Tag: body

On Wednesday, June 14, I’ll be presenting a paper called “AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter” at the Film-Philosophy Conference at Chapman University (in Orange County, CA). It’s the first time I’ll be attending the conference, which is usually held in the UK, and I am excited to get to know the association, meet up with old and new friends, and hear their papers. The abstract for my paper is below:

AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter

Though often judged by its spectacular images, AI art needs also to be regarded in terms of its materiality, its temporality, and its relation to embodied existence. Towards this end, I look at AI art through the lens of corporeal phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” This bodily “diaphragm” serves like a filtering medium out of which stimulus and response, subject and object emerge in relation to one another. The diaphragm corresponds to Bergson’s conception of affect, which is similarly located prior to perception and action as “that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies.” For Bergson, too, the living body is a kind of filter, sifting impulses in a microtemporal interval prior to subjective awareness. In his later work, Merleau-Ponty adds another dimension with his conception of a presubjective écart or fission between tactility and specularity, thus complexifying the filtering operation of the body. With both an interiorizing function (tactility) and an exteriorizing one (specularity), the écart lays the groundwork for what I call the “originary mediality” of flesh—and a view of mediality itself which is always tactile in addition to any visual, image-oriented aspects. This is especially important for visual art produced with AI, as the underlying algorithms operate similarly to the body’s internal diaphragm: as a microtemporal filter that sifts inputs and outputs without regard for any integral conception of subjective or objective form. At the level of its pre-imagistic processing, AI’s external diaphragm thus works on the body’s internal diaphragm and actively modulates the parameters of tactility-specularity, recoding the fleshly mediality from whence images arise as a secondary, precipitate form.