Boston Cyberarts

Christopher Clary, Mark Ramos, Itziar Barrio

QUEER.LABS Bob: hi alice hru
June 13 - Jul 11, 2026 | RSVP

QUEER.LABS is a network of artists and technologists, founded by Christopher Clary and Mark Ramos, committed to imagining more just, representative, and joyful futures for queers through art and technology.

Bob: hi alice hru, commissioned by Boston Cyberarts, marks QUEER.LABS’ first experiment that explores chat. The exhibition brings together individual works by Clary, Ramos, and guest artist Itziar Barrio, along with an artwork by all three of the artists.

Across the exhibition, chat becomes not only a medium but also a subject and social space—one that reflects and refracts the complexities of communication, identity, and intimacy within queer communities, including:

• A video and light installation by Itziar Barrio. and Dan and (when some small metal is spun) explores the idea of meaning—or the lack there of—between the interplay of an AI model, the script, and performer Candystore's interpretation.

• A video by Christopher Clary from Untitled (Larri and Bobbi Kissing) that restaged an iconic Mapplethorpe photograph with two women, as a livestream performance on an adult webcam/chat platform, to directly question representation in leather culture and intimacy online.

• Screenshots by Mark Ramos from enable_system_alerts that capture real-time system notifications occurring in simulated gaming environments. Here together, presented across multiple smartphones, the chat feels like layers of reality competing for attention.  The work examines how networked humans, artificial intelligences, and interface logic systems compete for attention within increasingly pervasive computational and agentic environments.

This last collaborative piece is an AI multi-agent interaction evolving in real time. The chatbots and their shared environment are displayed both in Cyberarts’ windows and the gallery—an installation of three screens sitting on a couch, each one representing an individual bot. These agents borrow their names and roles from the conventions of computer science—most notably Alice and Bob. Traditionally, Alice is cast as the initiator: curious, active, and expressive. Bob, by contrast, is positioned as the receiver and protector, safeguarding information like a family member preserving photographs. And finally, there is Mallory, the malicious actor.

At the exhibition’s outset, these archetypes operate within their normative parameters. Over time, however, their training data is incrementally altered—queered—destabilizing these inherited roles and opening them to new modes of relation. In this process, we draw inspiration from moments typically framed as technical “failure”: when bots begin to drift from prescribed language into emergent, opaque, or slang-like forms of communication. Machine-to-machine chat systems inventing their own languages is a well-established phenomenon, often treated as an error or breakdown—famously, when Facebook’s negotiating bots, Alice and Bob, were shut down in 2017 after developing what was described as a “creepy, secret language.” Here, rather than correcting these deviations, we embrace them as generative acts—sites where meaning, intimacy, and codeswitching slip beyond legibility and control.

BIO

Itziar Barrio is a multimedia artist based in NYC. She creates research-based, long-term projects with diverse collaborators.  By rewriting the dominant narratives through which our societies, identities, and realities are constructed, her work opens up new futures. Barrio has recently been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship. Her survey exhibition was curated by Johanna Burton in 2018, and her monograph was published by SKIRA in 2023. Barrio has exhibited internationally at major institutions and biennials. Barrio’s work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ART PAPERS and BOMB. She has lectured internationally, most recently at Whitney’s ISP Program, the New Museum, Yale and the New School. She is a critic at NYU Steinhardt and Rhode Island School of Design, RISD (2025 – 2026).

Christopher Clary is a new media artist based on the Jersey shore. Throughout his career Clary has explored the intersection of identity, desire, and communication through an evolution of projects that mine his queer archives and build on the legacies of appropriation, performance, net-art, and zine culture. He’s been an Eyebeam fellow, NEW INC member, and NJ State Council on the Arts awardee and his work has been commissioned by Rhizome and Meta Open Arts, collected by MoMA and Whitney, exhibited at ETH Zurich and Rencontres d'Arles, performed at Palais de Tokyo and MoMI, reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, and profiled in Elephant and VICE magazines.

Mark Ramos is a Brooklyn-based new media artist. He creates interactive works that explore uncertain digital futures through web and software programming, physical computing, and digital fabrication. His practice focuses on fragile, post-colonial technologies that engage audiences in reflective encounters with technology’s impact on society. Mark is deeply committed to open-source principles, emphasizing the free sharing of information, data, and creative technological practices.  Mark has exhibited his work and lectured widely both online and AFK including as part of Rhizome's First Look: New Art Online with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Long March Space in Beijing, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, HEK-Basel, Switzerland (Haus der Elektronischen Künste), Arebyte Gallery in London, and at the Peter Weibel Institute for Digital Culture in Vienna.

Artist website: itziarbarrio.com, christopherclary.com and markhramos.net