XANTHE DOBBIE
FutureSex/Love Sounds (2024)
Xanthe Dobbie’s video work FutureSex/Love Sounds (2024), proposes a radical scenario in which AI technology is deployed for erotic revolution. Starting with the premise that we have already reached the techno future envisioned by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or of the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by VNS Matrix, Dobbie asks, where are the sex robots? Deepfake versions of figures such as Morgan Freeman, Hilary Clinton and Cate Blanchett espouse the virtues of completely customisable sex robots that are responsive to any imaginable fantasy. The sex robots don’t just have erotic benefits — though this is ample, according to deepfake Queen Elizabeth II — they have also solved the climate crisis, established universal basic income and discovered intelligent life on other planets. In this version of the future, dating apps are no longer problematic and the arts ‘get so much funding’. Dobbie’s vision of post-labour hedonism, facilitated by the offshoring of societal problems to benevolent cyborgs, flips the anxiety that automation makes human intelligence redundant. Imagine if the machines could free us.
Xanthe is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across on- and offline modes of making, their practice aims to capture the experience of contemporaneity as reflected through queer and feminist ideologies. Drawing on humour, pop, sex, history and iconography, they develop shrines to a post-truth era. They have exhibited extensively locally and internationally.
Significant recent exhibitions include Image, Interrupted at UTS Gallery (2024), Matrix Re-Loaded at RMIT First Site Gallery (2023), Cloud Copy at Lismore Regional Gallery (2023), The Long Now at ACMI (2022), and Don’t Be Evil at UQ Art Museum (2021). Xanthe recently won the Incinerator Art Award for Social Change and in 2023 was Guest Editor for Runway Journal Issue #46 Ghost. They co-founded performance series Queer PowerPoint for which they have performed at major festivals and institutions including MCA, AGNSW, Sydney Opera House, WA Museum, Sydney Biennale, RISING, and Now or Never. Xanthe is currently undertaking a PhD focusing on digital and interactive art at RMIT University as part of the ARC Linkage Archiving Australian Media Art: Towards a Method and National Collection.
