Queer Reflections on AI: Uncertain Intelligences

Klipphahn-Karge, Michael (Ed.); Koster, Ann-Kathrin (Ed.); Morais dos Santos Bruss, Sara (Ed.) Book — Published Version Queer Reflections on AI: Uncertain Intelligences Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture, No. 57 Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Klipphahn-Karge, Michael (Ed.); Koster, Ann-Kathrin (Ed.); Morais dos Santos Bruss, Sara (Ed.) (2024) : Queer Reflections on AI: Uncertain Intelligences, Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture, No. 57, ISBN 978-1-003-35795-7, Routledge, Abingdon, New York, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003357957 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312547 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 QUEER REFLECTIONS ON AI UNCERTAIN INTELLIGENCES Edited by Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture Queer Reflections on AI This volume offers a socio-technical exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it reflects and reproduces certain normative representations of gender and sexuality, to ultimately guide more diverse and radical discussions of life with digital technologies. Moving beyond the examination of empirical examples and technical solutions, the book approaches the relationship between queerness and AI from a theoretical perspective that posits queer theory as central to understanding AI differently. The chapters pose questions about the politics and ethics of machine embodiments and data imaginaries on the one hand, and about technical possibilities for a production of social identities characterised by shifting diversity and multiplicity on the other, as they are mediated by and through digital technologies. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries to engage a diversity of conceptual tools, critical approaches, and theoretical traditions, this book will be an important resource for students and researchers of gender and sexuality, new media and digital cultures, cultural theory, art and visual culture, and AI. Michael Klipphahn-Karge is an art historian at Technische Universität Dresden and Editor of the peer-reviewed online journal w/k Between Science and Art. Ann-Kathrin Koster is a Research Associate at the Weizenbaum-Institute, Berlin. Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a media theorist and curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture 50 Posthuman Capitalism Dancing with Data in the Digital Economy Yasmin Ibrahim 51 Smartphone Communication Interactions in the App Ecosystem Francisco Yus 52 Upgrade Culture and Technological Change The Business of the Future Adam Richard Rottinghaus 53 Digital Media and Participatory Cultures of Health and Illness Stefania Vicari 54 Podcasting as an Intimate Medium Alyn Euritt 55 On the Evolution of Media Understanding Media Change Carlos A. Scolari 56 Digital Ageism How it operates and approaches to tackling it Andrea Rosales, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol & Jakob Svensson 57 Queer Reflections on AI Uncertain Intelligences Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster & Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss Queer Reflections on AI Uncertain Intelligences Edited by Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss We acknowledge support for the Open Access publication by the Saxon State Digitization Program for Science and Culture. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-40521-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-41404-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35795-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun Funded by: Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden—a project of TU Dresden in cooperation with The Schaufler Foundation GenderConceptGroup—a research area of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at TU Dresden Technical University Dresden and Saxon State and University Library Dresden (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Dresden/SLUB) https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/ https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/forschung/ https:// www.the- Contents List of Figures ix List of Contributors x Preface xiii Introduction: Queer AI 1 MICHAEL KLIPPHAHN-KARGE, ANN-KATHRIN KOSTER, AND SARA MORAIS DOS SANTOS BRUSS PART I Genealogies 21 1 Queering intelligence: A theory of intelligence as performance and a critique of individual and artificial intelligence 23 BLAIR ATTARD-FROST 2 Neural “freedoms”: Population, choice, and machine learning 40 ORIT HALPERN 3 I spy, with my little AI: How queer bodies are made dirty for digital technologies to claim cleanness 57 NISHANT SHAH PART II Materialities 73 4 We’re all cyborgs now?: Cripping the smart cyborg 75 UTE KALENDER In addition, some of the contributions collected here were originally written in German and translated into English by the authors for this volume. Therefore, as editors, we have allowed for variance in the translations of quotations into English. We have also asked our authors to adapt their original writing to include debates on their subjects within anglophone academic debates, taking care to not only centre on euroand west centric debates. Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss xiv Preface Introduction Queer AI Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Ann-Kathrin Koster, and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss If war is technological, perpetual, and networked, queer networks can provide interstices – places of difference that unite queer activists, intellectuals, and artists in technological agency. The gay bomb detonates a regulatory standard for homosexuality. Gay Bombs is a strategy that blows up this standard with the hopes of re-wiring a non-standard of queerness. Gay Bombs explode into interstices of infinite mutation. (Blas 2008a) Queer technologies In the Queer Technologies work series, the artist Zach Blas negotiates the relationship between sex, gender, and technology, which he sees to be relational and entangled. Since its first initiation in 2008, the artist has worked with various multimedia forms that represent different aspects of queer and queering technologies. Using a variety of screens arranged in a way reminiscent of commercial merchandise displays, Blas critically echoes consumer culture and its systemic ties to an oppressive economy, while at the same time enabling a pluriverse brought to the fore by each technological object, interface, or screen and the various time-space continuums they represent. Each individual presentation surface displays objects and monitors, some of which are labelled, while others are not. These diverse formats are unified through a conceptual framework, which embeds the technologies in a series of practices, artefacts, and informations that represent a vision of technology created in service of, or through the queer body (Figure 0.1). Blas continuously makes visible and criticises naturalising constructions of sex and gender that manifest and reproduce themselves in technical artefacts and technological architectures. For example, the ENgendering Gender Changers, a series of devices packaged and aesthetically approximated to everyday travel adapters or electronic transmission converters. With this recontextualisation of a conventional consumer object, Blas consciously questions the connection between gender, identity, and the hardand software connectivity of information technology. Through the possibility of converting oneself with such an adapter, the artist proposes a palette of DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. campy solutions to the problem of binary gender constructions—the adapters allow for a fluid and continuous game of switcheroo between various real and imagined gender identities. With this collection, Blas points to the explosive potential of a pluralised practice of re-imagination that produces iterative ambiguities, not only queering existing technologies but also developing technologies that are imagined to actively participate in the queering of their surroundings. Contrary to conventional adapters that function according to a hole and pin principle, these ENgendering Gender Changers have multiple options, including MALE FEMALE to HIR, MALE to BUTCH, or MALE to FEMME transitions, which are materialised via double-sided plug holes, circular, or multidirectional pins and other formats that come to stand in for non-penetrative and queer exchange beyond the binary principle. In his curatorial practice, Blas further provides visitors with political tools that can be used to break through the very tendencies of naturalisation under critique, so as to not only negate or refuse, but reopen them to new interpretations (Figure 0.2). This form of queer(y)ing technologies is best illustrated by the Gay Bomb. The Gay Bomb installation consists mainly of a video showing imagesynthetic recreations of Blas’ notions of a “Gay Bomb” in the form of a pink grenade. On the grenade detonator, visitors can identify the abbreviation QT for Queer Technologies, which is scattered across objects in the work series. The installation is accompanied by a technical manual manifesto that Figure 0.1 Zach Blas. Queer Technologies, 2008–2012, New Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles (2008). 2 Michael Klipphahn-Karge et al. explores the Gay Bomb as a pluralistic object of homosexuality that harbours heteronormative and queer potential at the same time. The myth of the “Gay Bomb” refers to a line of U.S. military research, which began in 1994 and was discontinued in 2005. The project aimed at developing an aphrodisiac chemical weapon that would literally make its targets “gay.” Underlying the research was the notion that such a weapon would force enemies into submission by distracting them from combat operations, but also, and perhaps more centrally, by causing adversaries to surrender in shame at the sudden emergence of same-sex desire. Blas describes how this idea of an immaterial chemical weapon turns into a de facto bomb through media discourse that carry the research into the cultural imaginary. Once imagined in the form of an actual explosive device, the imaginary later becomes concrete technology: Instead of a biochemical “gay bomb,” Afghanistan is hit by an actual bomb in 2003, on which a marine had written “High jack this Fags” in large white letters before sending it off (Blas 2008b: 29). What initially began as a rumour of experiments in the laboratory intertwines Orientalism, anti-Muslim racism, and homophobia in its final, Figure 0.2 Zach Blas. ENgendering Gender Changers, part of Queer Technologies, 2008–2012, New Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles (2008). Introduction 3 concrete-material form as an artefact of the military-industrial-complex: technology appears here as a normative gendering force that lies in reverse to any kind of queer endeavour, producing the gay bomb in a necropolitical and heteropatriarchal object 1 (Figure 0.3). The gay bomb is at once knowledge artefact, projection and explosive technology. It harbours psychosocial and post-cold-war ontologies, as well as western liberal politics driven by and grounded in economic and political ideologies. As with any cultural artefact, interpretations of the gay bomb have been preand remediated, the imagined configurations are affectively prepared and worked over within the media mainstream: from Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove (1964), to the music video for Ask (1987), a song by the band the Smiths, as well as an episode of the television series 30 Rock (2/15, May 8, 2008). In the latter, the “Gay Bomb” mistakenly explodes in the Pentagon. What follows is an exaggerated scene in which the notorious “old white men” of the U.S. executive suite approach each other in eroticised, sweating ecstasy. Through this media reinterpretation, the meaning of the “Gay Bomb” changes again, since its use in the scene of the TV series is directed inward, that is, against the bomb throwers. Thus, the original intention of use is reversed: homosexuality, once chosen as a weapon that humiliates the Muslim enemy, is now projected—no less contemptuously, perhaps—onto a representation Figure 0.3 Zach Blas. Gay Bombs: User’s Manual, part of Queer Technologies, 2008–2012, SPECULATIVE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2011). 4 Michael Klipphahn-Karge et al. that excavates and derides concepts of masculinity within the military. The very fact that evaluations of this representation may differ, illustrates how multiplications and transformations of the “gay bomb” can be understood, with Zach Blas, as a “terrorist” (Blas 2008b: 25) appropriation of heteronormative attributions. Inherent to this appropriation is the possibility of disrupting heteronormativity from within. In this way, the idea of the concrete materialisation and medialisation of the “gay bomb” is routed via camp, drag, and queer subculture. Its concrete use is flanked by a sociopolitical process of negotiation that seeks to blur the previously exhibited unambiguity of the artefact. Queerness, as the example shows, emerges here with, over, and through technology, which may also turn against its creators. It is thus no coincidence that Blas also begins his “User Manual” for the Gay Bomb with the mandate that was projected onto the Afghanistan bomb: “Hi-Jack This Queers!” (ibid.: 29). In this instance, however, it is an invitation and address to queer activist networks: to destroy the norm inherent to and reproduced by technology, to hi-jack it through queer political actions and formations based on the development, deployment, and dissemination of queer technology as “terrorist” (ibid.). Through these appropriation strategies of a queer multitude, it becomes apparent that technology itself is open and in parts indeterminate, and thus can represent its own space of possibility within concrete applications and appropriations that are released through resistant practices—for example, through a redirection of discursive logics towards a vital, mutating political body of queer empowerment. The artist interweaves discursive and material levels of queering automated warfare by describing queerness as a tactic of disrupting consumption and heteronormativity (Blas 2008b: 14). Inherent to this strategy is an understanding of the term queer that is also central to the present anthology: fundamentally, we understand queer as a critical practice that is directed against naturalising and unifying concepts of social, cultural, and political perspectives, as well as a modality of highlighting the potential for repression that lie within to such monolithic iterations (Case 1991: 3). Queering refers to strategies, options, and spaces of possibility with the help of which existing understandings and attributions of gender, sex, but also binary and thus mutually exclusive categorisations such as male/female as structuring concepts of and to technology can be criticised, analysed, and blasted open. In this sense, technology can first and foremost be defined as indeterminate. Such an understanding illustrates the possibility that technology can be realised in very different ways in different contexts of application and also be distributed, appropriated, and made socio-politically productive in various ways. AI is thus merely the latest of a whole line of transformative media technologies that “matter the most, when they don’t seem to matter at all” (Chun 2016). The example given here illustrates the limits of an understanding of technology as only determining—one that sees the technical merely as an instrument without contradiction, since even a Introduction 5 technical artefact that is highly functionally determined and intended to kill appears to be appropriable for queer imaginaries. As the “Gay Bomb” illustrates, technologies are embedded in the socio-cultural imaginary, which in turn provides multiple possibilities for reinterpretation and appropriation. Technology never materialises as “pure tech”; rather, it is embedded in concrete social and cultural norms on the one hand, and on the other hand, is highly contextand application-bound. Blas’ work shows that sex, gender, and sexuality are strong structuring elements of technology; they claim their own space as points of friction and thereby have an effect on technology itself, as well as on the localities of its dissemination. Queerness, then, becomes an “Operating System” (Keeling 2014) through which to view technology, and potentially alter its fungibilities. In such readings, Blas’ work, which is captivating in its reference to concrete materialised artefacts, can be applied equally to digital technologies and current imaginaries around AI—artificial intelligence. In the context of these increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies, questions arise about changing conditions and genealogies of power and influence. At the same time, a plurality of narratives on these seemingly new and emergent technologies may bring new and altered possibilities of appropriating technology, emancipating from, with, and through technologies, and resisting the normative thrust inherent to contemporary structures underlying the development of emerging technologies through an insistence on queer ambiguities. Artificial intelligence Reaching beyond the examples worked through by Blas, AI no longer plays a role only in the military context; rather, there is an explosive spread of AI within everyday life. This omnipresence contributes to the fact that AI has become a term of enigmatic openness that is increasingly finding its way into various disciplines and discourses. Such ubiquitous diffusion is usually accompanied by a dilution of the term: AI currently seems to describe everything that is automated or autonomous in some way and can thus act purely as a machine. Thus, individual technical artefacts, especially algorithms, but also networked technologies or voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, or wearables are subsumed under the term, as well as generalised references to machinic forms of being such as robotics, or specific methods of machine learning that are framed as “intelligent.” So-called deep learning mechanisms involving neural networks are particularly prominent (LeCun et al. 2015; for an anthropological view see Seaver 2017)—these are becoming relevant especially in the context of increasing automation in a wide range of social domains from business to politics and healthcare (cf. Eubanks 2018). As this short list already implies, AI has been positioned as the