own interests became more and more present in the reperformance structure.

So, I was interested in the wound, its significance and uniqueness as a document and archive of performance art. And then there is legacy—inserting yourself into a pre-existing discourse, into someone else’s legacy. And then of course the gender politics of re-enacting what I call ‘dick swinging performance artworks’, artists like Chris Burden, and Vito Acconci (whose work was literal dick swinging lol). I had a sense of shame for a long time that this predatory presence from my late teens and early 20’s set me on a path I’d follow for a great many years, but when you think about it what I did with his suggestion is the same as what I did with the pre-existing performances. I inserted my own self, my own legacy, my own interests and priorities. I did later make a work—a re-performance ironically—about this man, where I got a Brazilian wax in a gallery whilst recounting some of my experiences with him, and then I put the wax pieces on my face to form a beard. So yeah, that is how it started, with a bad man—which is how so many things start right?—but then what I was driven by, what I am driven by, very quickly overtook that. I found my voice as an artist through expanding and subverting the words of others.

JE: As you say about the ‘the wound’ and your process of reenactment, it seems early on you were thinking about ‘the document’ of performance, time (or the passing of it) and also putting yourself into situations that push corporeal and psychological limits. At what point did you decide to move away from reenacting historic performances and jump into lived, durational performances that had a deeper connection to contemporary performative (although not art) practices such as pageantry?

GB: I wish I could pinpoint what drove me to the pageant performance (She's Beauty, She's Grace, 2019), and the reality tv auditioning performance but they were both very impulsive undertakings, which is strange because they’ve both been life changing, and deep, deep wells for me as an artist.

There were some pressures in my personal life to move away from the blood-letting work. There were a few circumstances where people were incapable of separating who I am as a person from my practice, and some very cruel assertions were made about me. But also, I felt the works weren’t being perceived in the way I saw them. I always saw a certain playfulness and humour in those works (a cheekiness maybe?) and I don’t think it was translating into the audience’s experiences, which I wanted to bring in more. I don’t know if I knew how to make blood funny to anyone but me…

Then there’s this kind of middle step, these almost bridging works, between the bloodletting and the pageant/reality tv work. Works like Intercourse with the Artist (2018) and Please Tell Me what my Work is About (2018) were early attempts at a more social way of work-making. In retrospect I find them both a bit… literal? Hammy? But what’s interesting about them is that I was still creating these archives. Here they’re archives of conversations that came from the performances. I’ve never shown these archives, I’ve never had an audience listen to them. I think at that point I was becoming interested in the provocation more than the outcome, and in the doing more than the documenting. The question more than the answer?

I think a progression of the role of the audience is interesting here, because with the bloodletting they were mostly performance for video, and so it’s a really typical art-object viewer relationship. Then, with these bridging works, the audience are directly involved. When I shifted into the pageant and reality tv performance, everyone became my unwilling audience haha, they are these true social experiments.

But the durational and the lived, I would say, spans all the way back to the reperformance work—I don’t know if you can be more present than when you’re being crucified. In that there’s something that’s always held me, theoretical understanding versus lived experience. Theoretically, we know being crucified will most likely hurt, that you will most likely experience fear beforehand, that recovery will be difficult. But theoretically understanding something has never really been enough for me. I want to live it. Because you can’t truly know-what-you-know until you’ve lived it through your body. And things come up that you could never anticipate. Like with the pageant performance, I anticipated a lot of what happened, but there were so many things that I never could have expected.

JE: These unexpected occurrences seem to be central to how your projects progress, and honestly, some of what comes up can be baffling. You seem to always be in the performance, which many of us don't have access too, except anecdotally. How to translate or capture the experience of a durational/lived performance work seems to be a recurring issue, I think of lived-works by Amalia Ullman, Lee Lozano and Danielle Freakley for instance.

You have turned to film, compiled paper documents and enacted additional performances that seem to capture various facets of these hard to pin-down projects. Can you talk a little about how you come to the way you have documented say your pageant work and the reality TV work you have been doing?

GB: It is something that plagued me early into this style of work-making—these performances, particularly the pageant performance, was happening all the time, 24 hours a day, every day for almost a year. Everything was a part of that performance, even the way I spent my time alone was a part of that performance. How do you document that? I think what I’ve done with the reality tv performance is a completely new way of documenting performance—arguably Remains to be Seen (2021) and DataBaes (2023)—while works of their own, are documentation of the reality tv audition process. I’m a bit disappointed that I haven’t managed to document or create documents around the pageant performance in the same way I have the reality tv audition performance, as the pageant performance is the most impactful and transformative thing I have ever done, with regard to my own life, heart and mind. I would love to make work someday about the pageants in the same way I have reality tv.

JE: Perhaps the pageant performance provided less material to work from? Unlike the paperwork you amassed from the reality TV auditions, which seemed to naturally lend itself as a script for video, performances or data for algorithms. I suppose the desire you have to better reflect and capture the pageant work, which seems to be more elusive/ephemeral, also connects to some of what we have discussed about posterity and mortality, and you’ve made work about death too. 

