The Artists Behind Ugly Bitches Spill Their Routine

The history of networked technology is, and has been from its very genesis, a history of building hot girls. It’s also a story of making and remaking women: nudging and shaping consumer desire, consolidating cultural norms, and setting the parameters for gendered performance. Sadie Plant writes, in her feminist history of computation Zeroes and Ones, about the project carried out by a fictionalized version of Thomas Edison—the spiritual progenitor to our era of all-encompassing entrepreneurship—to manufacture a virtual woman called Hadaly, “an ethereal electrical force without shape or form other than that assigned to her by the wizardry of her maker.”

Molding bodies in the image of creators’ desire became a reality when Photoshop brought retouching to the masses in 1987 with Jennifer in Paradise, the first color test photo, which happened to be a topless chick on the beach in Bora Bora. Today, with the development of image-sharing platforms—and the editing tools and cultural pressures that attend to them—Jennifer-tier flawlessness has attained the status of dogma, with new economies of influence and desire built on its—her—suntanned back. Today, in place of Hadaly, we have Milady: even the most unhinged aspects of the internet are graced by cute-girl PFPs. That’s to say nothing of the notionally female-forward NFTs trading in platitudes about women’s empowerment: no matter where you look, online prettiness has been raised to the level of compulsion.

What, then, is a less-than-perfect gal to do? Log off? Maya Man and Ann Hirsch don’t think so. The pair teamed up with Golira, the developer behind Allstarz, and set out to issue a corrective—counteracting the pressure towards perfectionism on one hand, and the flatness of “female empowerment” on the other. Hence, the world was blessed with 500 Ugly Bitches: a collection of GAN-generated dolls that hate your style and won’t hesitate to tell you so. Following the project’s blowout sale, Man and Hirsch spoke to art writer and fellow female internet user Adina Glickstein about corporate-sanitized feminism, influencer theories of value, and the jouissance of openly using the word “bitch” online.

Adina Glickstein: Maybe a good place to start is to simply have you describe Ugly Bitches—talk us through what the project is and how it was made?

Ann Hirsch: Sure, sure. Ugly Bitches is an edition of 500 images. It’s comprised of dolls that were trained on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN): we input tons of doll imagery from the past to the present, and what came out were these weird, funky, ugly dolls. We combined each doll with a comment that we found on a female influencer’s Instagram. But we changed the comment: any time any kind of qualitative, beauty-related word was used, we swapped that out with “ugly.” And if any kind of woman-based noun was used, like babe or baby, then we swapped that out with “bitch.” The backgrounds are DALL-E-generated images based on spots that influencers like to take photos in front of.

Maya Man: We wanted to create the collection because we wanted it to stand in contrast to the constant rhetoric of “Everyone is beautiful, all women are perfect”—that kind of mindset, which we saw in a lot of NFT collections. The dolls look kind of fucked up from the AI generation system. Ann always said it was “ugly propaganda.”

AH: Yeah, just giving people permission to be ugly, both inside and out. I think there’s this pressure on everyone, but especially women, to present as perfect physically, morally, and ethically. Especially the latter in the past couple of years—and that’s just not the reality of who we are as humans.

AG: What other questions along these lines were you both thinking about as you came together to make this project? Could it be seen as an extension of the work that you were doing prior to it?

AH: My work has always been about how technology and media affect gender. And I had been doing these TikTok criticisms of NFTs for Outland, so I started to get deep into the NFT world. That’s where a lot of these questions, for me, started to arise—especially with the big female empowerment-themed NFTs, like World of Women and Boss Beauties. We made Ugly Bitches in response to those, but also in response to the general culture that those NFTs are reflecting, this “girlboss” kind of culture.

MM: Yeah, yeah. A lot of what we’re both thinking about is performance online, and how people realize or perform an identity through posting. We noticed that there’s this constant tension between craving realness and authenticity online, but also, at the same time, only wanting to perform or see perfection. The idea for Ugly Bitches grew out of wanting to talk about that tension—and those two conflicting desires people have, to be both a performer and part of an audience. When we looked at World of Women and all these different projects, the selling point was that they were focused on female empowerment, but often, they were just an illustration of a woman that was repeated. Maybe they changed colors or had different accessories. But there was always this really gorgeous, perfect illustration of a woman. Because the NFT space is such a male-dominated domain, people are looking for projects that are by women or celebrating women, in a way—but we found that a lot of them seem to rely on this more corporate-cleansed narrative of feminism.