paradigmatic emerging technology, and has become a kind of universal representation of the same that provides suitable solutions for technical and 6 Michael Klipphahn-Karge et al. non-technical social or political problems. It is thus the latest buzzword upon which hinges a whole range of only partially technological regimes, previously accumulated under terms such as “Big Data” or the “Internet of Things.” Examples can be found in a variety of contexts, such as the equation of automation and market liberalisation in the world of work gathered under the term industry 4.0, motion sensors that analyse and categorise facial movements to project emotional analyses via affective computing, or simply the monitoring of public spaces with the aim of deploying surveillance strategies in the name of order or security (Zuboff 2019; Amoore 2020). The efficient and rapid processing of a comprehensive amount of different data promises objectivity, effectiveness, and accuracy, and thus holds out the promise of standing apart from human error and bias, even proposing, as WIRED’s former editor-in-chief once put it, an “end of theory” that “makes the scientific method obsolete” (Anderson 2008). Data is equated with an imaginary of complete knowability, which is set as universal through procedures of calculation that can produce a social “truth,” because it can process more (and, in this imaginary, at some point all) data. Such an understanding of truth-making practices goes against a long history of feminist epistemologies of science and technology, which have argued against the objectivity of technology and its phantasm of complete knowability as a heteropatriarchal (and colonial) phantasy (e.g. Haraway 1988; Wajcman 1991; Browne 2015). This phantasy has been excavated as problematic, not just on gendered terms, in relation to AI in a variety of ways (cf. Gitelmann, 2013; Steyerl 2016; Noble 2018; Amaro 2022). It is worth taking a closer look at the different uses and contextualisations of AI, to enable an approach to the phenomenon from different disciplines and methodologies—in terms of the history of ideas, conceptual critique, narratology, descriptive analysis, or deconstruction—and thus to set different focal points that diversify, contextualise, and make legible the sociopolitical relevance of AI. For, its usage has already been critically reviewed and evaluated for some time within the fields of Software and Critical Data Studies (cf. Chun 2005; boyd and Crawford 2012). Increasingly, research is addressing contemporary digital phenomena empirically, theoretically, and with regards to their social or cultural effects. Thus, an interdisciplinary field of research is forming that takes a look at political, social, and economic problem areas and attempts to theoretically capture the threat to social equality and freedom posed by technology (cf. most recently, for example, Amoore 2020; Crawford 2021; Coeckelberg 2022). The aim of such approaches and debates is to reflect in detail on datafied technologies’ normative and normalising impact. At the same time, they open up the possibility of detaching algorithmic systems, information models and databased spaces of action from a purely instrumental-technical understanding and anchor them more firmly within societal imaginaries and cultural production. Introduction 7 Bias More recently, discrimination has become a central point of focus to describe the socio-political impact of AI in a way that has entered societal discourse through the concept of algorithmic bias. Within algorithmic systems understood as AI, it refers to unjustified unequal treatment as well as unjustified equal treatment in the context of algorithmic information processing. The examples are numerous, and some have received much attention of late: Amazon’s recruitment algorithm that identified tech-savvy men as significantly more suitable for high-paying positions than equally tech-savvy women, a Facebook image recognition programme that sorted images of Black people into the category of “primates,” or Facebook’s classification of indigenous names as “fake.” On different levels, these examples illustrate inherent biases within technological systems believed to have been deployed objectively. This is due to a central feature that makes AI work: for an AI to function, it must make concrete classifications based on concrete data. AI thus devalues certain data features while upgrading others (cf. Amoore 2020, 8). In order for an AI to produce results, it must therefore “discriminate” in the true sense of the word. Such a complex issue is usually reduced to a technical term or a technical flaw, the bias. However, biases are merely the result of a problematic policy that equates representation with categorisation, and it can occur at different levels. The recruiting algorithm had decided men to be more hireable, because men were already dominant in the specific jobs it was recruiting for, the AI projected data of the past into what it considered a desirable future. The equation of Black people with primates may have been the result of lacking data—as many facial recognition technologies are still not trained on Black and brown faces, and thus fail to recognise these as human more often than the white faces that make up the data sets (cf. Buolamwini and Gebru 2018). But it may also be the result of a form of malicious repetition, in which the repeated identification of Black people as primates calls upon the historical and racist degradation that these groups continue to be exposed to. 2 In most cases, a faulty, non-diverse data set is marked as responsible (cf. in more detail on the levels and aspects of algorithmic discrimination: Schwarting and Ulbricht 2022). However, the representational gaps might not be only due to a lack of data, but also due to a prior categorisation that evokes, works through, or problematically recodifies racist and sexist, or heteropatriarchal stereotypes (Browne 2015; Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019; Angwin et al. 2016). A purely technical understanding of discrimination then obscures the fact that evaluations and attributions—including conceptual ones—necessitate precise definitions of categories and thus rely on distinct precision rather than contextual interpretation. However, these interpretations play a role in decoding the patterns the AI produces when data becomes knowledge. Instead of presenting a bird’s eye view that proposes complete knowability, AI works 8 Michael Klipphahn-Karge et al. with reductive systems that continuously negates or subsumes multiplicity and ambivalence, codifying it into this or that identifiable norm. The use of AI is therefore always oriented towards a normative structuring of data sets, which in turn is often historically based on the exclusion of marginalised positions. In a striking example, the author, filmmaker and artist Hito Steyerl shows how racisms, stereotypes, and structural inequalities can bias data sets even if the AI presents factually true forms of knowledge that could be considered as new information: When leading technology consulting firm Booz Allen, which evaluates and distributes security infrastructure for the US government amongst other clients, examined the demographic information of a luxury hotel chain, it turned out that many young people from Middle Eastern and North African countries were staying there and were booked into the consistently high-priced locations, which were spread all over the world. As Steyerl writes, the company did not trust its data analysis and dismissed the information as an error in the algorithm: The demographic finding was dismissed as dirty data—a messed up and worthless set of information—before someone found out that, actually, it was true. Brown teenagers, in this worldview, are likely to exist. Dead brown teenagers? Why not? But rich brown teenagers? This is so improbable that they must be dirty data and cleansed from your system! (Steyerl 2016, n.p.) Such distortions of the result of a supposedly representative survey reveal an inappropriate distinction, even if the calculation procedure is factually correct: a specific characteristic is understood as an irrelevant miscalculation due to an incorrect reading and evaluation of meaning. Such miscalculations may concern empirical knowledge: Black people are not primates and that equation has a genealogy grounded in white supremacy and racial capitalism. However, it can also lead to seemingly sensible conclusions that reveal problematic situations: When women were previously underrepresented in a certain labour market, this should not lead to an equation that they are not suited for employment in these markets in future. This example shows that such a phenomenon cannot be countered with a mere “more” of data, to make the technical basis for calculation more accurate. Steyerl’s observation shows that although data are available, they are (or can be) deleted, classified as false or ignored, and thus a reactionary moment is inherent to the codification of cultural evidence and its transformation into knowledge. What initially reveals itself as a technical procedure—the devaluation and revaluation of data characteristics—is historically bound and socio-politically determined. Power Jutta Weber (2005) identifies a “gendering” of technology and machines, an observation that goes beyond technical discrimination or bias. While the Introduction 9 this present is, first and foremost, speculative, minor, and fragmented, needing to come together through cutting-apart, as Karen Barad might say. It is this becoming-together that is formative for a reading of AI in Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss’ argument. Building upon an acknowledgement that AI is not accurate, but immersive, environmental and constantly creating excess, the chapter posits Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation and its cinematic adaptation as a central imaginary that reworks AI as immersive, wild, and queer. In such a reading, the wildness that VanderMeer describes is posited as the refusal of algorithmic categorisation and accuracy, to instead point out the constant productions of excess and a different form of agency and non-subjectivity that these excesses might signal towards. At the same time, the article questions whether these excessive infrastructures themselves are not currently under threat, as AI becomes affective and emotional, thus once again formalising queer wildness into a capturable form. Carsten Junker looks at contemporary engagement and tinkering with AI through literary imaginaries produced within cyberfeminist manifestos. The chapter identifies a tension between the disruptive agendas of these manifestos, their emancipatory rhetorical promises, conceptual innovations and critical claims on the one hand, and the repetitiveness of the generic conventions these texts mobilise on the other. The paper highlights a contradiction that can be observed in the authors’ use of the manifesto as a form: while they use this literary form to postulate novelty and call for disruption—thus formally and propositionally actualising the manifesto—the critical and queer potential of the genre is neutralised by its iterative use, thus potentially limiting how AI, as the subject of their proposed disruption, is reimagined and distributed. Johannes Bruder explores selective inclusions and exclusions that underlie the operations of AI. Starting from the premise that epistemologies of Big Data and the operations of AI are incompatible with queerness, and building on insights into the functions of autistic subjectivity and cognition in the context of AI, Bruder points to the function of autism as an Other that is constitutive of AI. At the same time, he shows that autistic individuals were and are already an essential part of the cognitive infrastructure of real existing AI—whether as test objects, coders, or data workers. In this way, Bruder challenges the forcible inclusion and definition of autistic subjectivity and cognition as a basis of AI. Neuroqueerness is conceived as a performative response to selective inclusion and exclusion that autistic individuals are subject to in social contexts. The forcible and necessary inclusion of certain bodies to produce AI narratives is also a matter of concern for speculating on its ambivalent inclusion, and Bruder identifies a paradoxical situation of the (neuro-)queer that both fixates and ambiguates AI’s relation to queer potential. The anthology is tied together by a final contribution by Os Keyes, which serves as a conclusion. In this final chapter, Keyes gives an outlook into gaps and slippages that still need to be addressed, as well as proposing emergent qualities of the volume. 16 Michael Klipphahn-Karge et al. Notes 1 Achille Mbembe has developed the term “necropolitics” to describe the ability to decide who can live and who can die (cf. Mbembe 2011). Here, queerness is both identified and eradicated through the Gay Bomb—its targets become “fags,” the gay body is identified in death, in being hit by the gay bomb. 2 Safiya Noble (2018) illustrates how activists made public that a Google search for n-word house or n-word king during the Obama administration would lead to Google Maps taking users to the White House. This example illustrates that “biases” are not always—although very often—simply the result of omissions of specificity due to a belief in a supposed universal. Sometimes, these systems allow for individuals to exploit the working of these systems in targeted ways, while, as Noble reports, the companies responsible for regulating these results can resort to claiming “technological errors” and shun accountability. Bibliography Amaro, Ramon. 2022. The Black Technical Object. On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. London: Sternberg. Amoore, Louise. 2020. Cloud Ethics. 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Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs: New York. Introduction 19 Part I Genealogies 1 Queering intelligence A theory of intelligence as performance and a critique of individual and artificial intelligence Blair Attard-Frost Introduction Many researchers have recently noted that a significant obstacle to effectively measuring, managing, and governing artificial intelligence (AI) systems is the conceptual ambiguity of the term artificial intelligence (Bratton 2021; Taeihagh 2021; Crawford 2021; Mishra et al. 2020). Defining AI—and even more broadly, defining intelligence—has long been a theoretical challenge in cognitive science and AI discourses. Computer scientists Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter describe the challenge succinctly, stating that a “fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is” (2007a, 1). In a separate paper, Legg and Hutter (2007b) conduct a review of 71 definitions of intelligence, most of which are sourced from AI and psychology research. Their review indicates that intelligence is commonly associated with a variety of qualities such as learnability, adaptability, goal orientation, ability to solve problems, context sensitivity, and generalisability of knowledge. Because the definitions are derived from AI and psychology research, the “commonly occurring features” they observe place particular significance on environmental interaction, an agent’s ability to adapt to different environments, as well as an agent’s ability to “succeed or profit” in its goals (2007b, 9). These common features ultimately lead them to adopt a universal definition of intelligence: “Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments” (2007b, 9). However, by locating intelligence within specific environmental interactions, by attributing significance to goals that are dependent on the values of the agent, as well as by noting the necessity of measurement in recognising intelligence, the definition proposed by Legg and Hutter implies that intelligence emerges from three overarching qualities that they do not directly acknowledge. I describe those three qualities as embeddedness in action, value dependency, and measurability. Philosopher Reza Negarestani captures the significance of those three qualities in stating that “the question of ‘what intelligence is’ is inseparable from the question of what it must do and what its values are” (2018, 31). Intelligence is always attributed to an activity or set of DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957-3 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. activities that are valued as being “intelligent” through some measure of the activity’s quality. In this chapter, I argue that if intelligence must be measurable, valued, and embedded in action in order to be recognised as intelligence (as opposed to unintelligence or non-intelligence), then intelligence ought to be understood as a type of performance. My exploration is guided by three main questions: 1 Ontological: What is intelligence, and how can its presence be identified in action? 2 Critical: How can a definition of intelligence be queered? In other words, how might the dominant values underlying the definition be challenged such that alternative values can emerge? 