Amplifying the body: AI pornbots and chimeric flesh

As part of the exhibition BODIES AND ANTIBODIES Index invites Carmen Lael Hines to give a talk relating bodies, AI, contemporary art practices, new meetings and definitions of public and private encounters. This talk will consider how conceptions of the body are shaped, formed and fashioned in digital universes. The talk will begin by discussing pornography platforms and AI chatbots in interactive chatrooms, where research will be presented on the business models, aesthetics, and visual culture associated with such environments. How can we begin to define the ‘real’ vs. synthetic body? Where, why and when does the body become a space of codification, negotiation and (un)calculability? Where do we define the limits of the body – and what kinds of systemic forces designate or profit from these slippages? Can we imagine sliding in and through the tentecularities of biopolitics towards open-source chimeric commons?

Carmen Lael Hines is a writer, researcher and curator interested in technology, bodies, and the implications of their entanglements. She has lived and worked in the UK, Italy, Puerto Rico, Austria and the US. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at the Technical University of Vienna, where she teaches critical theory to students studying architecture. She is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her most recent writings have concerned topics such as AI, neoliberal aesthetics, femtech, home automation, dating apps, platform urbanism, and the architectures of speculation. She is currently co-editing the book Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy, to be published by Bloomsbury. She was on the curatorial team for Austria’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, and has curated exhibitions/programmes at: Exhibit (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), e-flux screening room NY, The Austrian Cultural Forum NY, Architekturzentrum Wien (as part of the Claiming*Space Collective) and Galerie Kandlhofer, amongst others. She has lectured at institutions in Austria, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK. She recently started a podcast with Morgane Billuart called GirlEmployee, which explores digital feminism(s), platform capitalism, and visual culture.