What does the body of an artificial intelligence look like?

Being present is very difficult, it is a quality we have lost. We are now in constant translation. Our ‘dematerialised’ bodies travel through the clouds of data that surround us, aided by technological devices whose implications we do not understand. Every day we meet them, we talk to them, we look at them, we write to them. And they read us, answer us and return our gaze. These ‘beings’ are not mere tools, they have a nature of their own. Their bodies are made of data, and their intelligence is artificial. But what is artificial intelligence? Who is it? Does it have race, gender, social class? Does it have problems, concerns? What does it listen to, what language does it speak? Does it love us, hate us, or does it not care about us? How many of the decisions you have made today were actually made by them?

As Helen Hester explains in her essay Xenofeminism, technologies - and here any kind of digital or non-digital design comes into play - are ‘social phenomena’, discarding the idea that they are neutral, as they already contain a specific objective from their creation, while understanding that they can be transformed.

If we delegate design to technology, we would be faced with the same dilemma that Hannah Arendt encountered: some individuals act within the rules of the system to which they belong without reflecting on their actions. They do not care about the consequences of their actions, only about compliance with orders. The AI becomes a thinking entity, we delegate to it small executions that are part of our daily lives. Where is the authorship of the final design? In a first decision, the hand of the creator who designs the tool is the one that decides what the artificial intelligence will learn and what it will not learn, which databases are chosen and which languages it speaks. But is the creator hand of that AI the only author, and the executing hand?

In this course we will explore the role of artificial intelligence as a speculative medium in contemporary creation. We will learn how to use AI tools and incorporate them into our processes. We will question all these questions and more to try to clarify... what does the body of an artificial intelligence look like?

You can see the results of the course at this link