Biblically Accurate Babe

Arvida Byström

Biblically Accurate Babe is a holographic installation that interrogates the collision of digital identity, artificial intelligence, and religious iconography. The project began when I discovered an AI-powered website that could artificially 'undress' images, primarily of women, without their consent. I tested it using my own photos and was disturbed by the realism of the generated nudes.

I produced multiple deepfake versions of myself and eventually uploaded them to a content-selling platform, accompanied by a chatbot trained on interviews and writings of mine. I didn’t initially disclose that the nudes were AI-generated. This act of self-experimentation became a way to explore how identity, authorship, and the body are increasingly commodified and abstracted in digital economies. . In the installation, AI-generated nude images of myself are projected as ethereal, flickering holograms, evoking the grotesque beauty of scriptural angels.

The images are set among reclaimed church benches where visitors can sit down while listening to the audio track. The audio layer blends chat logs between buyers and my AI double with theological texts, speculative fiction, and contributions from artists and researchers. The resulting polyphonic soundscape mirrors religious chorus, inviting viewers into an uneasy meditation on digital divinity, desire, and deception. Biblically Accurate Babe reanimates sacred visual language to ask urgent questions about how technology reshapes our understanding of intimacy, authenticity, and our post human exsitence.

Project Collaborators:

First produced for OK Linz in Austria.