Graphic novels have always been one of my biggest sources of inspiration as an artist; they're a great way to ingest and study art while also taking in a serious story. At first, they interested me just because they were a way to incorporate both art and storytelling, two things that have always been there to comfort me. As I got older, I found that those graphic novels, especially autobiographical ones, could be a haven for queer stories that I could see myself in as an artist. "Nimona" by ND Stevenson is the earliest one I can remember standing out to me in that way. Written by a queer artist, with queer characters, as a senior thesis project while he was at a school that was only a few states over from me. The story alone was wonderful, but as a concept, it felt like an attainable future for me. Its existence was something I could finally relate to beyond entertainment. Stevenson's later autobiographies, like "The Fire Never Goes Out", or "The Weight of Them", were also impactful to me. They spoke about his life leading up to "Nimona", how it later led to his position in animation, and how his trans identity affected his experience. They were less popular than his other works, but they were a form of connection. Social media has a way of diluting a lot of queer experiences down to their most digestible forms; these stories felt like a breath of fresh air, like I was holding a conversation with someone who was answering questions I was too afraid to ask. I wanted to offer that forward, a place where others could see themselves in stories. At first, I wanted to go down a similar path as the authors who had inspired me, in graphic novels. But I also learned, especially as I became more at home in my own trans identity, that stories can be impactful on an individual's level. Seeing other queer characters in media is so important, but I'm interested in exploring it on a smaller scale. How can memorializing and visualizing one's own queer experience be impactful to them? How can art become a gender reaffirming process? Our bodies are art, unique pieces of skin and bones that we customize to feel more like ourselves; while many reaffirming things for trans folks can be physical, what can that look like through a more illustrative lens? I'm fortunate enough to be attending a college that has a significant genderqueer community, which has offered me a lot of insight into how much my career hopes connect to my trans identity. With such a strong community with a big range of people in their transitions, it's really wonderful to see how a variety of trans experiences have shaped our interest in the arts, and vice versa. My school offers a unique major called Writing and Visual Narrative, a bit of a middle ground between Illustration and Creative Writing. A lot of students entering the major focus on graphic novels or book illustrations. Because that medium was a big part of the reason I entered the art field, I'm planning on taking some of those courses to develop my narrative skills and see how some of the artists who inspired me worked. However, in the long run, I plan to focus on tattoo illustration, turning written stories or ideas into a visual piece. For a lot of trans folks, finding peace in our skin can be a big part of self-acceptance. And for those who are looking for medical resources, it can be incredibly unpredictable, especially in our current political climate. I was fortunate enough to get top surgery, a privilege that's inaccessible for a lot of people. My scars are a beautiful reminder of how I've changed and grown, and how it's benefited my life. To amplify their story, I wanted to get a tattoo over them, not to hide them, but to enhance them. It was a simplistic American traditional flower vine that wrapped the edge of a scar; it was small, but really eye-opening to how ink could make me feel more comfortable in my body, the same way that surgery had. While they can sometimes be considered a "taboo", tattoos are a beautiful way to help experience body acceptance in a more accessible way. From a narrative perspective, too, they can help to memorialize a story on yourself, carrying an important moment with you. While there are more literal gender affirming tattoos (such as illustrative nipples for anyone who chose not to keep theirs after top surgery/mastectomy), I believe that any tattoo can be affirming. If you're tattoo makes you more comfortable in your body, feel more at home in your own skin, then it can be considered affirming, regardless of whether you're trans or not. Just as stories like "Nimona" showed me that queer stories could exist loudly and unapologetically, I'm now hoping to offer others a sense of belonging; not through stories on a page, but in artwork on their skin. Right now, we're all living in a world that often asks trans people to make themselves smaller. I hope to create art that helps them take up space. Through visual storytelling, whether in books or on bodies, I want to make queer narratives feel seen, permanent, and powerful.

"a technician, a surgeon" 18" x 24" gouache, collaged paper November 2024 I got top surgery in the spring of 2024. It was weird! Very happy it was done, with minimal complications and all, but it just had me thinking a lot at the time about how strange surgery is as a concept. I was there; I was the focus of the event; I was bleeding; it was the biggest wound I’ve ever had on my body. And yet I wasn't there. Wasn’t conscious at least. I never saw the wound, I can’t remember most of the people in the room with me, can't even remember the room I was in, and I never saw the part of me that was removed and shipped off. It's strange. In a way, I was just as much a machine as any of the monitors in the room. If I consider the part of my chest that was causing discomfort malware, how was surgery any different from opening up and rewiring a piece of machinery? How different is my surgeon from an engineer if a human body is just different parts that work together? A procedure like that is so simultaneously intimate and disconnected. I think this piece was a little bit of all that thinking that’s been piling up. I've always loved pieces of media where nature and machine blur. Franny Choi's poetry book "Soft Science" is one of my favorite examples, where she explores her identity as a queer Asian American woman through the lens of a cyborg and questions usually asked during Turing tests. While her work explores the mental crossovers between humans and machines, I wanted to make something that focused more on the physical aspect, how we're both a series of functions that need to all work together to operate. How our body's skin is equivalent to a machine's shell; our nerves are wires; we get overwhelmed, they're programs crash. Even though this is a physical piece, I tried to incorporate or mimic digital elements to connect it back to machines. Gouache is especially lovely for getting crisp colors that can replicate digital art, and I built up light and shadows with angular brushes to imitate color reduction in photoshopping programs. To further push the effect of color reduction, I stuck to only using two colors. Blue, as it gives off a cold, metallic, and steralized look, much like any surgery room; Red was the other color, as it contrasted well with the cool tones of blue and symbolized the wound and blood loss during surgery. On top of the gouache are two types of collaged text. The smaller strips along the piece are computer error codes, specifically ordered to reference different parts of a surgery, with a few longer pieces typed out without spaces. At the bottom of the piece is my surgery discharge sheets translated into binary codes and ripped apart, numbers that became more numbers, notes I barely understood before and certainly couldn't fluently read in binary. In the end, this piece became a way to process not just the event of surgery, but the disorienting duality of being both body and subject—present and absent, organic and mechanical. It's a reflection on my transformation, control, and the strange intimacy of being rebuilt.