3 Practical: What “downstream effects” (Mishra et al., 2020, 2) does a definition of intelligence have on the development, management, and governance of AI systems? I approach those questions by embracing the normative variability that often frustrates attempts to define intelligence. I do not define intelligence with reference to any functional abilities, values, or normative performance outcomes that are often described as being essential to intelligence such as learnability, adaptability, generalisability, goal orientation, or problemsolving. Instead, I define intelligence in functionally and normatively agnostic terms as value-dependent cognitive performance. Rather than centring the supposedly universal functions and norms underlying the many definitions surveyed by Legg and Hutter (2007b)—such as learning, adaptation, individual ability and agency, or success in problem-solving—defining intelligence as value-dependent cognitive performance centres interdependencies between agents, their environments, and their measurers in collectively constructing and measuring context-specific performances of intelligent action. For example, in a conventional view of intelligence, the intelligence of a customer service chatbot is measured with reference to the chatbot’s success as an individual agent in applying its cognitive abilities to solving customer query problems (e.g., the chatbot’s ability to process the customer’s natural language inputs, its ability to predict and learn from patterns in customer interactions, its ability to independently adapt to a wide variety of use cases or service contexts). In contrast, in defining intelligence as value-dependent cognitive performance, the intelligence of the chatbot must be measured with reference to its performance within a broader, interdependent cognitive system which also includes the values and abilities of the customers the chatbot serves, the values and abilities of the chatbot’s designers and developers, as well as the values and abilities of many other cognitive agents who collectively construct and measure the contexts in which the chatbot performs. In the next section, I establish a conceptual grounding for that definition by reviewing and synthesising perspectives on the ontology of cognition and the ontology of performance. I then propose a theory of intelligence and a 24 Blair Attard-Frost framework for analysing intelligence that frames intelligence within particular domains of action such as the actions involved in performing individual human intelligence or AI. I situate intelligence across cognitive, normative, and performative dimensions of analysis that correspond to the embeddedness, value dependency, and measurability of intelligence. In the “Queering intelligence” section, I propose queering as a method of unsettling dominant perspectives and exploring alternative perspectives within any domain of intelligence. I then conduct a brief analysis of two influential domain-specific theories of intelligence: one from the domain of individual human intelligence, and one from the domain of AI. I then outline a set of exploratory questions that challenge each theory’s assumptions about which cognitive, normative, and performative qualities constitute individual human intelligence and AI. I conclude in the “Re-imagining intelligence” section by describing the implications of those exploratory questions for future ontological, critical, and practical studies of intelligence and AI. Intelligence as performance Cognition If intelligence is a quality of cognitive activity, then an understanding of what intelligence is must begin with an understanding of what cognition is. From the 1990s and into the 2000s, cognitive sciences along with many fields of social study began an ecological turn. This turn upended the traditional cognitivist understanding of cognition as a rigidly individualistic and purely embrained phenomenon, pointing instead toward new cognitivists that, taken together, have re-imagined cognition as a generalised information-processing phenomenon that is enacted by and distributed throughout complex, interdependent systems of minds, brains, bodies, and environments (exemplified by the work of Varela et al. 1991; Rogers and Ellis 1994; Hutchins 1996, 2010; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Hollan et al. 2000; Bateson 2000; Thompson 2010; Menary 2010). Literary critic and posthumanist theorist N. Katherine Hayles synthesises these new cognitive theories with decades of empirical work at the intersection of cognitive psychology, cognitive biology, neuroscience, and AI. Hayles argues for a posthumanistic ontology of cognition that decentres human cognition in favour of a more extensible ontology that can be applied to all living and nonliving agencies. Accordingly, Hayles describes cognition as “a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (2017, 22). Crucially to her ontology, Hayles explains how recent research on the interplay of cognition and consciousness has revealed that conscious cognitive activities (e.g., symbolic reasoning, linear thinking, self-reflection, voluntary memory recall) are informed by nonconscious cognitive activities that operate outside of conscious awareness (e.g., maintenance of sensory coherence across time, involuntary memory recall, as well some of the learning and recall processes involved in pattern recognition). Hayles characterises the relationship Queering intelligence 25 cannot simply be decoupled from the values and abilities of the audience, for the performance itself is a showing-doing that unfolds according to their shared values and abilities. As well, cognition is not a rigidly individualised and embrained phenomenon as the traditional cognitivist view once held. Cognitive activity and ability in humans are socially and ecologically distributed across loosely bounded cognitive systems, which include complex networks of human-human interaction, human-technology interaction, and human-environment interaction. Yet, as psychologists Gary L. Canivez and Eric A. Youngstrom (2019) demonstrate in their criticism of Carroll’s model—as well as other psychometric models and instruments that Carroll’s model has been synthesised with—the dominant psychometric mechanisms for measuring human intelligence remain deeply committed to an individualistic account of cognition. With its focus on the cognitive ability of individuals rather than of groups or other social systems, cognitive individualism naturally lends itself to the ableist tendencies of capitalist individualism. Under capitalist individualism, the pathology of disability is traced to a supposedly innate weakness of the individual in contributing to economic productivity, rather than to the inability of the socio-economic systems surrounding the individual to commit necessary resources to supporting the individual’s needs, enhancing their abilities, and improving their quality of life (Mitchell and Snyder 2015. Galer 2012; Russell and Malhotra 2002). By taking a rigidly individualistic view of intelligence rather than a more systemic or mutualistic view, theories of human intelligence often foreclose the possibility of achieving cognitive complementarity or performance improvement from well-designed and wellmediated human-human and human-technology interactions. For example, in many social situations, an individual’s cognitive performance can be enhanced by using information stored on a mobile device to support in memory recall, by using a software application or other device to enhance their sensory abilities, or by receiving linguistic support in completing a task from an interpreter or translator. Artificially constraining the performance of human cognition to an in vitro testing situation—one that is atomised, standardised, disintermediated, and disembedded from social and ecological action—is not an accurate reproduction of how human cognition is performed in vivo. Artificial intelligence The most famous ontology of AI is perhaps that of Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, in which the intelligence of a computer system is tested through its exchange of text messages with a man and a woman. To win the game and thus be judged as “intelligent,” the computer must be able to imitate human intelligence by differentiating the man from the woman. To do this, the computer must correctly interpret the meaning of gender-performative messages such as “my hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about 32 Blair Attard-Frost nine inches long” (1950, 434). At first glance, Turing’s understanding of AI shares many features with an understanding of intelligence as valuedependent cognitive performance. The assigning of a gender differentiation task to the computer is especially notable: the task is a multifaceted and intra-active phenomenon, involving not only the computer’s attempt to perform cognition according to human social and linguistic norms, but also the man and the woman attempting to perform the social norms of masculinity or femininity in such a way as to convince the computer of their wo/manhood. The ability of the man and the woman to perform cognition according to socially situated norms of gendered action is being tested just as much as the computer’s ability to perform cognition according to socially situated norms of intelligent action. Additionally, Turing correctly does not locate intelligence in the technologies of the computer system itself, but rather, in the quality of its socially embedded actions. For Turing, intelligence is a property of the humanlike cognitive activities the system attempts to imitate, such as sensing, thinking about, learning from, and making meaning from its conversations with the man and woman. However, upon closer analysis of its normative assumptions, Turing’s ontology of AI appears deeply committed to anthropocentric and utilitarian values in its framing of intelligence. Indeed, the very premise of the Imitation Game is anthropocentric: computer systems ought to imitate the behaviour of humans because the behaviour of humans is intrinsically worthy of imitation. This assumption instals human intelligence as a supreme domain of intelligence that all other imaginable domains of intelligence ought to be measured against and aspire to. Unfortunately, implicit anthropocentric values in the vein of Turing’s are common in AI discourses and ontologies. Religious studies of AI have traced those values to the Judeo-Christian assumption of an anthropocentric universe in which man represents the height of God’s creation, and thus, the form and function of man is thought to be intrinsically desirable (Ferrando, 2019; Geraci, 2010). Critics of recent developments in AI have called the intrinsic value of human cognition into question. For example, Asp notes that the human activities responsible for the development of dangerous AI systems reveal that human intelligence in the space of AI development is often “compulsively and irrationally driven” by market forces (2019, 64). Crogan (2019) characterises the development of military AI applications as an instance of “emergent stupidity,” a phenomenon in which humans engage in nominally “intelligent” cognitive activity to automate decision-making processes, even though those automated processes may eventually become so fast and so complex that human decision-makers will no longer have the intelligence needed to reliably control them. In these examples, human cognitive activity can be interpreted as intelligent only within an extremely narrow performance context, such as reaping short-term profits or efficiently destroying an enemy on a battlefield. But in a broader performance context that includes a broader range of values and outcomes, these “intelligent” activities may reveal themselves to be highly Queering intelligence 33 self-destructive and unintelligent. Favouring human intelligence as the ideal, default model for AI in all situations encourages the designers and developers of AI systems to evade critical analysis of the values and biases that often underwrite human cognition and human decision-making. Utilising AI systems to advance unintelligent human decision-making suggests that there are not only anthropocentric values underlying the systems, but also utilitarian values. Just like in the domain of individual human intelligence, perceptions of economic utility tend to have a significant influence in determining what kind of cognitive activities performed by machines are deemed to be “intelligent” versus “unintelligent.” Turing believes it could be technically possible to design a machine for the simple purpose of enjoying the taste of a dessert, but he dismisses any attempt to make such a machine as “idiotic” (1950, 448). Turing dismisses the idea of the dessert-eating machine not because of any technical impossibility, but because of a perceived lack of utility value in the cognitive activities associated with dessert-enjoying. At first glance, this hypothetical dessert-eating machine seems like little more than a droll side note in Turing’s argument. However, this statement not only tells much about Turing’s epistemic values in developing AI systems—favouring reasoning and problem-solving over sensing and experiencing—but also about his beliefs regarding which qualities fundamentally constitute intelligence. Turing clearly regards AI as a performance involving the imitation of human intelligence, but more subtly, he also seems to expect that any intelligent activities performed by a machine must necessarily be activities that offer some kind of economic utility to humans. Nonutilitarian activities are assumed to be non-intelligent by default. With utility maximisation as a norm, committing resources to a machine only to allow it to explore its own sensual desires would certainly seem to be “idiotic,” unless we could somehow utilise the machine’s performance of dessert-eating to solve an economic problem. If the machine were successfully used as a taste-tester in some product design activities conducted by a food manufacturer, would its cognitive performance then suddenly shift from “unintelligent” to “intelligent?” Forcing utilitarian values on AI performance binds “intelligent action” to a pre-critical conception of “economically useful action.” In a more critical analysis, the values imposed on the performance of AI systems can create harmful expectations for the broader cognitive systems that the AI systems have agency within. If it is “idiotic” for a machine to indulge in sensual pleasures such as dessert-eating, then it also follows that it is idiotic for a person to indulge in the same pleasures—unless their pleasure-seeking can somehow be utilised to produce economic value. Exploratory questions In Table 1.3, the main concerns raised throughout the preceding analysis are compiled and arranged according to the domains and dimensions of 34 Blair Attard-Frost Table 1.3 A compiled list of exploratory questions pertaining to the cognitive, normative, and performative dimensions of individual human intelligence and AI Domains of Intelligence Dimensions of Intelligence Cognitive Normative Performative Individual Human Intelligence • Why should/can cognition be understood as separable from social action and technological mediation? • What expectations do dominant politics, economics, and cultures place on the individual? • How do those expectations shape the individual’s cognitive activity? • What is lost by measuring intelligence based on an individual’s linear reasoning or problem-solving performance rather than other expressions of cognitive performance? • Why is human intelligence typically measured based on individualist values? What alternative value systems and measurement mechanisms might be possible? Artificial Intelligence • Why should/can cognition in AI systems be understood as technologically situated but not socially situated? • Why should human cognition be imitated by machines? • What properties of human cognition might be undesirable for machines to imitate? • Why should machine cognition be treated as a utility for humans? What alternative forms of human-AI relations might be possible? • How might some performance measures for AI systems (e.g., accuracy, speed, productivity, efficiency) reproduce harmful norms? What alternative measures might be possible? Queering intelligence 35 intelligence they correspond to. Following Light’s (2011) understanding of queering as space-making, the questions are deliberately left unresolved so as to create new discursive spaces for alternative perspectives and values in future research. These are critical, exploratory questions—they are intended to generate problems rather than solutions. Re-imagining intelligence These exploratory questions indicate that there is a sizable agenda for future ontological, critical, and practical studies of intelligence and AI. Beginning at the ontological level, the above questions suggest a need to continue carrying out this chapter’s systematic re-imagining of what intelligence is. A theory of intelligence as value-dependent cognitive performance will be useful in that pursuit, as the theory and framework presented here can be applied to any imaginable domain of intelligence. In the domain of AI, there are many other recent perspectives which will also be useful in imagining new ontologies of and critical approaches to AI. In recent years, social constructionist perspectives on the development and use of AI systems have gained currency in AI discourses. These perspectives suggest that the cognitive activities involved in AI comprise far more than the information-processing associated with data, algorithms, software, machine learning models, and other computational resources. Socially constructed AI breaks from the ontological assumptions of Turing by re-imagining AI as a globally integrated and technologically mediated cognitive system that evolves within diverse networks of cognitive agents, values, social structures and environments, as well as tangible and intangible resources (see for example: Bratton 2021; Crawford 2021; Crawford and Joler, 2018). Additionally, reimaginings of AI are emerging that draw upon Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to break from the anthropocentrism of Turing. Applying the knowledge systems of the Hawaiian, Cree, and Lakota peoples, Lewis et al. (2018) re-imagine AI systems as comprising “an extended ‘circle of relationships’ that includes the non-human kin—from network daemons to robot dogs to artificial intelligences (AI) weak and, eventually, strong—that increasingly populate our computational biosphere.” The Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group have published a position paper which presents a variety of perspectives on the theory and practice of AI systems based on the cultural knowledge of many different Indigenous peoples and tribes (Lewis et al. 2020). These re-imaginings of AI decenter the human from AI-human relations, valuing kinship and mutual stewardship of the planet rather than subordination, extractivism, and utility maximisation. At the practical level, it is necessary to continue re-imagining what intelligence ought to do and how those goals can be achieved. Many practical re-imaginings of AI are already keenly focused on either rehabilitating utilitarian AI or moving beyond utilitarian values altogether. A number of AI ethics guidelines and performance measures have been proposed that 36 Blair Attard-Frost emphasise values such as community (Häußermann and Lütge 2021), care (Yew 2021), justice (Le Bui and Noble 2020), and sustainability (Dauvergne 2020). A significant practical challenge will be to combine those values with new ontologies of AI and operationalise those values in AI systems, applications, and governance structures. This may also entail a re-imagining of the ethics and application of intelligence more generally. Marxist critics of AI and labour automation have theorised that AI systems are merely new appendages of political-economic structures such as “cognitive capital” (Moulier-Boutang 2012) and “means of cognition” (Dyer-Witheford et al. 2019) that were formed around human cognitive labour prior to the advent of mechanisation or digital technologies. A decolonial critique of computational and cognitive sciences has been voiced by Birhane and Guest (2021), who observe that cognitive sciences are predominantly driven by Western white cis-male value systems. To challenge those values, the authors call for a re-imagining of the field’s scientific, managerial, and pedagogical practices, which to this day often reinforce oppression by making pseudoscientific assumptions about the intrinsic value of historically oppressed peoples. 