Bodies of knowledge: art and embodied cognition

By unpacking push and pull between humans and machines over 5 days in a studio environment that shaped a recent project, I will reflect on how AI measures, communicates and engages with humans and what it is to be human in a digital culture. With three performers, a director and two AI specialists in a partly improvised partly choreographed performance for an imagined audience I started with the premise that subjectivities experienced while dancing cannot be measured as data. I hoped to frustrate the programming of an autonomous airborne drone by distinguishing between movement and dance to emphasise the subjective. Initially I attempted to video a dancer’s multi-dimensional visual memory of choreographic sequences, however this idea became subsumed by the presence and behaviour of the drone. I then recorded dance sequences showing an anthropomorphic partnership emerging between us with a mechanical eye. Relationships evolved emotionally, gaining momentum – anger, playfulness, fear, love, and suspicion shaped each performance. The paper will draw on Evan Thompsons’ articulation of imagination and embodiment and Felix Stadler’s ‘Stop Making Sense’ lecture at ‘The New Alphabet’ in which he explores differences between how humans make meaning and AI uses data. Both philosophers define subjectivities in terms of embodiment. Using their thesis as a starting point, the paper will be a 20-minute video showing the evolution of the project from diverse perspectives.