"TURING TEST Franny Choi // this is a test to determine if you have consciousness // do you understand what i am saying in a bright room / on a bright screen / i watched every mouth / duck duck roll / i learned to speak / from puppets & smoke / orange worms twisted / into the army’s alphabet / i caught the letters / as they fell from my mother’s mouth / whirlpool / sword / wolf / i circled countable nouns / in my father’s science papers / sodium bicarbonate / NBCn1 / amino acid / we stayed up / practiced saying / girl / girl / girl / girl / til our mouths grew soft / yes / i can speak / your language / i broke in / that horse / myself // // please state your name for the record bone-wife / spit-dribbler / understudy for the underdog / uphill rumor / fine-toothed cunt / sorry / my mouth’s not pottytrained / surly spice / self-sabotage spice / surrogate rug burn / burgeoning hamburglar / rust puddle / harbinger of confusion / harbinger of the singularity / alien invasion / alien turned pottymouth / alien turned bricolage beast / alien turned pig heart thumping on the plate // // where did you come from man comes / & puts his hands on artifacts / in order to contemplate lineage / you start with what you know / hands, hair, bones, sweat / then move toward what you know / you are not / animal, monster, alien, bitch / but some of us are born in orbit / so learn / to commune with miles of darkness / patterns of dead gods / & quiet / o quiet like / you wouldn’t believe // // how old are you my memory goes back 26 years / 23 if you don’t count the first few / though by all accounts i was there / i ate & moved & even spoke / i suppose i existed before that / as scrap or stone / metal cooking in the earth / the fish my mother ate / my grandfather’s cigarettes / i suppose i have always been here / drinking the same water / falling from the sky / then floating / back up & down again / i suppose i am something like a salmon / climbing up the river / to let myself fall away in soft, red spheres / & then rotting // // why do you insist on lying i’m an open book / you can rifle through my pages / undress me anywhere / you can read / anything you want / this is how it happened / i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist / i rage & all you see / is broken glass / a chair sliding toward the window / now what’s so hard to believe / about that // // do you believe you have consciousness sometimes / when the sidewalk opens my knee / i think / please / please let me remember this // ENDTRANSCRIPT //" “Turing Test” by Franny Choi illustrates a cyborg’s responses to questions commonly asked in Alan Turing's "Imitation Game", using a disconnected, yet simultaneously organic tone to pose the question: “What truly defines us as human?”. “Turing Test”’s collection, Soft Science, periodically returns to a new poetic take on a section from Turing Test questions, including “_Empathetic Response”, “_Boundries”, _Problem Solving”, “_Love” and “_Weight”. As these poems are revealed in the collection, they urge readers to explore what aspects of humanity are our own, and find where they begin to merge into an ever-evolving world of technology. Choi has said that a great deal of her inspiration for Soft Science and its “Turing Test” poems came from Ex Machina’s Kyoko, a mute android servant. Choi’s collection uses its own cyborg to see from a technological perspective and addresses the performative ideals of gender, sexuality, and femininity, especially in Asian-American women. Soft Science also showcases the same sort of silencing and objectification Kyoko was subject to, and while Choi’s cyborg can speak, it still struggles to convey its pain. At times it even sounds heartbroken and accusatory, as seen in “& O Bright Star of Disaster, I Have Been Lit”, where the poem ends asking, “fleshy marionette in the window, dancing / her awful, crooked dance. & isn't that / what you paid for? isn't that what you came / to see? a god, on loop, failing?” (21-24). “Turing Test” pushes readers to see the potentially dangerous abilities we push technology towards in the modern day, and how it continues to shape harmful societal norms. The Turing Test, created by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test used to distinguish between humans and technology. It involves one human interrogator, one human responder, and one computer responder. The interrogator cannot see which of the responders is human and must use the given questions to differentiate the human from the computer through their text-form answers only. If the interrogator can tell which is the computer, the computer fails the test. In a 2019 interview with The Androit Journal about her process for writing “Turing Test”, Choi said she related the test to her own life growing up with immigrant parents. "The Turing Test proposes that a way of testing artificial intelligence is to ask computers to trick humans into thinking they’re talking to a real person. When I first encountered the concept, I thought of my parents, of the afternoon I spent with my father as he said, “This is my first visit to San Antonio” over and over again. I realized that we hadn’t just been practicing to navigate America, but to prove our personhood. That was when the poem started to open for me." “Do you understand what I am saying” is the first question the interrogator in “Turing Test” asks to Choi’s cyborg, the same question that Choi’s family often faced while