Description
Responding with our bodies to hidden labour that AI exploits. Translating concepts into the body, embodying values.
- Exploring other ways of knowing – epistemological shake up!
Further information
Our embodied experience is subjective, and thus not something that can be accessed, interpreted and synthesised (known) by algorithmic systems. The “us” AI systems seek to know emerges out of our choices within heavily redacted communications, reducing us or the totality of the knowable, to
that which the system can parse. Subjectivities are not just narrowly read but narrowly produced, AI is generative of behaviour which soaks beyond the confines of the machine. Basically, AI system only “talks” in algorithmic language, every bit of us that cannot be captured by this language is missed out.
Reflecting on these systems through our bodies can help us to explore more holistic, communal and sensorial ways of knowing and open up new opportunities for collective resistance and imagining of alternate possibilities. Somatic practices bring us into a space of connection, both with our own bodily experience of AI, and with the bodily exploitation required to sustain its production. Through this embodied reflection, we make moves towards a more hopeful prospect, to figure out ‘how we
might sail the sea of cyberspace as a means of dreaming forth a future’ (Lewis, 2014, p. 58).
How can we use our bodies differently, and redirect protocols of oppression into protocols of liberation and collective imaginaries? The designers of technologies do not just design the functions of a system, they ‘design the protocols of knowing through which culture operates’ (ibid, p. 61). Keeping this in mind, we seek spaces for voices all the way through, so that communities, especially those who are so often overlooked or actively exploited for the purposes of AI, have a say in the way technologies are dispersed in their communities.
Resources
- Lewis, J.E. (2014) “A better dance and better prayers: Systems, structures, and the future imaginary in Aboriginal new media” in S. Loft & K. Swanson (eds.) Coded Territories: Tracing indigenous pathways in new media art (pp. 48-77). Calgary: University of Calgary Press