This project approaches the body as a “black box” both as an artistic strategy and as a critical lens through which to examine how interactive technologies—and AI in particular—engage with bodies. Rather than prioritising control, prediction, and optimisation, it focuses on intimate, situated experience, while questioning how bodies are modelled, abstracted, and often excluded within these technological paradigms.
AI systems operate through opaque, probabilistic processes grounded in extractivist practices, invisible labour, entrenched biases, and regimes of surveillance and governance. They function at a distance from the body, producing inherently unpredictable outputs while serving structures of capital accumulation. In response, this research draws on feminist hacking as a methodological approach, emphasising co-existence, care, and collective survival as ways to question and intervene in our engagement with technological systems.
Within this research, the body is understood as an operative apparatus: an automatic system that processes signals without full cognitive access to its internal processes. Engaging the body as a “black box” becomes a form of hacking—working with its indeterminacy, rather than attempting to control or decode it. Agency is not located in a single entity, but emerges through dynamic coupling, through processes of mutual influence and co-constitution between human and machine.
From this perspective, perceptual phenomena such as sensory substitution are mobilised as a way to hack the body from within. By shifting how sensations are experienced across the body and situating participants as internal interactors, perception itself becomes the site through which the experience unfolds.
This project develops concepts and methodologies for artistic practices centred on intimate haptic experience, critically engaging with dominant AI paradigms through embodiment, touch, care, and hacking, within media art, Sensory Studies, Human–Computer Interaction, Feminist Hacking, and critical AI.
ENDOSENSORIAL INTERACTION
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