I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess is a project by female art collective Ljubavnice (‘mistresses’) consisting of six young artists, who start the creation of their seventh member – an artificial identity.

001 Photo of the sun found on the Internet
002 I wonder what she’s doing when she’s doing nothing
003 I’m thinking about her independence
004 We’re talking about her name (she’ll be called THE SEVENTH)…

THE SEVENTH is currently our conceptual construction that we discover seeking and producing information about her.

The materials that Ljubavnice gathers through the research form her fragile identity that will gradually attempt to communicate with the surroundings of the real and the virtual world. Her paradigm is the establishment of the ability to react independently to new situations. We live in a time in which technology changes the understanding of living to date and allows us to achieve the impossible. And this is the time in which our ecosystem and our planet are collapsing, changing and vanishing before our eyes. Social changes are taking place in line with climate change, there is more and more of the unstable, of the unreal.

A look into the future shows a climatic catastrophe and journeys in space constantly changing the position of us as subject in the world and at the same time testing out whether we are really the most intelligent species or just a transitional level. The human body is already changing so as to adjust to what is at hand. This opens up a space for thinking and work, for new possibilities. Artificial identities are part of our virtual reality and their existence in capitalist society is extremely complex. Accordingly, we wonder if we can create artificial life that will be interested in the forms outside the political platform where artificial intelligences often generate the repetitive patterns of consumerism. What can we offer it? What kind of archive can we create for it?

The chief application of artificial networks is manifested in the search for dependence among data that are not in an exclusively linear relationship and yet can be united into a single complex input group.

The collective called Ljubavnice (mistresses), composed of six individuals, this time has collected data so as in the future to be able to form the Seventh Mistress. She is stirring. Stirring and being transformed. Coming into being differently each time, she is the possible combination of a thousand combinations. She is, is never the past.

She is the future, imminently and now.

The residency and commission is part of KONTEJNER’s upcoming festival Extravagant Bodies – a triennial international art festival which deals with social demarcations of normal and pathological, be they concerned with corporeality, appearance, behaviour, sexuality or life style. This year’s edition is entitled Extravagant Love: an international exhibition, performances, workshops, talks with artists and a conference bring together artists, researchers and scientists who are re-examining, deconstructing and re-constructing what it means to love, whom we can love and how to express that love.