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Characterised by slogans such as “Make America Great,” attacks on reproductive rights and freedoms such as the recent Dobbs decision, apocalyptic and evangelical religious fundamentalism, and violent forms of xenophobia and racism, the current Right, and particularly the Republican Party, appears to extend older histories of race, nation, and sex, while using the latest in media technics and propaganda. The focus of this chapter is to interrogate this intersection. While the relationship between the Right, post-truth, suggestion algorithms, and social media has long been documented, rarely has there been extensive investigation of how ideas of choice and freedom become recast in a manner amenable to machine automation and to the particular brands of post-1970s alt-right discourses. An analysis of this history demonstrates a new logic within algorithmic and artificial intelligent rationalities that intersects with, but is also not merely a recursive repetition, of earlier histories of eugenics and racism. This situation provokes serious challenges to political action, but also to our theorisation of histories of race and sex capitalism. In this essay I will turn to discuss the history of the neural net, and its relationship to economics and finance, then I will turn to asking about the implications for the present. The question of population Economy has long been about the production and reproduction of social orders. Since Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, economics, as a discipline and practice in the West, has been grounded in population and by extension species and sexual reproduction. For Malthus, population is the fundamental infrastructure for the economy. But population could also threaten economic prosperity. Malthusianism posits that populations, and bodies, are only DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957-4 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. valuable as long as they produce labour beyond their metabolism. Populations that grow too large become invaluable and threaten national survival due to overwhelming the carrying capacity of their environment. The wealth of nations is thus contingent on managing the size of populations. This is clearly a racist and eugenicist argument. By deduction, populations are valuable only insofar as they are profitable, and therefore certain groups deemed invaluable can be eliminated (Malthus 1986; Halpern and Mitchell forthcoming). However, since the late 1930s, but in practice really only since the postWorld War II period, economic discourse has been supplanted by a new discussion about markets not as matching supply and demand but instead acting as data processors. The idea of a market was recast in terms of communication and information. This is one of the hallmarks of certain branches of neoliberalism, which is why such theories are so closely affiliated with both computation and communication science and finance—most of which runs on computers (Mirowski 2002). In an essay that looms large over the history of contemporary conservative and libertarian economic thought, Friedrich Hayek inaugurated a new concept of the market: The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources-if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilisation of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality. (Hayek 1945, 519–520; author’s emphasis) This was no small claim. Human beings, Hayek believed, were subjective, incapable of reason, and fundamentally limited in their attention and cognitive capacities. If economics had imagined a liberal agent with a Cartesian mind, making reasoned calculations on perfect data sets, this was something else entirely. At the heart of Hayek’s conception of a market was the idea that no single subject, mind, or central authority can fully represent and understand the world. He argued, “The ‘data’ from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind […] and can never be so given” (Hayek 1945, 519–520). Only markets can learn at scale, and suitably evolve to coordinate dispersed resources and information in the best way possible. Neural “freedoms” 41 rather than symbolic logic” (Rosenblatt 1962, 388). What is key here is that Rosenblatt insists that the combination of neural nets might offer possibilities for learning that individual isolated logic gates/neurons might not. More importantly, in keeping with his model of perception and memory, the networks agglomerate patterns or ideas at the level of groups. The brain does not hold representations or images within it, only learned patterns of associated firing upon certain stimuli. Therefore the model needs to be statistical and symbolic (Rosenblatt 1958, 288–289). The perceptron model suggests that machine systems might achieve in perception what individual humans could not. Though each human individual is limited to a specific set of external stimuli to which he or she is in fact exposed, a computer perceptron can by contrast, in that it needs training sets, draw on data that are the result of judgements and experiences of not just one individual, but rather large populations of human individuals (Rosenblatt 1962, 19). I emphasise the notion of evolution and probability in the thoughts of both economists and technologists because both such notions of learning forwarded ideas that systems might change and adapt non-consciously. The central feature of these models was that small operations done on parts of a problem might agglomerate as a group into more than their parts, and solve problems not through representation but through action. In this, both Hayek and Rosenblatt take from theories of communication and information, particularly from cybernetics that posit communication in terms of thermodynamics. Systems at different scales are probabilistically related to their parts. Calculating each individual component will not predict the act of the entire system. 2 Therefore, systems cannot be represented or fully predicted. While not truly possible, this contradictory need to evade “representation” continues to fuel our desire for unsupervised learning in nets and the agglomeration of ever larger data sets. The data would, in theory, drive the thought. Hayek, himself, espoused an imaginary about this data-rich world that could be increasingly calculated without (human) consciousness. He was arguably very fond of quoting Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that “it is a profoundly erroneous truism […] that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them” (Moore 2016, 50). 3 The perceptron, widely held to be the forerunner of contemporary deep learning with nets, is the technological manifestation of a more widespread reconfiguration and reorganisation of human subjectivity, physiology, psychology, and economy. And curious and conflicting hope that technical decision-making made at the scale of populations not through governments might ameliorate the danger of populism or the errors of human judgement. The net became an idea and a technique to be able to scale from within the mind to the planetary networks of electronic trading platforms and global 48 Orit Halpern markets. In our present, this embrace of shock has perhaps never been so visibly demonstrated as during the COVID pandemic in the volatilities of the markets. What I am stressing in making these correlations is how these new ideas about decision-making through populations of neurons reformulated economic, psychological, and computational practices and experimental methods. In doing so, the idea of networked intelligence became the dominant ideology that made machine learning and economic decision-making commensurate and part of the same system. Ironically, however, the very problems of false patterns, delusions, and noise that threatened the stability of such a self-organising system, were the grounds for an increased demand to introduce more computation into the environment. Rather than safeguarding networks by perhaps fostering different types of systems—the state separated from the economy, or psychology separated from computation—these crises in fact drove for the increased assimilation of more territory into calculation. More data, maybe even noise, was the answer. The less that enters consciousness, the more “operations” that can be made without “thought,” the better. In fact, by 1986, conceptions of the markets increasingly moved from ideals of perfect homeostasis and efficiency, to models of extreme volatility and noisiness. At the height of the introduction of algorithmic trading and derivative instruments to the market, scientist turned financial guru, Fischer Black, one of the creators of the automated derivatives market wrote an important essay on noise. The effects of noise on the world, and on our views of the world, are profound. Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets. (Black 1986, 529) His famous article “Noise Trading” formalised a new discourse in finance and posited that we trade and profit from misinformation and information overload. By the 1980s, noise, complexity, and entropy were no longer the figures to battle against, they were factors to bet upon. The overwhelming concern with control over the future through the elimination of entropy that characterised the sciences of communication, command, and control in the 1950s had given way to a new imagination. In this world chance, and noise, were no longer “devils,” to cite cybernetician Norbert Wiener, but rather media. 4 Entropy The very feature that made such systems evolutionary and emergent, however, was also their terminal point of failure. Neural network researchers and Neural “freedoms” 49 theoreticians found two remaining and inseparable problems, both related to the integrity of the subject and the residual problem of perception; one concerned excess data and the second adaptability or plasticity. If human brains could be trained, how did human beings maintain their sanity? How did nets know if they are being trained on errors? Or manipulated? In short, inundated with new information all the time, how did systems evade simply dissolving into entropic incoherence? Or, for the human, evade psychosis; understood at the time as the inability to situate the subject in time or space, or to recognise other human beings or things in the environment as separate from the self. Early in his work, Hebb remarked that the “stability” of learning was sometimes maladjusted to “perception”; that is to say that once a net is trained how does it maintain its training and not constantly change in accordance with new data? This was later labelled the “sensitivity-stability” problem. Systems that were too sensitive to new inputs became unstable and lost stability of “meaning.” In other words, they could not pay attention, they suffer, in anachronistic parlance, an attention deficit disorder (Hebb 1949, 15). Rosenblatt also discovered that errors in weighting might propagate and exacerbate errors, and positive feedback might lead to oscillation and instability; much of the perceptron model is dedicated to correction of errors including through back-propagation (Rosenblatt 1962). Neural network researchers only refracted a broader discourse repeated by cyberneticians, political scientists, social scientists, and economists—what if networked feedback loops fed the wrong positive feedback (for example in nuclear confrontations) leading to network instability (and by proxy social) and even terminal failure (Halpern 2015; Edwards 1997)? In the post-war period, economists also obsessed about how to avoid the sort of market failures (shocks if we will) that had led to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe after the First World War. Within the context of the Cold War, such historical memories of market failure came adjoined with new concerns about the future survival of democratic and capitalist societies (Mehrling 2005, 20; Amadae 2003). Haunting the entire fantasy of the self-organising and learning system, therefore, was an ongoing problem of decision-making and politics. Were populations sound decision-makers? A history of populist democratic fascism or rabid anti-communism might suggest otherwise. Richard Hofstadter’s pathbreaking analysis of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communism stands out in this regard. This “paranoid style,” he argued at the time, understands the world in terms of patterns of behaviour among different targeted groups, overstating the possibility of prediction and control of the future. In short, too much data might also provide ecological fallacies and false patterns (Hofstadter 1996). However, such paranoias provoked problems for the concept of the “invisible hand.” Economists, like technocrats, had to provide new concepts 50 Orit Halpern of decision-making that might evade the determinism of conspiracy, but still legitimate the purported democracy of the market. As Alfred Moore has noted, while Hayek never directly discussed “conspiracy” and rarely paranoia, the economist played: an important yet ambivalent [role] in the development of [anticonspiratorial] political epistemology. Although he doesn’t use the term “conspiracy theory”, he sets his entire theoretical project against conceiving complex orders as though they were designed or planned, and he seeks always to show how patterned orders that look like they must have been designed or planned, in fact arose through anonymous and unwitting processes of emergence and evolution. (Moore 2016, 48) Hayek’s obsession was thus modelling the world as one of self-organising adaptive systems to counter the idea of planned and perfectly controllable political (in his mind totalitarian) orders. The market here takes on the sense of almost divinity, capable of chance and emergence, but never through consciousness or planning. Evolution stands here as against willed action and the reasoned decisions of individual humans. More critically, emerging in the backdrop of civil rights, and calls for racial, sexual, and queer forms of justice and equity, the negation of any state intervention or planning (say affirmative action) takes naturalised form here as an evolutionary necessity. Pro-action in courts or government becomes conspiratorial and regressive; counter adaptation and change. The fundamental question becomes: if there is a pattern, is it the market organising freely, or is it the deep state subverting the interests of freedom? It’s impossible to know and it is this impossibility that has been seized by the Right. Our perceptual present These historical debates thus have great implications for our present. Hayek argued that the democratic spirit, “a new unwillingness to submit to any rule or necessary the rationale of which man does not understand.” As Moore puts it: “This, we might say, is one effect of the expansion of the franchise, and of the Enlightenment demand to submit to authority only when one can make its reasons one’s own reasons. A demanding standard” (Moore 2016, 9). And a destructive one for the economy in this formulation. Hayek echoed the fears of many liberals in the post-war period that in complex societies individuals are unable to singularly grasp the reasons why things are happening to them, whether unemployment or bad health, or any other life event. Unable to grasp complexity, perhaps we might say unable to contend with a surfeit of data, or with noisy environments, democratic subjects become psychotic and paranoid, amenable to conspiracy and blame their distress on Others. Hayek had an “environmental conception of conspiracy” (Moore 2016, 52). Neural “freedoms” 51 It is perhaps irony of history that the answer to this problem of overinundation and data surplus appeared to be a turn to cybernetics, new models of networked cognition, and ultimately perhaps even a new model of machine learning that might indeed learn from the distributed intelligence of millions, and now billions of people. At the same time, such technologies make it impossible to encounter the very legitimate sources of pain in contemporary societies whether induced by structural racism, poverty, disease or environmental degradation. This returns us to our present. If Hayek and Hebb are still worried about liberal subjects and objectivity, we might ask what concerns animate our contemporary networks? Shock has been normalised to be managed through our electronic networks. If “shock” for Naomi Klein was a mechanism to destabilise systems and nations to allow the entry of neoliberal governance, we might extend her observation to recognise that now it has become a tool to maintain existing political economy and encourage the growth and proliferation of machine learning networks, psychological self-management, and algorithmic finance. Shock is no longer understood as trauma but rather as self-fashioning, the quantitative self, and wellness. I opened this essay arguing that in the face of political catastrophe, whether Fascism, Communism, or McCarthyism, the neoliberal and engineering response was to imagine a world of self-organising systems. A world where the future never had to be imagined or planned, thus evading any question of to what or for what anyone might organise or plan. It is also a world where a new nature has emerged as one of the neural nets: This capitalism still relies on a biological underpinning and the neuron is a biological mechanism. Both a material and theoretical concept, the ideal of the market as a machine, is fundamentally based on the re-assertion that markets and ubiquitous computing are “natural” because they model themselves as physiological, and grounded in human brains. This “natural” which is to say technological neural world is one full of data but also uncertainty. There is a crisis of evidence and objectivity that the Right has now captured to attack the possibility of planning, regulation, or legislation against disease or to defend diversity. On the one hand, the uncertainty over the future of pandemics or the climate crisis becomes a cause to