Girlroom exhibition by Samiha Meem (2024)

"to be a girl is to be a computer." OG tumblr cool girl and design research45 samiha meem* fed girlcoded tumblr archives through LLMs (before they were known to be environmentally problematic!!), generating 30,000 individual still images to be spilled out onto the floor, to create a series of horror film shorts which were to be projected, then flattened into black-and-white dithered drawings, and manually translated to textile, punctuating a mock-bedroom complete with a canopied bed, light table desk, clothing racks, projection mirrors, all contained like miles of curtains. equally soft and horrible.

synthesizes the the girlhood ethos of the times and the history and politcs by which autospace is manufactured — the history of women's labor in computation, from the textile loom to the algorithm, which has runs through the hands of brown women in the global south (see A Room of One's Own)

*in working together for hours and days and months on the physical making of this project, i've have the capital-p Privilege of being in commune with Such a Great Mind. beyond the provisions of this temporary third-space, samiha is an amazing educator and psuedo-sister and role model