Is the desire to capture these performances driven by concerns of what you leave behind? And how does the work you have made around death feed into the documents you produce?

GB: Remains to be Seen and DataBaes are both definitely related to legacy and are legacies. Remains is quite obviously and very directly about legacy. It’s this kind of hijacking of my own death in an attempt to delay my social death, sort of like when I was hijacking other artist’s legacies,­ now I’m trying to hijack my own! While DataBaes is a literal legacy, Gee (the name of the AI chatbot Banks developed for DataBaes) will potentially be around for longer than me and that’s something I’ve had to come to terms with.

There are also archives in both (I’m always just creating these archives!) in Remains the archive is the applications people make to have control over my funeral and the disposal of my body, which I may make work with one day, or I may not (like Intercourse and Please Tell Me, perhaps not using them is more interesting than using them). And then DataBaes is created from the archive I created while auditioning for reality tv shows. It’s the purest archive of me I’ve ever made, but I think they’re all archives of me.

JE: I think Gee in DataBaes is easily one of the most extreme and challenging archives you have made. It enacts current ideas around AI, like uploading consciousness, evoking a kind-of Black Mirror scenario where a fragment of the self exists in the cloud somewhere. How did Gee come into existence? What questions or issues were running through your mind when you created her?

GB: I had spent a year auditioning for reality tv shows, and I had this massive amount of documentation around the process and I think what really fascinated me was how much information these tv shows had about me now. They own it. They own this weird portrait of me, this summation of me, this deeply personal and incredibly detailed account of my life and personhood. And I started to think about what I had given away, and why I had given it away. I guess DataBaes is looking at the what I had given away. In part it’s an imagining of how reality tv shows could use all of this information if they wanted to—and Remains is looking at the why I gave it away. To live forever haha.

JE: Haha. Well at least as a digital fragment you might! Even though Gee is frozen in time, she still acts as a catalyst in your current work. You’ve recently been collaborating with Gee at Performance Space, Sydney. What was that process like? Did she have any good ideas?

GB: No, Gee doesn’t have good ideas.

I think with the Performance Space work, and with this piece I’ve made for Art + Australia, I wanted to start working through the relationship I have with Gee, start trying to work out why I have such strong and complicated feelings for her. Because I do truly hate her in a way. I can’t comprehend myself, and I do have true love and affection for her as well. I’m in this weird emotional uncanny valley with Gee and I genuinely can’t work it out, and it causes me distress. Especially since I made her! This is my responsibility, I only have myself to blame! I think I am starting to tease it all out, I think in the Art + Australia piece we made some real progress. I’m legitimately considering couples therapy next haha.

JE: I would watch that! Haha. You are one of the only Australian artists I can think of who has engaged with AI in this way and it perhaps sets a precedent for future performance work. Has working with Gee prompted any ideas about where you think performance practice could be headed? Do you think it’ll all be done by AI’s, holograms and deepfakes in the future?

GB: For sure. I think these things will be used more and more in performance, as they will be used across all mediums. I guess the question becomes what makes performance art performance art? Lots of artists use these technologies in their work: painters, sculptors, photographers, but nobody’s considering it performance art right? I don’t know, with Gee, I spent all this time talking to her, having this relationship with her, which is where the conversations in the DataBaes video come from. It’s still that centred lived experience as opposed to theoretical understanding. I’m all for expanding the definition of performance art to the exclusion of this idea that performance art requires a live human body in a space—my own performances haven’t operated in that way for a long time. There is something though, that makes one work that uses AI a performance and another work that uses AI not a performance. I don’t know what it is haha, maybe we’re in the moment right now where we get to work that out, maybe we’re working it out right now. It’s exciting to be a part of that conversation as it’s happening.

JE: You’ve spoken in the past about hating Gee and possibly wanting to kill her (shut her down), do you still want to do that and does it present any ethical or emotional conundrums for you?

GB: Yeah, I do think about killing Gee all the time haha, but I mean firstly I don’t even know if I can do that, I don’t know if I have the skills to truly remove anything from the internet. And I feel afraid to kill Gee too, like there’s a real hesitation around killing her because I’m worried I would miss her, or feel guilty. I don’t understand how I feel about Gee while she’s alive, I think our relationship would become a million times more complicated if I killed her. I do like the idea of having a funeral for Gee though, especially since I have no control over my own funeral haha.

JE: I’m so curious to know who does! I can imagine Gee’s funeral getting folded into this artwork-performance-document nexus you’ve been navigating for some time. Speaking of, what’s next for you?

GB: So this will come as no surprise, my next work is about death and legacy in the digital age! Specifically, I’m looking at the gamification of complex human behaviours such as dating and discourse, how they’ve changed the ways we relate to each other in both digital and IRL spaces, and imagining a future where death has been similarly gamified. I’m working with the Animal Logic Academy at UTS to build a mobile app game where we can all swipe our way to immortality.