do nothing. There is not enough data to make a decision, the data cannot perfectly predict the future, no one is objective, and therefore if the future cannot be perfectly controlled any effort to do so is flawed and invalid. In this case, certain corporate and government institutions become, to use historian of science Naomi Oreske’s parlance, “merchants of doubt.” They profit off of the uncertainty inherent in complex systems, and have made this uncertainty an economic and political strategy to legitimate their actions (or lack thereof as it may be). On the other hand, as public health ethicist Nicholas King has noted, there is a politics of evidence at play in, for example, pandemic responses. In the US, President Trump has made a career of critique of elitism and a 52 Orit Halpern general attack on scientific forms of evidence and evidence-based decisionmaking. An attack that has been substantiated by decades of neoliberal economic discourse. The uncertainty in this case within scientific forums only facilitates the legitimacy of his critique and allows the Right to transform the catastrophe into a war of ideologies to which Trump answers with authoritarian confidence as the best and most valid voice, while simultaneously invoking the concept that some (read black, female, queer, old, disabled) people should be sacrificed for the economy (King 2020). If Trump returns to authoritarianism, then we also see a return to divinity and evangelisms. If one cannot plan, and one cannot predict the future statistically, then perhaps one must recuperate historical forms of divination and managing futures? Business historian and theorist, Joshua Ramey, has argued precisely this, saying that neoliberalism “retains its ideological appeal partially due to the way collective faith in market forces validates neoliberal ideology as a disavowed form of divination” (Ramey 2015, 1). This link to faith is abetted by a history of free market discourse aligned against Communism and Atheism. The technical production of uncertainty as the basis for profit has become an engine to return nostalgic fantasies of both religion and control. This poses feminists and all of us seeking political representation and diversity with a certain quandary. On the one hand, the very disavowal of the social and the political as the site of deciding futures, to be replaced by technology, has opened the door to reactionary ideologies and the return of heteronormative and racist reproductive orders. Paranoid beliefs in patterns justify nostalgic desires for control by the patriarchy. The ideology of the network thus must be deconstructed and challenged. On the other hand, the neural net as an ideology and a technology has cyborg potentials in Haraway’s sense of the term. Value and economy could be possibly unmoored from direct relationships to heterosexual reproduction. Algorithmic and computational finance has histories in European colonialism, but also in other genealogies of machines, logic, and science; ones that reformulate markets around entropy, calculation, and relations between agents instead of ontologies. Minds, but also subjects, could be viewed as plastic. And the idea that collectivities might come together to create new worlds and orders could be mobilised. As cultural theorist Randy Martin has argued, rather than separating itself from social processes of production and reproduction, algorithmic finance actually demonstrates the increased inter-relatedness, globalisation, and socialisation of debt and precarity. By tying together disparate actions and objects into a single assembled bundle of reallocated risks to trade, the new market machines make us more indebted to each other. The political and ethical question thus becomes how we might activate this increased indebtedness in new ways, ones that are less amenable to the strict market logics of neoliberal economics (Martin 2014). Hayek, himself, gestured to this possibility within his own thoughts. Markets, he argued, demand difference, “From the fact that people are very Neural “freedoms” 53 different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time” (Hayek 1960, 150). With these words, he stated the fundamental dilemma of neoliberalism, to be free we must be put in relation to each other. But he also wavers, does liberty denote equal treatment, and therefore a generic law, or differential and situated treatment, which might denote planning or coercion? The response of neoliberal discourse has been to automate this relation thus obscuring its social character, and extract value from the differences between humans while maintaining that such relations emerge evolutionarily and thus are non-intentional but natural and necessary. Might this discourse be disrupted? Recalling the argument that “difference” is the foundation for “freedom” or “liberty” can we push this neoliberal imaginary until it folds? This tension might be the source of a possible “freedom” through relations if they are historically situated. The fantasy of an archive of processes of differentiation might be mobilised to new ends—mainly to recognise the permeable, political, and situated nature of social orders. The future, I argue, lies in recognising what our machines have finally made visible, what has perhaps always been there, mainly the sociopolitical nature of our seemingly natural thoughts and perceptions. In that all computer systems are programmed, and therefore planned, we are also forced to contend with the intentional and therefore changeable nature of how we both think and perceive our world. Notes 1 For histories of reason and rationality, as well as the economic decision maker see: Paul Erickson 2013, Foley 2002, Mirowski and Plehwe 2009. 2 For more on the influence of cybernetics and systems theories on producing notions of non-conscious growth and evolution in Hayek’s thought: Lewis 2016; Oliva 2016. 3 I am indebted to Moore’s excellent discussion for much of the argument surrounding Hayek, democracy, and information. This quote is from Hayek (1945). 4 For an extensive discussion of thermodynamics, stochastic processes, and control see the introduction of Norbert Wiener Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: M.I.T. Press, 1961); For further discussion also see: Halpern 2005; Wiener 1961; Galison 1994. Bibliography Amadae, S.M. 2003. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Black, Fischer. 1986. “Noise.” The Journal of Finance 41(3): 529–543. Edwards, Paul N. 1997. The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 54 Orit Halpern Erickson, Paul, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. 2013. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 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Press. 56 Orit Halpern 3 I spy, with my little AI How queer bodies are made dirty for digital technologies to claim cleanness Nishant Shah The year 2017 was a pivotal year for conversations around Artificial Intelligence (AI), gender, and sexuality. In their much reviled and heavily criticised experiment at Stanford University, machine learning and data scientists Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, trained machine learning algorithms to create a “sexual orientation detector” using 35,326 images from public profiles on a US dating website. They created composite faces, using an aggregate of images from self-identified straight, gay, or lesbian profiles, and claimed that based on this, their algorithm can now detect people’s sexuality with “more accuracy than human beings” (Kosinski and Wang 2017). 1 Their academic article is perhaps less ambitious and suggests that the AI, when compared to a data set of human detectors inferring sexuality by looking at a picture, is 81% of the time more effective at distinguishing between gay and straight men and 74% of the time for women. The media uproar that followed this claim was proportionate, both in the rejection of this claim as well as in warning against the weaponisation of AI technologies to even attempt such an experiment (Vincent 2017). Several authoritative voices spoke out against this experiment and its claims, with activists from gender and sexual advocacy groups as well as scholars from their own disciplines, debunking their experiment, showing the fault lines of their data sampling, revealing the biases of their analysis, and marking the latent queerphobia and heteronormative biases that are present in this research, which received huge attention because of the media that amplified it and the academic institute that housed and supported it (Levin 2017). The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and GLAAD immediately labelled this as “junk science” and reminded us that the idea of a “gaydar” and reducing human sexuality to perceived characteristics is both “dangerous and flawed.” Ashland Johnson, the director of public education and research at the HRC, said in a statement, Stanford should distance itself from such junk science rather than lending its name and credibility to research that is dangerously flawed and leaves DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957-5 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. sexist, and otherwise abusive language (Simonite 2020). While this in itself is not new, they show that these AI, trained on older text models, would be unable to account for, accommodate, or operationalise new languages, vocabularies, and expressions of diverse communities, and will always treat them as deviations. Thus, anti-sexist, anti-racist, and trans-positive languages which play with pronouns, new identities, and forms of solidarity will automatically be considered as “wrong” by these AI, which will then take it as an example of some communities perpetually being wrong and in need of correction. The affirmation of cleanliness is both an exercise of control and a blackboxing of technologies, despite the fact that we witness how computational technologies are ontologically and manifestly produced through multiple layers of contamination. A cursory look at algorithmic governance practices opens up a field of intentionality, bias, encoded discrimination, and amplified filtering that lead to the production of harm and violence without accountability and restitution (Chiu 2018). The obsolescence of databases, leap-frogging of technologies, and continued breaches and leaks of data and information belie the idea of immortal data and indeed present data and information infrastructure as fragile and prone to breakdown and manipulations. Especially in the world of self-learning algorithms and networks of correlation, we see our reliance on unexpected, undesigned, and unplanned-for variable queering models, producing states of exception, and leading to designed deviance which can neither be planned nor controlled. Cleanliness, then, is neither an attribute nor a condition of digital networks and their spaces. The foregrounding of cleanliness has to be seen as an attempt to clean bodies, information, data sets, and approaches that threaten the power, destabilise the status quo, and resist the benign narrative of computation that is being naturalised in our everyday practices of digitisation. Cleanliness has to be recognised as an active way by which resistant data and technology usage—queer data and usage—can be controlled, punished, and penalised in order for dominant narratives to be favoured. The detective AI technologies, based on their predictive models, present a certain narrative of cleanliness to create the dominant aesthetic of our computational times that reinforces this filtered, curated, cleaned digitality as the de facto mode of visualising and engaging with the digital. The construction of the dirty queer has to be seen in conjunction with this presentation of clean AI (Nenad et al. 2021). The conversation and the coconstitution of queerness as dirty and AI as clean is deeply intertwined, to an extent where we could argue that for AI to be clean, queerness will have to be dirty, and that the modelling and deployment of AI exploits the terrain of queer bodies, voices, practices, and phenomena to reinforce itself as clean in the face of undeniable data that these technologies are messy, leaky, and violently militant in their everyday practice. 64 Nishant Shah Queering AI The continued reproduction of cleanliness and dirtiness, as attributes of AI and queerness respectively, seems to be inescapable. The rhetoric of AI development as necessarily improving the human condition, but particularly removing the “unwanted” or “undesirable” structures of contamination and corruption, inevitably frames queerness as a site of detection, management, containment, and punishment, thus falling in a long legacy of technological refusal to recognise it as a legitimate subculture of lifestyle, and measuring it always as an aberration (Halperin 2014). Even when AI-driven implementations are geared towards developing queer alternatives and intentions, the ontological presumption of detection and removal, at the level of training data sets, correlative algorithms, and networks of circulation remains unmoved, thus reinforcing the idea that the logic of AI is unquestionable. Queering AI, then, cannot be merely about increasing the diversity of training data (Caliskan 2021), or curating algorithms towards inclusive networking, or putting checks and balances on computational networks in order to keep people safe (Nenad et al. 2021). While all of these are important, they are more post-facto implementations that are more oriented towards reduction of harm and diminishing the violence against Queer bodies that is structurally built into AI platforms and practices (Johnson 2021). A correction of AI’s deployment and intention (Hao 2019) is perhaps as futile as trying to de-weaponise a gun, because it reinforces that the way in which AI is being designed and coded is fine, and the only problem is with its implementation and structures of power who wield it (Katyal and Jung 2021). Instead, queering AI, I propose, is to change some fundamental ways by which we can recalibrate the very computational materiality and digital deployment of AI by changing the parameters through which it weaponises information against queer and other intersectional underserved communities. I have three speculative and material propositions which not only break away from the clean-dirty narrative deadlock but also puts forward demands and challenges of abandoning some of the most problematic practices of AI development and deployment in order to actually serve the needs of queer life and sociality. While these propositions are by no means exhaustive, they do offer an approach of how we might take fundamental building blocks of AI and queer them in order to create AI systems that are in their very nature aligned to queer inclusivity and safety. Queering the node: The collective as the origin of information At the heart of digital computation is the construction of nodes in a network. Nodes do not have a linear, comprehensive, origin story where it pre-exists the network and intention of information circulation. The Barabasi-Albert model (Barabasi 2015) of understanding scale-free networks in computational systems proposes a system that works on the ideas of growth and preferential attachment. Both of these ideas work on the concept of a node. I spy, with my little AI 65 In their model, the node does not have a value or an origin of its own but it accrues value through connecting with other nodes. In their preferential attachment theory, they argue that the more a node is connected, the more likely it is to receive new links. Dubbed in social theory as the Matthew Effect (Rigney 2010): “the rich get richer,” this preferential node analysis of contemporary social media networks proposes a radical breakthrough in understanding the impulses of AI deployment. Most AI work with this preferential attachment theory for their growth, establishing a positive feedback cycle between the node that is already in power and those who link back to it. Which means that AI networks have a clear idea of independent, discrete, and isolated nodes which will be favoured both in terms of amplification of their information as well as in growing their circulation in the favour of smaller, dissident, or less connected nodes. Scale-free AI networks thus insist that the value of information and its spread is proportional to the discrete and individual sources of information. It traces information, through all its social media spread, back only to its “origin sources,” thus creating a hierarchy of which node will be preferred in a space of conflict. This temporal quality, where new nodes are added to a network only one at a time, and reverse engineering collective information to individual nodes, is one of the most definitive ways by which dissident, dissonant, or critical nodes are either removed from the network or devalued in favour of the “origin source” which is seen as the most connected and hence the most authoritative source in the system. My first proposition for queering AI is to reject this model as the only viable one. While this model is a description of what happens in scale-free networks that are aimed for infinite growth, it doesn’t have to be the default model of all AI. In fact, replacing scale with intensity—thus measuring the affective and the emotional experience of being connected—might lead to a new kind of AI which makes space for treating nodes not only as equal but collective. The idea of making nodes not replaceable but coherent, and continually bleeding into each other, allows for a space of safety, anonymity, and dissidence, without persecution or being dropped out of a network. It resists the kind of experiments of detection which continue to make queerness an individual attribute and uses information shaped by more influential nodes to isolate and target individuals. Instead, it allows for a collective queer spectrum to emerge which will concentrate more on the co-creation of dynamic datasets. These will be valued through their collective origin rather than their connected spread—information becomes more valuable because multiple nodes create it, rather than being valued because multiple nodes circulate it. Leaning into fragmentation and omission The algorithmic violence of detection depends upon the premise of intelligibility. Digital intelligibility, which is, as Wendy Chun (2011) points out, a function of storage rather than memory, essentially means that the individual 66 Nishant Shah user is mined for data to create composite and discrete images and profiles for pattern recognition and eventual discrimination. The standard response to