On my very first day volunteering at Hazelhurst gallery, I encouraged an older lady to try walking on one of the artworks. She had been eyeing the work for some time, and perhaps didn’t know it was interactive. She must’ve been secretly hoping it was, for my confirmation was all it took for her to hop up.
This sculptural work, consisting of maybe a hundred hand-made tiles, was uneven and disjunct. I expected her to comment about how she felt she would topple at any moment, or at least, the disorienting experience of walking on a non-unified surface. Instead, in being unbalanced, she was placid. She enjoyed it.
“I had an accident a while back,” she explained. Something happened to her back. And, upon recovering, she was unable to walk on her left leg. The process of recovering, she recalls, is what made her appreciate her body so much more.
“It’s only when we’re sick,” she says, that we realise our bodies can hurt, and our bodies can break.
Our human meat can shut down.
Balancing can be a really beautiful thing. Staying upright can become meaningful. It indicates that you are in control of an otherwise helpless organism.
Meanwhile, AI does not even know what an arm is. It can name an arm--disturbingly easily--and it can replicate an arm. (Sometimes.) It can recognise which “objects” an arm is likely to appear alongside. But it doesn’t know how an arm should behave in space, how it can knock a cabinet. How it twists in its socket.
AI only knows of the body as an image. A labelled image. An image with edges and shades and light.
This is how it manipulates our bodies. An AI-generated woman is a shell, an uninhabited body. Her body will never pulsate. She will never know the mechanical, physical thrill of violence. She will only have violences done to her. But she will never know pain. She will never writhe at her arm twisting in her socket. She will never know the ecstasy of cutting her knee open on the sidewalk just to confirm she is alive. She will never titillate over the tiles and thank herself for walking, for relearning how to walk, for commanding her living body. For having a body to love.