The Backyard of Weird Creatures

The Backyard of Weird Creatures is an artistic project that investigates the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI), performance, and aesthetics, within the field of cyberformance. Through a great curiosity of the imperfections found in machine-made images, this piece explores how, rather than erasing these imperfections, one can use them as the operating centre of a creative process against the classics. Classical aesthetics was once dominated by the pursuit of beauty, often defined through symmetry, harmony, and order. However, contemporary thought has long since expanded to include other affective dimensions of experience, such as the tragic, the grotesque, the comic, and the ugly. This expansion allows for a richer understanding of artistic value and experience. The Backyard of Weird Creatures inserts itself into this lineage by foregrounding the ugly and the strange, seeking not to correct AI outputs, but to reveal their intrinsic expressive force. The work also enters a conversation about hybridity and the dissolution of binary categories. Several dualities are questioned throughout the creative process: human versus machine, beautiful versus ugly, real versus virtual, and natural versus artificial. Rather than reinforcing these oppositions, the project seeks to blur them, crafting a hybrid space where distinctions collapse. It is in this blurred space that the performance unfolds: one that cannot be easily reduced to a single category or aesthetic judgment. From a performative perspective, the project engages deeply with the notion of theatricality beyond the traditional stage. It asks what it means to perform within cyberspace, in environments shaped by code, algorithms, and synthetic visuals. This inquiry includes an awareness of the material and economic conditions that underlie digital performance, recognizing that the virtual is never entirely immaterial. The expansion of the body into digital realms becomes both a conceptual and visual strategy, challenging what presence, identity, and embodiment mean in technologically mediated spaces. Rather than offering a finished answer, the project uses provocation as a method. It invites audiences to confront unsettling imagery, fragmented narratives, and non-human aesthetics. The performance becomes an open field for experimentation, a space to feel disoriented and intrigued at the same time. AI is not a tool of control, but a collaborator in generating chaos, nonsense, and surprise. By situating this exploration within the context of cyberformance, the project proposes new modes of presence, collaboration, and dramaturgy. It creates a liminal space, both digital and emotional, where human and machine co-produce a world populated by strange, misshapen, and oddly compelling creatures. These creatures are not metaphors for malfunction, but symbols of a new aesthetic regime: one that values difference, failure, and weirdness as forms of beauty in their own right.