Your AI doesn't know what to do with you. And neither did the category.

"Twink death" names what happens when a queer body ages out of a youthful archetype — an archetype racialized white. Its eroticism gets flagged by content moderation as proximate to childhood. But the data image doesn't age anyway. This performance-lecture follows one impossible twink through the machine: AI refusals, glitch-bodies that might be trans, SORA-generated trad tops, and the question of what you mourn when the self you lost never quite existed.

Shaka McGlotten runs their own old images through generative tools live. The failures are the data. The talk is part of a larger project on "the computational hex," which examines how algorithms seduce, bewitch, and occasionally himboify us all.

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Chair of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Purchase College–SUNY. An anthropologist and artist, they work at the intersection of Black study, queer and trans theory, and computational media, with a focus on “messy” networked intimacies and algorithmic hexes. They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life and Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality, and co‑editor of Black Genders and Sexualities, Zombies and Sexuality, and the forthcoming Postdigital Intimacies. Their projects Ima Put a Computational Hex on You and Black Data: Against the Hegemony of the Transparent are supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Data & Society.

Sponsored by the art department and the Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies program. Free and open to the public.