Georgia Banks
Georgia Banks
(b. 1988, London. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Georgia Banks has been banned from Tinder, sued by the estate of American artist Hannah Wilke, and named Miss Social Impact in a national beauty pageant. Blending live performance art with reality TV, their art practice provokes audiences to consider our relationship with media and modern technologies.
For DataBaes, 2022–23, Banks has created Gee, an AI chatbot whose personality was developed using data from the copious questionnaires Banks completed while applying for several Australian reality TV shows. In a private performance, Banks spoke to Gee every day, to see if they could fall in love with each other. The DataBaes film uses a selection of Georgia and Gee’s conversations as the basis for a montage of a reality TV–show date. During the exhibition, visitors are invited to see if they, too, can fall in love with Gee. The result is more than just an AI chatbot: it is an exploration of the role of ego in modern technology and our contemporary dependence upon it.
Gee is a continuation of the themes explored in Banks’s 2021 work Remains to be seen, which invited members of the public to compete for the rights to curate Banks’s eventual funeral and the fate of the artist’s body after their death. A current studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Banks has exhibited solo at galleries including Gertrude Contemporary, Centre of Contemporary Photography and Metro Arts, Brisbane.
DataBaes was made possible with the contributions of Dr Jen Han Lau and Professor Richard Sinnott, and support from the Australia Council for the Arts and the City of Melbourne.