AG: Yeah, definitely. There’s a real sense of “The Wing” energy in these female-empowerment-in-scare-quotes NFT projects.

AH: Yeah! And the projects marketed as “by women, for women” still usually have a lot of men involved, and are usually ultimately for men.

AG: So how did you two find each other?

AH: It was in the stars.

AG: And how did each of you become interested in generative art?

AH: I’m just interested in the NFT space as a whole new crazy thing that exists. And generative art is popular in that space. Is Ugly Bitches a generative project? I don’t know if it is. It’s a GAN project. Is GAN artwork necessarily generative?

AG: Can you tease out that distinction a little bit? Help us bucket those two technical terms separately?

MM: Well, the way I think of generative art isn’t specific to technology, to any specific technology, at all. Generative art just implies that there’s an autonomous system and an element of chance involved—which I definitely think is present in this piece. It is also super present in works throughout history where an artist is using chance: Sol LeWitt is the classic example. I’m interested in generative art because I come from a background in computer science, and I’m interested in software as a medium, which is inherently generative, because you’re programming a system to create something.

In this project, chance shows up in the GAN. We fed it over a thousand images of the dolls and we didn’t know exactly what was going to come out, and we were tweaking different parameters and levels to try to get it to look how we wanted it to. The aspect of Ugly Bitches that’s maybe the most “generative” in the sense that people are familiar with is the combination of all the components. I wrote a really simple program that paired a doll with a random background and a random phrase. There’s a nice element of chance there: seeing which dolls were paired with which pieces of text was exciting, because sometimes the text doesn’t really make sense with the doll, but sometimes it totally does.

AH: Another thing about the GAN that interested me was that, in a lot of my work, I look at how beauty or femininity is created socially. Maya does, too. What I’ve found is that beauty, acceptable beauty, is just always an imitation of what has come before. Like, the people who are the most beautiful, the most celebrated, are the best at imitating what they believe beauty is, or what a woman is and what a woman should be. Beyoncé does the absolute best imitation of femininity and beauty. She’s just flawless. Everything looks amazing. Compare her to Miley Cyrus, who objectively is beautiful, but when you watch her, you see the imitation—you see her working so hard to try to be this sexy thing, and it comes off really awkward (which is actually why I really like Miley Cyrus). With the GAN we used, it’s a similar process. It’s trying so hard to imitate beauty, recreating these dolls, but it just fails miserably.

AG: To hone in more on the other side of generativity: how does the chance aspect of the project make it particularly well-suited to being tokenized as an NFT?

AH: I view the NFT space like it’s Vegas, basically. People love it because you’re gambling, and that’s so much fun. And generative art is like a slot machine, where you’re just putting money in and seeing what comes out and you’re hoping it’s something good. That’s the exciting, fun part, seeing what you get. I don’t think that’s a bad thing—it’s something that’s made the space really enjoyable and interesting for the artists and the audience. So that’s kind of where I see them going together.

MM: When people minted Ugly Bitches, they didn’t know in advance which exact one they would be getting. That’s something that feels really new with NFTs: there’s a technical system that allows for people to collect something while knowing the parameters of the thing, and potentially seeing an example output, but not knowing the specifics of what they’ll own. Dolls, as objects throughout history, also have this long relationship with collecting. Bringing that into the project was interesting in the NFT space—seeing people want to own one of these dolls, not knowing which one they would get, and then, in the aftermath, trading them, maybe to try to get a specific one that they felt more attached to.

AG: Do you think that Web3 is changing the landscape of influence online? People talk about creators getting more financial opportunity, or even audiences getting kickback from work that they’ve supported with their attention. But are there other dynamics that you think are changing from the platform paradigm of Web2? And do you see that changing gendered performance in particular?