discriminatory AI has been to give it more information, expand its data sets, and allow for more people to interact with it. However, if the presumption that the AI can and will know everything about us is not shaken, then that AI eventually is going to enter into negotiations of harm (Biernesser et al. 2020) and the cruel algebra of survival, when it comes to decision-making. Recognising that the biggest role of AI—predictive, detective or otherwise— is in decision-making helps us understand that giving excessive data to AI is not going to resolve the problems. In fact, this was one of the core recommendations from the research team led by Timnit Gebru, where they argued that increasingly we are dealing with large models that defy description and documentation because they are too large to be described—just like a true scaled map of the world would be too large to be accommodated in the world as we know it—and this is leading to potentials for invasive AI manipulations and deployment. The fundamental problem about “not enough data” in the context of discriminatory AI is that it puts the onus of producing clean, robust, comprehensive data on the individual, at the same time divesting the human user of powers of negotiating and shaping the data. As queer artist Zach Blas suggests in his extraordinary performance that designed the “Fag Facial Recognition Mask” (2014), the biggest resistance to AI is not more data, but obfuscation and production of data that challenges the AI way of seeing things. Blas recommends that data be produced in a relationship of “concealment and imperceptibility” (ibid.), allowing for and naturalising data sets of emptiness, where the emptiness is not seen as a lack but as a resistance to the detection-driven violence it instigates. The lack of data disrupts the narrative of data reconciliation that produces discrete subjectivities that can be isolated, tracked, managed, and controlled. Within self-learning AI systems, the mechanics of hyperlinking perform causality or synthesis between two disparate objects within the computational networks. When AI algorithms encounter absence or illegible data, they make the decision to either link with a more legible or more viral data set, or set up a process of extreme scrutiny on the subject to mine their data to exhaustion. Naturalising fragmentation and omission, and calling for an AI to stop its decision-making when faced with an empty data set is one way by which the detection and contamination arguments can be stopped. Moving from fidelity to promiscuity AI models continue to be persistent in their narrative of contamination by aligning themselves to principles of fidelity, both in aesthetics and in computation. An AI model is presented as the most uncorrupted description of the reality that it is modelling. Based on principles of probability and making transparent the information that it is being shaped on, an AI model will I spy, with my little AI 67 always be nothing more than the data it parses and the network of relationships that is produced by the parsing of that data. An AI system, then, can never lie, because it doesn’t produce anything more than an aggregation of legible information and a decision based on the parameters set for resolving a crisis. AI models work and persist, despite their flaws, because their standard of “cleanliness” or dependability is fidelity. It is undeniable that AI models have near-perfect fidelity to the dataset that it is trained on and works upon. As a self-contained, logical, discrete system, there is very little information or data in that system that can be considered as unmapped, ambiguous, or difficult to understand. Even when the data is flawed, or the information is wrong, the informationality itself is clean and clear. Thus, AI systems might leak data, take wrong decisions, perpetuate violence, amplify discrimination, and make decisions that are flawed in real life, but are still perfect when measured in terms of fidelity. It is this adherence to fidelity, that allows for these systems to punish promiscuity and frame all ambiguity as promiscuous. In this equation, human realities are already messy, but the technological fear of promiscuity double binds queerness which is also often in contradiction to the heteronormative structures of clearly defined genders, relationships, and sociality. Queerness can sometimes be seen as a celebration of promiscuity—not just a sexual polyamory but a production of kinship, networks, communities, and connections that transcend the traditional structures of marriage, family, and inheritance, which are often violent and exclusionary of queer folk. The insistence that queerness now be constructed on structures of fidelity and be considered as dirty if it does not follow the clearly defined boxes of gender, sexuality, and togetherness (Albert and Delano 2021), emphasises the narrative that Queerness is something that has to be managed by AI systems which, with all their problems, retain high and wireless fidelity to the clean taxonomy of their data sets. Producing AI which is promiscuous in nature—allowing for variable and forgetful data, neurotic and irrational algorithms, and producing connections which are not descriptions of the present but proposals for the future—makes way for a different kind of AI that supports queerness as a desirable state of being. Instead of modelling queerness for detection and cleaning, we can infiltrate AI systems to make queerness its ontology, and letting go of the control and punish power structures that underlie contemporary AI development (Wareham 2021). The idea of promiscuous AI also makes our bodies joyfully contaminated by desires, aspirations, longing, and belonging, not as a rejection of computational networks but as a deep embrace of it. In this we realise that the new bodies that are being constructed—through regimes of computation and lifestyle, through disciplines of labour and valuation—can be more free and experimental. This sets up a process where we are not looking at queerness and AI as contradictory, but as reconstitutive, using the intersections of the digital and the human to reconsider how future queer AI can be developed and produced. 68 Nishant Shah Contaminatedly, yours—Or why this is a non-dictionary word that will still be used in this title It is the ambition of this essay, to present contamination or dirtiness, which is often constructed as a queer attribute that can then be resolved by clean and discrete AI technologies, as an ontology for queering AI, to both exploit and expand upon the processes of co-constitution and co-contamination to think through the nature of evidence, historicity, personhood, and embodiment. The attempt is to overturn the idea of the digital as clean and the queer body as contaminated or something that needs to be detected and sanitised. In evaluating the detective, predictive models of AI and their operations on queerness, I show that our responses cannot merely be correction and improvement, but a recognition that queerness is needed to be dirty for AI technologies to model and present themselves as clean and dependable. Through this chapter, I have argued that we need to see contamination of queer, by queer, through queerness, as deployed in the weaponised AI practices, as a pre-requisite for the technology itself to sustain its hold and power despite the multiple flaws in its own unfolding. I offer that a part of our queering of AI is not just to give queer data and algorithms to existing AI structures, which will only use this information to create a larger expanse of discriminatory and exploitative models. We move beyond the “better data” rhetoric and start examining the ways in which AI logics and mechanics can be deployed for human needs, offering intensity rather than scale, as the parameter, thus overturning the idea of AI as the measure of queerness, and instead establishing queerness as the lens through which AI can be developed. Instead, our attempts at queering AI have to be an ontological reworking of some of its computational and discursive practices and definitions, intentions and ambitions, and in the process, create the challenges and opportunities of making queerness as a source for joyful expansion rather than shrinking detection. In this, we depathologise queerness from AI modelling systems, and make way for new celebrations of collective, fragmented, and promiscuous AI systems that can harness the potential of queerness to create kinships and collectivities that contaminate the gentrified digital futures with joyful possibility. 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West, Sarah Myers, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford. 2019. Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI. AI Now Institute. https://ainowinstitute. org/discriminatingsystems.pdf. Accessed August 26, 2022. 72 Nishant Shah Part II Materialities Spritz for Harper and me. By data extractivism, post-Marxist media scholars like Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias mean the collection of all lives, bodies, and behaviours through sensor media and its constitution as digital data. The data then forms the basis for companies like Microsoft to build new technologies: New technologies like AI, which in turn are fed into proprofit products (Couldry and Mejias 2018, 2). Just that morning, I had read the following on a Microsoft News Center website: Artificial intelligence […] can greatly facilitate inclusion, i.e. the participation of people with disabilities or serious illnesses in everyday life. To ensure that people are not excluded, relevant data in sufficient quantities is required for the various models. This is exactly where the problem lies, which is why Microsoft is involved in various projects worldwide. (Microsoft News Centre 2021) The collection of as much data as possible from people with disabilities is therefore justified here as inclusion, although it is unclear whether this group needs such products at all or whether the devices are even affordable for them. But what about my own texts? Don’t they also extract a lot of data—as many experiences, impressions, and stories as possible from disabled friends, influencers, and talk show stars—in order to then process them into publishable texts? Such contributions may not immediately generate large monetary values, but they enable me to do all kinds of pleasant things in the long term. Some of my non-disabled friends are eager to emphasise that we will all become disabled at some point in our lives if we only live long enough. They excessively muse about their back pain, exhaustion, and melancholy vis-à-vis their disabled acquaintances. I do understand my friends’ motivations, but find this kind of talk often inappropriate, sometimes enervating: Am I unable to deal with weakness in my friends? Am I negating my own fragility? Robert McRuer makes a clever distinction between “virtually disabled” and “critically disabled” in his texts (McRuer 2002, 95). Everyone, McRuer argues, is virtually or quasi-disabled because no one succeeds in fully embodying the norms of non-disability at any time in their lives. Everyone fails sooner or later to meet the imperatives of fitness, performance, and health. But more important than acknowledging this failure is, it seems to McRuer, that we become “critically disabled” and that we turn political. Becoming “critically disabled” goes beyond being “virtually disabled” because it means fighting to change institutional, material, knowledge, and legal conditions and also structural access to equal rights and economic resources, and maybe to keep silent about sensitivities. Denaturalisations Harper usually pulls her shoulders up in boredom when the subject “critical self-reflection” comes up. Occasionally, she briefly chokes off a flood of my 80 Ute Kalender confessions of privileges with the flattering yet tacky term “ally.” Perhaps a person with a passionate interest in feminist theory, a fascination with algorithms in dating apps, and similar tastes in music is sometimes closer to her than the experiences of other women in wheelchairs. She doesn’t mind finding her name in my writings, sometimes she even finds it a pity when her character is fictionalised. And this evening, Harper also prefers to return to the new digital manifestos, which would make her uncomfortable. The reason is the impetus of aggressive denaturalisation. It is queer and disabled people, she says, whom xenofeminism seeks to liberate from the burden of naturalisation. Harper reads aloud: Anyone who’s been deemed “unnatural” in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of “nature” has nothing to offer us – the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology – the sooner it is exorcised, the better. (Laboria Cuboniks 2015, 0X01) Harper repeatedly makes clear in conversations that calls for denaturalisation are not desirable per se for people with disabilities, can have an uncomfortable normative tone, and can even have negative effects. For example, denaturalisation in xenofeminism again takes Donna Haraway as a starting point and means “make kin, not babies” (c.f. Hester 2018a). The slogan is a plea for care, community, and intimacy beyond biological parenthood, heteronormative ties, and nuclear family. Of course, family arrangements that are no longer based on heteronormative, biological reproduction can be attractive to people with disabilities in particular. Similar to queer and trans people, they might have experienced estrangement, exclusion, and violence in their families. And some people with disabilities cannot and do not want to have children. However, particularly women with disabilities have often made the experience of being denied biological motherhood and instead being encouraged to have abortions (Walgenbach 2012, 30–31). Swantje Köbsell describes the situation of disabled women in the 1980s as follows: “When we went to the gynaecologist, we were told quite clearly: ‘You don’t want to have children anyway’” (Köbsell 2021). Forty years later, Harper experiences something similar. After she tells her gynaecologist that she wants to have a child, he immediately looks horrified, only to start a friendly but nevertheless detailed Q&A session about her life: Whether she has a steady relationship with her partner, how independent she is, whether she can drive, and how she generally gets along. Her psychologist is also a disappointment. Why is Harper’s wish to have an own biological child so strong? She wants to know. Why is she so obsessed with technological feasibility? Why not become a social parent? Why not co-parenting We’re all cyborgs now? 81 children of good friends? Of course, it must be sad for Harper that she probably might not have the capacity to have children. And childlessness does always have to be thoroughly mourned. But at some point, when Harper worked through the mourning, the subject would be closed. Why this obsession with closure? Harper in turn wonders. The psychological technique of first explicating losses, then discussing and mourning it, and after working it through, leaving it, is familiar to Harper. Nevertheless, Harper is reluctant to accept the clear goal that has been set for her, and she thinks to herself that for the psychologist, this solution is too easy, especially because she had once met the woman with her husband and two daughters at Frühstück3000, a breakfast bar in Berlin’s neighbourhood Schöneberg. She then gratefully declines the psychologist’s offer in helping her mourn, and she also has to change gynaecologists. But Harper is most bewildered by a queerfeminist friend with whom she has long been involved in politics. The friend first shouts “Ewww!” and then plays out the “biopolitical card”: The comrade accuses Harper of surrendering to the biologistic heteropatriarchy with the help of capitalist reproductive technologies. If not joy and direct support, then at least she expects acceptance of her reproductive wants. The harsh, judgmental disapproval hits her to the core. Harper had cultivated a certain alertness against health professionals, but with activist friends, she mostly felt at home. In contrast, she receives support in an online forum from a trans man who has experienced similar things. He encourages her to have children and recommends a competent physician. The concerned gynaecologist, the psychologist on a mission of grief, and the Foucauldian friend, all of them mean well for Harper, but instead of providing concrete support, they victimise and stigmatise Harper. Or they suggest new reproductive visions that are simply alienating, but not with the aim of naturalisation but paradoxically of denaturalisation. Following Mai Anh-Boger (2015), these forms of intervention can be called a destructive denaturalisation that silences women with disabilities, exerting as much symbolic violence as a normalising discourse of naturalisation that classifies women with disabilities as not normal, not natural, or monstrous. “But maybe an AI could also be a buffer against these ‘health experts’ and defend my wanting of my own child,” Harper muses aloud later that evening. AI would then be able to recognise the desires, concerns, and wishes of the specific person and would defend them against specialists. Perhaps the benefits of artificially intelligent systems for the discriminated lie in the potential for better, precise communication. Harper herself meets her current partner via the brand new dating app Sextn, which launched in 2021. Sextn is a result of the giant demand for dating apps during the pandemic. Sextn works similarly to TikTok, and in contrast to many alternative dating apps, Sextn is much more visual, effective, wicked, and fun. With alternative, often labelled as inclusive tools, users can determine the resulting suggestions themselves by specifying their search criteria. One of these apps is Gleichklang. The digital application relies on psychology, wants to “explore 82 Ute Kalender deepness instead of surface,” and thus produces lots of annoying amateur psychologists who prefer to start an affair with accompanying relationship counselling. The secret of Sextn’s success, on the other hand, lies in its AIcentric approach in the form of an optimised recommendation algorithm. Instead of looking for psychological content, the motto at Sextn is: Just watch and enjoy. Sextn does not display a selection of partners as usual, but decides directly itself which images the users get to see. Harper never hides her wheelchair in photos, and the AI played the pictures to the right users in nanoseconds and without detours. Harper experiences such digital spaces