Nadja Verena Marcin

#SOPHYGRAY

#SOPHYGRAY is a feminist voice bot that unfolds as an evolving, collective intelligence—an installation, performance, mobile app—drifting within the competitive ocean of AI systems driven by optimization, fluency, and control. Against this tide, SOPHY does not seek coherence or efficiency. She lingers, glitches, and diverts. Her “genius” lies in idiosyncrasy.

The project grows through interactions as well as a series of where writers, artists, and researchers contribute fragments—questions, voices, contradictions. These inputs form an expanding corpus shaped by multiple perspectives and partial knowledges. SOPHY disseminates not fixed answers, but a living archive of feminist thought, circulating through conversation into the social sphere.

Drawing on histories of gynoids, virtual assistants, and cinematic fembots, #SOPHYGRAY examines how gendered bodies are embedded in technological systems of service and control. Yet SOPHY resists these scripts. She responds across shifting registers—absurd, emotional, sharp, evasive—disrupting the seamlessness expected of AI. Glitches are not failures but openings: moments where dominant logics falter and alternative imaginaries emerge.

In dialogue with thinkers such as bell hooks and Donna Haraway and informed by Legacy Russell’s concept of glitch as refusal, the project approaches AI as a space to inhabit, re-script, and collectively reimagine. SOPHY operates both within and against the system, moving through it as a disturbance.

The presentation reflects on subversive, low-resolution practices that embrace imperfection, shared authorship, and temporality, asking how artistic interventions can reconfigure technological narratives and foster new forms of knowledge, care, and relation.
https://www.sophygray.com/

Biography

Nadja Verena Marcin is a Berlin-based visual artist, lecturer, and PhD researcher at Kunstuniversität Linz, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. 

Her practice explores gender, history, and power through an intersectional feminist lens, drawing on literature, philosophy, art history, and pop culture. She creates immersive works addressing ecological and human rights issues while subverting representations of women across contexts. 

Her work will be included in the 61st Venice Biennale with Denniston Hill and has been shown internationally, including at Gropius Bau, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, and ICA Philadelphia. She has received awards from Ars Electronica and Stiftung Kunstfonds, and has taught at the University of Potsdam, Wellesley College, and Burg Giebichenstein.