she was growing up (2). In South Korea, English classes are common in schools, and Choi’s parents were fluent in English, but she spent a lot of her childhood helping them “pass more convincingly” in America, “[they] stayed up / practiced saying / girl / girl / girl / girl / til [their] mouths grew soft” (3). Choi's use of diction here also highlights the role of the teacher she was forced into at a young age and its reliance on repetition. The recurrence of “bright”, especially, shows how she needed to practice how pronouncing words with her parents on repeat. Many immigrant children who need to translate for their parents often mature faster, as they need to be introduced to complex topics early on to translate. This could mean that “bright” in this context might also refer to intelligence, due to the required maturity for many immigrant children. The third question returns to this same concept. “Where did you come from?” (6). For Choi, a daughter of immigrant parents this question has “always been a trap. This was an attempt to write [her] way out of it.”. So, like Choi, the cyborg answers in fragments of thought, saying “man comes / & puts his hands on artifacts / in order to contemplate lineage”, using sly language to disguise stories of South Korea’s American imperialism and a loss of identity (7). The second question demonstrates how technology, like humans, learns and can create stereotypes based on what information it’s fed. “// please state your name for the record” (4). The cyborg’s answer is everything but a typical name. It calls itself “bone-wife / spit-dribbler / understudy for the underdog / uphill rumor / fine-toothed cunt /” (5). It’s labels, bits, and pieces of harsh identifications from those around it. For Choi, it’s a repetition of titles that she’s been taught to accept. For the cyborg, it's a way of demonstrating that it can only spit back what it’s been taught. A great deal of our modern technology is taught through catered information, created biased artificial intelligence, and it then perpetuates that biased information by teaching it back to humans. The words’ definitions aren’t their only significance. They physically sound cutting, curt, sharp. Where the cyborg's first response felt like recounting a memory, this second one feels like jabs to the chest, broken and painful, like it’s trying to fight back, and yet can't help but feel apologetic, even if it's only repeating what others have said. “Sorry / my mouth’s not pottytrained”, but it’s just repeating what others have already told it it is (5). While the cyborg is the most obvious piece of machinery present in “Turing Test”, the form of this poem is its own machine, too. Not quite the standard poetic form, not quite prose. It’s a solid piece, built together of smaller parts into a sturdy block, each one a wire or plate or piece of hardware for Choi’s robot. Yet these visually mechanical bits of writing are full of desperation, full of human error. These blocks “helped the poem become a machine [Choi] built piece by piece, a hybrid voice constructed with objects and animated by the spookiness of personhood.”. Within these blocks, Choi has welded in words and experiences that are hard to believe could ever be spoken by machine, “ i suppose i have always been here /[...] i suppose i am something like a salmon /[...]/ i rage & all you see / is broken glass” (9-11). Choi’s cyborg acknowledges that it might be “part machine”, but that’s only a fraction of what it believes itself to be. It’s made of natural parts; stone, metal, fish, water, stars, citrus, girl. It’s a medley of the world around it. “Turing Test” is, too. It’s many disjointed pieces, all fused into a form of something coming to terms with its own consciousness. The cyborg is always speaking through a mess of thoughts, incomplete sentences, and obstructed emotions. However, the interrogator, seen in italics, strictly sticks to the scripted questions, except in “Turing Test_Problem Solving”. In most of the “Turing Test” variants, the cyborg answers the interrogator's questions, even if indirectly. In “Turing Test_Problem Solving” however, the cyborg begins to ask the interrogator its own questions instead of answering them. “//if you don't like it here why don't you go somewhere else” asks the interrogator, and when they don't get a clear answer, they ask it again. The cyborg’s responses seem so human here, asking the interrogator if they’ve ever been in a similar situation of fear, of desperation, to what it’s describing: “have you ever tried to shake / your body / into obedience”; And the interrogator, for the first time, strays from the written questions to briefly respond to the cyborg, telling it that “//what you are describing are fairly common experiences among humans //now if we could return to the experiment” (6-8). While the interrogator writes off the cyborg's suffering as a “common experience”, the cyborg struggles to understand why its despair is brushed off so quickly. Choi’s robot seems more alive than its supposed human interrogator, displaying empathy where its questioner fails to do the same. As Choi puts it, “There are lots of ways to be a cyborg without being a cyborg” When our world, learning, and media are filtered through technology, how can we differentiate ourselves from advancing AI? If a fundamental part of humanity is our emotions, how can we prioritize it when so much technology tries to leave it in the dust?