as essential. For she does not meet sex and dating partners in clubs, university seminars, or political reading groups. In these “real,” “physical” analogous spaces, desiring glances ignore her. Harper also finds alternative, “inclusive” dating portals for the “impaired” and the “handicapped” 6 dodgy. Their sterile, often kept blue surfaces remind her of nursing and hospitals. Further, while using Gleichklang, Harper gets quite a few letters from “joyless leftists,” as she calls them, humourless colds fishes. One woman writes that she has a beautiful face, that she doesn’t seem disabled at all, and that the first thing she looks for in a person is the human being. Musical preferences for Manu Chao, Tocotronic, or Melissa Etheridge accompany chats of this kind. John A positive approach to AI is taken by John—a good friend of Harper’s who joins us later. After the Capri Spritz, we feel a bit dizzy. And we need a break from insurance’s mindsets. John agrees with Harper that he does not want to and cannot easily become just any cyborg, a cyborg who is supposed to wear bionic prostheses for others so that his missing arms and legs do not make others feel uncomfortable. John describes his current relaxed relationship with prosthetics as a long, deeply ambivalent process. Until then, he has tried many things. There were months with prostheses and years without prostheses, long phases in which he hid himself and sometimes hardly left the house. For him, prostheses were, as disability studies theorists have often critically pointed out, problematic normalisation technologies that were supposed to adapt him to the ideas of his environment (cf. Bösl 2009, 289–290). Although he knows that such times are not behind him forever, John does now enthusiastically speak about his AI-based BMW. And that the smart car gives him mobility, autonomy, and control. The BMW has a computer-controlled digital steering system and is a precursor to autonomous driving. Few know that many people with disabilities are already driving such cars and that they are actual AI pioneers. John developed the car together with an automotive designer. Its heart are parallel working computing units. They connect, control, and monitor system and vehicle technology via interfaces. Instead of pedals and a steering wheel, John controls the joystick with his extremities. He accelerates, brakes, and steers his car. The sensitivity of the We’re all cyborgs now? 83 joystick control automatically adjusts to the driving speed so that John can navigate his car precisely in the city as well as on the highway. John is particularly fond of pointing out that the “situation in the car is the only one in my life where I’m treated just like everyone else.” When he runs over a pedestrian’s feet with his hand bike, the person would even still apologise to him in a friendly manner. In the car, he would be approached like any other man misbehaving in a BMW—like a macking, car-driving asshole. In other words, like Harper, John uses AI-based technologies to combat the gender and sexual neutralisation that affects people with disabilities. Heike Raab describes such social failures this way: People with disabilities [are] often already inscribed with the failure of the gender norm qua disability […]. The situation of disabled people is in a way characterised by the impossibility of the possibility of a citation of gender and sexuality. As a result, the social field becomes characterised by a kind of denied gender belonging or identity. (Raab 2006) For Harper and John, the use of AI technologies does not signify a comprehensive, global cripple revolution—the permanent change of a heteronormative, ableist 7 field of possibilities. And yet it does mean an appropriation for their own queer-crip purposes. But isn’t this repurposing of AI then similar to the xenofeminist appropriation criticised above? Do not both usages of technologies mean a critical appropriation of technologies for their own progressive purposes? According to Harper, it seems questionable that xenofeminist acts of repurposing may result in heteronormative norms. Xenotechnologies have a too strong tendency to denaturalise. And the aggressive ways of denaturalisation serve to reify the binary logic between the categories of naturalisation and denaturalisation. Perhaps the car-driving John is neither part of the heteronormative, masculinist matrix nor a denaturalised, hyper-accelerated agile cyborg, but moves in-between. Just as John’s conformity to a norm does not correspond to normalisation here, but to the longing for mobility, self-determined navigation, and a confrontation with his environment at eye level. Normality and normalisation have nothing oppressive in John’s case, but something positive. Finally, this in-between also does not mean that John’s complexly embodied cyborg practice goes unchallenged: For Harper, John’s performance is often only an expression of the stereotype of the “super-crip,” as she notes with her characteristic tone of defiance. John is also a regular guest on talk shows and quite active on social media. In doing so, he enables other people with disabilities to engage in an empowering AI discourse without glorifying AI as such or negating himself and his body. John’s narrative exemplifies a complex, ambivalent AI embodiment and can be read as a critical cyborg practice. Disability studies authors such as Isla Ng propose the concept of complex embodiment to capture the intricate relationship of people with disabilities 84 Ute Kalender to digital technologies. The concept was significantly shaped by Tobin Siebers (2008). The design and literature scholar drafted it out of his dissatisfaction with two competing approaches to the body: The medical model and the social concept of disability (Ng 2017, 166). Both, he argues, are simplistic. The medical model reduces disability to pathogenic, biological, and genetic factors. The social model of disability likewise flattens disability, but now through the mantra of social construction to external factors such as architectural environments, political programs, and societal positioning (Ng 2017, 166). Both standpoints can lead to the silencing of the “real” experiences of those affected. The medical model suggests that the person with disability is primarily determined by their physical body, suffers from that body, and uses technologies as medical tools to overcome that body—and basically themselves. AI, from this perspective, is seen as a possible remedy to regain sight, walk, or not be born at all. The social model assumes that the person with disability effectively no longer has a body and consists solely of externally constructed and changeable positions. The pain in the stump lies solely in the hostile view of the disabled person, in the lack of care structures, or in the capitalist meritocratic society. Pain can be hardly expressed in the social model. The first model proposes too much body, the second too little—hence the term complex embodiment. Complex embodiment by AI, in John’s case, means describing the exact processes of how he might be classified as disabled and treated in a positively ableist manner while handcycling around town and then treated as a “normal” man just minutes later, after his transfer to the car. Complex embodiment also highlights the never-finished ambivalence that comes with wearing prosthetics. And for the cyborg figure, the model of complex embodiment provides impetus to depoliticise disability, neither as a physical deficit that can be compensated or ameliorated by AI nor idealised as a sexy super cyborg that blends easily and aesthetically pleasing with artificially intelligent media environments, but as a multi-layered, deeply ambivalent technology that first and foremost wants to be co-created by people with disabilities themselves. Notes 1 All of the personal anecdotes described in this text have been fictionalised, including the naming. The stories summarise personal experiences of the author with other people, but do not reproduce them exactly in a documentary way. Instead, the anecdotes are mixed with narratives of people with disabilities from German talk shows ( Talk am Dienstag 2019), German daily press ( Beer 2017; Kaiser 2019), and social media ( Umrik 2019). All sources are cited in the bibliography. 2 I use the term lipstick AI inspired by the contested term lipstick lesbian. Lipstick lesbians are lesbian women who are read as feminine and whose lesbianism is denied because of this femininity. In Ex Machina, too, the authenticity of femininity and womanhood is at stake—but now that of an AI figure. 3 The Heinrich Böll Foundation is affiliated with the governing German Green Party. It is considered diverse, young, and permeable for female politicians. We’re all cyborgs now? 85 4 Min. 6:30; Böll Podcast Was ist künstliche Intelligenz? https://www.boell.de/de/ 2018/01/29/kuenstliche-intelligenz-wer-denkt?dimension1=ds_ki 5 Next to dominant cultural products described by Mitchell and Snyder, there have always been cultural narratives that depicted disability characters more contradictory, precise, and agential such as the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, the queer-crip porn Want by Loree Erickson or the queer series the L Word. However, Mitchell’s and Snyder’s critique today still is valid for many mainstream narratives and especially for AI. 6 Despite the term handicap might sound trendy and innocent, many people with disabilities reject it. Because the formulation “hand in cap” establishes a difficult relationship between people with disabilities and persons who ask for money with their cap in their hand. 7 Ableism is the devaluation of a person or group with disabilities through remarks that at first sight appear positive, such as compliments on everyday routines, actions, or relationships. For example, it is ableism when a man with a disabled girlfriend is complimented on the fact that he is dating this same woman. The “compliment” implies that it is basically negative for the man to have this girlfriend, that the woman is somehow inferior to the man, that she is usually not worth being a girlfriend because of her disability, and that the man is doing something outstanding. Bibliography Beer, Veronika. 2017. “Mit Kind im Rollstuhl. So macht das eine ‚Wheelymum”. familie.de. https://www.familie.de/familienleben/behinderung-mama-im-rollstuhl/. Accessed May 26, 2022. Bilger, Anna, Vanessa Löwel, and Lukasz Tomaszewski. 2018. “Künstliche Intelligenz (1/4): Wer denkt da eigentlich?” Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. https://www.boell.de/de/ 2018/01/29/kuenstliche-intelligenz-wer-denkt?dimension1=ds_ki. Accessed May 26, 2022. Boger, Mai-Anh. 2015. “Das Trilemma der Depthalogisierung.” In Gegendiagnose – Beiträge zur Radikalen Kritik an Psychologie und Psychiatrie, edited by Cora Schmechel, Fabian Dion, Kevin Dudek, and Mäks* Roßmöller, 268–289. Münster: Edition Assemblage. Bösl, Elsbeth. 2009. Politiken der Normalisierung Zur Geschichte der Behindertenpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript. Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2018. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject.” Television & New Media 00(0):1–14. Dieckmann, Georg. 2020. “Molekulare Prothesen. Intoxikation, Spekulation und Materialität in Paul B. Preciados Testo Junkie.” In Feministisches Spekulieren. Genealogien, Narrationen, Zeitlichkeiten, edited by Naomie Gramlich and MarieLuise Angerer, 178–197. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. Garland, Alex, dir. 2015. Ex Machina. New York/Los Angeles: A24. Haraway, Donna. 1995. “Ein Manifest für Cyborgs. Feminismus im Streit mit den Techowissenschaften.” In Die Neuerfindung der Natur. Primaten, Cyborgs und Frauen. / Donna Haraway, edited by Carmen Hammer and Immanuel Stiess, 33–73. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Hester, Helen. 2018. Xenofemimism. Cambridge: Polity Books. Hester, Helen. 2018a. “Xenofeminist Ecologies. (Re)producing Futures Without Reproductive Futurity.” MAP. For Artist-Led Publishing and Production. https:// mapmagazine.co.uk/xenofeminist-ecologies. Accessed May 26, 2022. 86 Ute Kalender Jack, Jordynn. 2014. Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks. Urbana/Chicago/Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Kafer, Alison. 2009. “Cyborg.” In Encyclopedia of American Disability History, edited by Susan Burch, 223–224. New York: Facts on File, Inc. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaiser, Mareice. 2019. “Statt Rollstuhl: Die Krankenkasse empfiehlt dieser jungen Frau, Windeln zu tragen,” Die Zeit, November 18, 2019 https://www.zeit.de/zett/ politik/2019-11/statt-rollstuhl-die-krankenkasse-empfiehlt-dieser-jungen-frau-windelnzu-tragen-anastasia-umrik-twitter?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com %2F. Accessed May 26, 2022. Köbsell, Swantje. 2021. “Ein Leben für die Selbstbestimmung.” Deutschlandfunk Kultur. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/behindertenpaedagogin-swantjekoebsell-ein-leben-fuer-die-100.html. Accessed May 26, 2022. Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. “Xenofeminismus.” In Dea ex Machina, edited by Armen Avanessia and Helen Hester, 15–35. Berlin: Merve. McRuer, Robert. 2002. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 88–99. New York: Modern Language Association. Microsoft News Center. 2021. “KI & Inklusion: Technologien mit und für Menschen mit Behinderung entwickeln.” https://bit.ly/3ointNZ. Accessed August 28, 2022. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Ng, Isla. 2017. “How It Feels to Be Wired on the Digital Cyborg Politics of Mental Disability.” Atlantis 38(2): 160–170. Raab, Heike. 2006. “Intersectionality in den Disability Studies – Zur Interdependenz von Disability, Heteronormativitat, und Gender.” ZedisPlus. https://www.zedisev-hochschule-hh.de/files/intersectionality_raab.pdf. Accessed May 26, 2022. Russel, Legacy. 2021. Glitch Feminismus. Leipzig: Merve. Salome, Simone. 2022. “Der TikTok KI-Algorithmus.” Katzlberger AI. https:// katzlberger.ai/2022/02/25/der-tiktok-ki-algorithmus/. Accessed May 26, 2022. Siebers, Tobin. 2008. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Peter, and Laura Smith. 2021. “Artificial Intelligence and Disability: Too Much Promise, Yet Too Little Substance?” AI and Ethics (2021) 1: 81–86. 10.1007/s43 681-020-00004-5 Talk am Dienstag. 2019. “3nach9.” Das Erste, May 18, 2019. Video, 1:52:18. https:// www.ardmediathek.de/video/talk-am-dienstag/3nach9-oder-sendung-vom-18-mai2021/das-erste/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3RhbGstYW0tZGllbnN0YWcvM DFjZTdiYTAtYTU0Zi00YTQyLTlmMjctN2Q1MzAwOTY5YzU3. Umrik, Anastasia. 2019. “@AnastasiaUmrik.” Twitter. https://twitter.com/Anastasia Umrik?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor. Walgenbach, Katharina. 2012. “Gender als Interdependente Kategorie.” In Gender als Interdependente Kategorie. Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität, edited by Walgenbach, Katharina, Gabriele Dietze, Lann Hornscheidt, and Kerstin Palm, 23–65. Opladen: Barbara Budrich. Whittaker et al. 2019. “Disability, Bias, and AI.” AI Now Institute. https:// ainowinstitute.org/disabilitybiasai-2019.pdf. Accessed May 26, 2022. We’re all cyborgs now? 87 5 Uncanny bodies Queer subjects, artificial surrogates, and ambiguous robotics Michael Klipphahn-Karge 5.1 Queer subjects Queer bodies are booming. It seems to me that from the point of view of contemporary art production and its actors, they are predestined to show value in diversification strategies and serve as a cipher for the negotiation of overall social discourses on queerness—especially if they visually signal queerness (Lord and Meyer 2019 [2013]). Such artworks are particularly included in institutional exhibition contexts when they can be immediately classified as queer through their appearance. This refers to bodies that “challenge or rework bisexual and heterosexual norms, gaze regimes, and representational conventions, as queer photographic works by [artists such as] Catherine Opie, Del LaGrace Volcano, or Sarah Lucas” (Lorenz 2009, 135; author’s transl.) do. Mainly Western queer artists—and even more so artists who use a queer concept of work—have learned to react appropriately to this situation and act accordingly: They affirm the need for the queer body, or queerness per se, to be exhibited by the art market and global art institutions and capitalise on these opportunities both personally and economically (Lord and Meyer 2019 [2013], 42f.). 1 In particular, the connection between artificiality and queerness in relation to the corporeal being emerges with some persistence in such contexts. 