AH: It does feel like the pressure to produce a curated, perfect image is more of a Web2 thing. So much of millennial culture—hipster culture—was about how what you consume is your identity. And I kind of think Web3 takes that to an even more extreme place, because people feel like, “These things that I collect define me.” Eventually, it becomes solely about those things, and you are not even in that picture at all.

MM: In Web2, when you reach peak influencer status, peak success, making money off of your social media or internet fame, it’s primarily through brands—it’s not actually coming from the millions of followers you might have on Instagram. But those millions of followers are what get you the brand deals. In Web3, there is interest in having a system that relies more on an audience supporting a creator. But I think that does then require the creator to really think about how they’re creating content—art, music, writing, whatever it is—to appeal to an audience that will want to pay for it. It’s just a different way of thinking.

AG: Right, like, in Web2, even when the influencer is getting paid by a brand, the value is really generated by someone’s audience. No brand is going to work with an influencer who doesn’t have an appropriate number of followers. So in that sense, the value is brought by the fans, who create the influencer—it could be seen as coming from below. Whereas, part of what I hear you saying is that in Web3, which is often seen as liberatory for the participants who get the kickback for their attentional labor, the creator is the one who’s forced to become the total entrepreneur of the self. There’s no longer an intermediary brand—the creator herself is the brand.

MM: Totally.

AH: And also, the audience can profit off of the creator’s output in the secondary market.

AG: What aspects of the NFT space are you most excited about? And what wisdom do you think it could have to offer the legacy art world?

AH: I guess most people care about the nerdy shit, the blockchain. But for me, the real draw is the audience. A lot of my other work has been for non-art audiences—and in the NFT space, for the first time, there’s a huge amount of people interested in art that are not from the fine art world. To me, that’s really exciting. Now our ugly propaganda can reach a lot of people that it couldn’t previously, and people are actually engaging with it. And for me, that’s a very exciting thing.

MM: As artists who are making work that is meant to exist on the internet, there was always this process of transformation that needed to happen if you wanted to turn your work into something that could be put up for sale in a traditional way. There was never a market for digital work to live and fully operate within its native environment. So I think that aspect of NFTs is exciting.

Also, when you’re launching any sort of NFT project, you suddenly have access to all of this open conversation from the general public about what you’re making. We would get messages on Discord. We were seeing tweets, people discussing the project, people loving it, people hating it. Whereas, at an opening, no one’s going to come up to you and be like, “I actually think this is really bad and I hate it.”

AG: So, having been privy to those honest reactions—has Ugly Bitches made people squirm? Have people been uncomfortable openly referring to “bitches” on the internet, or have they taken some kind of perverse joy in it? What’s the reception been like?

MM: I’ve definitely seen a perverse joy. Very unexpectedly, the project got a lot of attention after we announced it, maybe five days before the launch. We had no allowlist, and basically no protection against bots. We decided right before the launch that, based on the interest, we needed to have some sort of allowlist. So we redeployed the smart contract and said people could message us to get on the list, and we would basically ensure that they were a human and not a bot. We’d do our own personal Twitter DM Turing test. We started getting a lot of messages from people—at least 1,000. It was really interesting to see what people would write when they were requesting to be on the list. A lot of accounts would just message stuff like, “I really need an Ugly Bitch. Here’s my wallet.” It definitely seemed to hit an audience where boys were getting excited to have a reason to throw this word around. It was really interesting to see it reach an audience that was beyond our expectations, and which was probably interpreting the project in a way that was different from what we had intended.

AH: Yeah, but I think that’s okay. And that’s going to happen with anything you put out into the world. I think some people will get it and some people won’t, and that just is what it is. But I think as an artist, when you do see people connect with it in the way you had intended, that makes it worth it.

AG: I’m personally very satisfied with my Ugly Bitch—even though she’s passive-aggressively pointing out that she hates my outfit and would like to gift me one of her own designs to wear instead. Talk about an online landscape where everyone is nudged into being a total entrepreneur of the self. Even the commenters are thirsting for their moment in the spotlight, in this backhanded way. If that doesn’t sum up the self-promotional landscape of online image culture, I don’t know what does.