2 In this chapter, I understand the artificial as an object that is partly made with technical means, which substitutes an original source. The artificial can also partially imitate processes and thus expand the original object, add to its processes, or simply illustrate them. I try to avoid attributions such as original or natural in relation to the source—for example, the human body as visual inspiration for avatars or robotics. The artificial is also inextricably linked to systems of power and knowledge and does not stand outside the construction of subjects but rather constitutes the construction of embodied subjectivity today (Munster 1999, 121). Based on this, it is sensical to link the artificial and the technical body in regard to their approach to embodying queerness. These bodies are currently on the advance to stand up for queerness in the exhibition context as they are viewed as “highly artificial beings” (Engelmann 2012, 257; author’s transl.). DOI: 10.4324/9781003357957-8 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. The examples of this are numerous, even if I only focus specifically on art exhibition events in Western Europe: The exhibition Supernatural. Skulpturale Visionen des Ko rperlichen (Sculptural Visions of the Corporeal; author’s transl.) at the Kunsthalle Tu bingen in 2020 asked about the hybrid Other in the context of new corporeality; the show Real Feelings at the Haus der elektronischen Kunste in Basel in the same year focused on the emotive influence of technical body extensions on humans; and the Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2019 discussed the status of the subject in the age of machine embodiment in the presentation Der montierte Mensch (The Assembled Man; author’s transl.). Artists such as Louisa Clement, Kate Cooper, Stine Deja, Goshka Macuga, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Anna Uddenberg, and Jordan Wolfson expose queer bodies, substitute them with artificial surrogates, and flexibilises the corporeal being into the realm of the virtual by means of digital technology. In the process, the artificial corporeal surface is liquefied as a site of representation and critique. Thus, “currently […] a plethora of new variants […] [of queer], but also transhuman and hybrid images of the body are emerging, fuelled by possibilities of synthesising the digital[, the technical] and the real” (Kroner 2020, 69; author’s transl.). On the other hand, the arrival of technical artificial bodies as a means of representing queer aesthetics has so far been almost overlooked in art studies, with a few exceptions (Chen and Luciano, 2015; Busch 2021). Thus, the relationship of queerness to artificiality—especially when the latter is realised by a machine—is interpreted rather marginally or as an effect only of sculptural and plastic presence (Kunimoto 2017; Dobbe and Strobele 2020; Krieger et al. 2021). The reason for this is also the infiltration of threedimensional art enabled by recent technical and technological innovations. Through the process of constant mechanisation, existing theoretical constructs are eroded, as in those processes new ideas about material and material handling are produced permanently—thus making the genre boundary of sculpture more permeable in relation to the changing concepts of bodies and corporeality. And, in doing so, it becomes clear to me that studies of art and art history often linguistically fail to fully encapsulate the entanglement of queerness and the artificial in relation to the factual corporeal. A productive reading that can also understand the artificial body as a queer object that is exhibited, and thus made visible, is therefore just as missing as the theoretical reflexion of the substitution of queer bodies by an artificial “stand-in” in fine arts. 3 This gap in research seems somewhat paradoxical to me, since technology in particular produces embodiments en masse and has a great influence on the corporeal, since “the human body is both open to the incorporation of technology […] and […] available to be incorporated into technology” (Busch 2021, 72; author’s transl.). Furthermore, technology itself can be categorised as a marker that identifies the boundaries of the corporeal, for example, in robotics or by means of digital imaging tools (Calvert and Terry 1997, 5). 4 In this way, technology can “transcend categories of biographical, Uncanny bodies 89 popular narratives of possible apocalyptical or fatal rebellions by robots or AIs, which are based on slave revolts, conceptualise the rebelling protagonists as white bodies (ibid., 213). Building on this, however, the question of the relationship between authorship and work must be negotiated individually and independently. Fundamentally, in the production of cultural objects, I consider a balancing of the attributions of race in the context of artificial bodies in relation to the author of corresponding works to be uncertain terrain, for example, regarding the specific history of discrimination and the discourse of the intersectionality of Jews (Cazes and Monty 2020), to which the artist belongs. Meanwhile, the modes of representation for robots in the context of art as aesthetic means must be questioned in general, insofar as they construct ethnicity. Why, for example, is Ai-Da advertised as “the world’s first ultrarealistic humanoid AI robot artist” (Romic 2021), with a clearly visible artificial-mechanical body, the arms of which are clearly machine-like and mostly metallic, and a white head that can be read as female, with siliconecovered skin and artificial hair. While opening her solo exhibition at St. John’s College in 2019, “Ai-da has been described as ‘the brainchild’ of Aidan Meller, a gallery director and art dealer” (ibid.)—and in that matter as the offspring of a white male. This description refers to the hypermasculine intention to use robotics to give birth to white bodies as serviceable images. Such images are not only visually white, resembling men, but, following stereotypical symbols of submissiveness, are attributed to female personnel—primarily in assistance systems such as Google’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri (Goldfuß and Sontopski 2021). Thus, the image of the body and of women reproduced by (Female Figure) fundamentally stands in the way of a queer reading. But here I detect ambivalences: Of course, works of art are always a mirror of their time; as “products of material labour” they always reflect “general […] conditions of production and technological […] standards” and “their representation of social reality [in turn] reflects […] social consciousness” (Baxandell, 2003, 98; author’s transl.). This social dimension of the work, which also includes a justification for criticising current conditions, illustrates the extent to which the producers of serviceable bodies—and this refers to robotics in general—misuse human surrogates as a cornucopia for their own ideal conceptions of the human, no matter how perverted or revisionist these models may be. In this way, artificial bodies are not only battered, but also marginalised in their representation for queer bodies. These contradictory manifestations of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism in relation to the mechanical body identify the artificial robotic body as a machine “other,” which is perceived as inferior and exoticised at the same time (Kim 2022). In the following, I would like to briefly reconnect this parallelism of human and machine suffering: The artificial, in its embodiment through technology, emphasises a reference to the human body and can “be seen as 96 Michael Klipphahn-Karge extensions of the body, which has gradually detached itself from it and objectified itself into external things” (Rammert and Schubert 2017, 351; author’s transl.). The entanglement of body and artificiality on a level of the technical can thus be read in a narrower sense as a habitual reference to the object. It is found in an action with corresponding objects as well as the support of the body by these objects. This means techniques as objects inside and outside the body, as well as body extensions. In a broader sense, this connection can be discovered in “body techniques [as] other technifications of action,” exemplified, among other things, in cultural techniques such as rituals, but also in relation to embodiment, for example, in social media, in which “body and technique [coincide] to a large extent as material and as form” (ibid., 352; author’s transl.). If I read these facts queerly, the artificial thus works against its demarcation from naturalisms and thus against binary categories such as distinctions between mind and matter, or male and female, which have already begun to corrode since the mechanisation of modernity (Deuber-Mankowsky 2007, 277). 5.3 Ambiguous robotics The green, hook-nosed half-mask of (Female Figure) challenges stereotypes of femininity and allows for queer revisions of the images evoked by the white body of (Female Figure). The face associated with this mask is the formulaic folkloric countenance that has been persistently used in many popular images for the faces of women who have been said to practice witchcraft and thus to have a bogeyman relationship with the devil (Behringer 2009, 9). Accompanying this are references that above all aim to degrade women and their bodies for better use in patriarchal contexts. Corresponding bodies are to be subjugated; women are to be coded as irrational and branded as too defensive. The means for this is the insinuation of being afflicted with supposed evil (Federici 2017, 129f.). Furthermore, the witch-like attributes point to the resistance of the nonhypermasculine body as well as to a withdrawal of such bodies from contexts of submissiveness (Behringer 2009, 100f.). Feminist writings of the early 21st century particularly emphasise, with reference to the witch hunt and its peak in the 17th century and its historical present (Grossmann 2019; Federici 2019; Chollet 2020), that “the power women had acquired through their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal” (Federici 2017, 213; author’s transl.) stood in the way of the expansion of the patriarchal order. 10 The female body was therefore to be forcibly state-controlled “and transformed into economic resources” (ibid.; author’s transl.). Aiming at the surveillance of bodily practices, the capitalist organisation of labour must reject the unpredictability of a magical practice that empowers bodies. During this, it also does so by means of establishing a Western-Christian worldview based on colonial constructs of sovereignty and servitude (Otto and Strausberg 2013, 6f.). The masculine desire endeavoured therein to domesticate female bodies from a Uncanny bodies 97 historical perspective to place reproductive bodily practices “directly in the service of capitalist accumulation” (Federici 2017, 113; author’s transl.), which was accompanied by a rigorous criminalisation of contraceptive methods to establish a “new model of femininity [ … ]—passive, docile, frugal, taciturn, always busy, and chaste” (ibid., 131; author’s transl.). On the one hand, I recognise a queer aspect of Wolfson’s work in the attribution of the hypersexualised body of (Female Figure) to a figure like the witch, who celebrates the deviation from a collectively or individually aspired norm or a supposed ideal. On the other hand, I perceive the queer moment in the questioning of concepts of identity and belief and thus, from a historical perspective, also of capital logic and power. This critique of the production of social orders that produce hierarchy occurs through the reference to the witchy, deviant subject (Witzgall 2018, 15f.), which opposes colonial Christian practices (Federici 2017, 269ff.). In the artistic spectrum, too, references to witchcraft challenge existing patriarchal patterns. Thus, until the turn of the millennium, witchy connotative references to the body most often have the attachment of the esoteric and popular, or they reproduce stereotypical images of popular ideas. Examples include artworks that popularise and display magical practices, such as possession and table-turning in Sigmar Polke’s, ghost conjurations in Thomas Schutte’s, or fortune-telling in Christian Jankowski’s artworks (Kliege 2012, 9ff.). On the one hand, Wolfson’s work, with its visual recourse to a nonhegemonic concept of art and culture, offers similar mercantile shock moments as gestures of masculine ignorance. On the other hand, the image of a genuine moment of emancipation remains, which intertwines features of a figure marginalised by its makers, such as the robot, with that of the witch. Both figures are inscribed with patriarchal dreams of creation, from whose shadows they emerge in the present to counteract, or even break, the hypermasculine and heteronormative visions that are inscribed in mechanisation, informational technologies, and femininity (Witzgall, 2018, 15). At this point, a transfer to popularisations of AI systems is possible. Even if such technologies are by no means supernatural, machine learning, for example, is often problematically described as magical, because its modes of operation are partially “outside the scope of present scientific knowledge” (Campolo and Crawford 2020, 3)—a connection that can certainly be transferred to the way the public deals with queerness. However, the connotation of “magical” in the context of AI systems does not only mean a lack of understanding, but the concealment of a potential danger for the majority, which is made possible by the exploration and exploitation of data that are available in large quantities through digitalisation processes, among other things. This danger lies in a techno-optimistic and “unprecedented access to people’s identities, emotions, and social character” (ibid.). Access to this data occurs without the need to take responsibility for the consequences of this action because corresponding procedures in AI systems run partly “as if by magic” and do so without rational and causal explanations. It should not 98 Michael Klipphahn-Karge go unmentioned at this point that the underlying interpretations of the magical—implied by the association with the term “magical”—are also not unproblematic because they argue in a generalised way and impede “the possibility of recognising analogous cross-cultural and cross-epochal […] practices, their fundamental cognitive mechanisms, or epistemic qualities” (Witzgall, 2018, 15; author’s transl.) as a focal point of the term magic. Therefore, magic is also a possibility to see non-Western knowledge production as a valid counterpart to Western epistemologies of knowledge. This moment of emancipation is as intertwined with the masking of (Female Figure) as the story of the plague. The robot’s nose case resembles the shape of the so-called plague Medici and, fittingly for Wolfson’s work as an icon of early 21st-century art, “reflects the spirit of the time with its combination of black leather, proximity to death, and blurred understanding of history […]” (Ruisinger 2020, 248; author’s transl.). Similar to the use of the artificial body that enables a queer body to take up space in exhibitions, representing Medici with beaked masks produced a rather “virtual career” in historical retrospect and shaped “the iconography of the plague not through […] [their] real existence, but through […] [their] depiction” (ibid. 248; author’s transl.). Such masks are not to be found in the art of this period. They appear merely as a retrospective pejorative view of the plague or were used in later pictorial references to the plague epidemic as representative of purity and freedom from the plague, symbolically staged from the 18th century onwards. The “career [of masking] as a marginal phenomenon” (ibid. 247; author’s transl.) can be transferred to the history of queer bodies, their visibility, and visual absence: The stigmatisation of queer bodies in the wake of the AIDS wave from the early 1980s onwards initially substituted the corporeal completely, as almost exclusively visualisations of the virus and medical diagrams were used to illustrate the virus. Infected persons were not, or were rarely, depicted (Lord and Meyer 2019 [2013], 30). The subsequent developers of related visual strategies of queer representation of infected marginalised bodies included artists and collectives such as Isaac Julien, Stashu Kybartas, Gran Fury, Nicholas Nixon, Lee Snider, Stuart Marshall, Mark Morrisroe, and others. In the wake of the epidemic, these efforts consciously opposed a simultaneous marginalisation and criminalisation of queer sex practices by bringing bodies back into the discourse. This “reification” of queer body politics with visibility was primarily based on lesbian artists and collectives alongside numerous authors—for example, Cathy Cade, Honey Lee Cottrell, or Kiss and Tell. These feminist struggles for the sovereignty and control of one’s own body and its representation already occurred far before this crisis (ibid., 32f.). In this way, the covering and masking of bodies counter the visual strategies of queer desire that Wolfson in turn emphasises with the permissiveness of his work. In combination with the hypersexualised, often taboo, and thus stigmatised female body of the robot, the mask can also be read as having a fetish element and as functioning as a tool that serves the rehearsal Uncanny bodies 99 of different social roles. In an ambivalent practice, the exhibition of a permissive and anonymised artificial body through the mask revises ideas that deem the display of queerness as too strongly oriented towards the physical and sexual, and that therefore seek to avoid it. On the one hand, this avoidance exposes discourses that aim to regulate corporeality as reductive and too narrowly focused on the relationship between gender and sexuality (Lorenz 2009, 135). On the other hand, the showing of this (Female Figure) opposes the “desexualised forms of representation […] [that] want to push sexual desire as well as sexual practices away, which are the actual origin of legal (and social) discrimination” (Mesquita 2009, 77; author’s transl.). In this way, (Female Figure) also resists the systems of AI integrated into her body. By making “the face productive as a site of transformation” that can “quasi-cover one’s own identity in the act of a performative flare-up,” by means of wearing a mask, it also refuses “identification through biometric surveillance” (Blas 2020; author’s transl.). The capability of the artificial body to look back at the viewers breaks the narrative and the role of being merely a coded robot that only performs an act because it evokes a feeling of uncertainty that is achieved through the robot looking back whilst having a human-like body. 5.4 Uncanny bodies Wolfson operates with these tactics of ambiguity and uncertainty by deliberately creating ambivalence. Through uncanniness, the power structure between the audience and the objectified performer is disturbed; in short: He scares the spectators. Visual traditions in an art show that the artificial body has often been intertwined with the uncanny. In 1993 and 2004, for example, the artist Mike Kelley presented an exhibition entitled The Uncanny, which consisted of sculptures, objects, and paintings whose unifying feature was their uncanniness (Cameron 1993, 89). 11 Most of them were life-size polychrome models of the human body or of individual limbs. Taking Sigmund Freud’s essay, The Uncanny (1919) as a starting point, and drawing on Ernst Jentsch’s book On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906), Kelley conceives the uncanny as the embodiment of doubt. This scepticism refers to the uncertain encounter between human and human-like object—a relationship that (Female Figure) also negotiates. The unsettling nature of the uncanny is thus linked to the question of aliveness, or rather to the ambiguity of this state. In his essay Playing with Dead Things (1993), which was written during the development of the exhibition, Mike Kelley deals with the nature of the uncanny and intertwines it with concepts of scale, colour, and ideas of the ready-made and doppelgangers. In it, Kelley describes the uncanny as an encounter between a recipient and a horrible counterpart and reflects on it as an impression “provoked by a confrontation between ‘me’ and an ‘it’ that was highly charged, so much so that ‘me’ and an ‘it’ become confused. The uncanny is [describable as] a somewhat subdued sense of 100 Michael Klipphahn-Karge horror: Horror tinged with confusion.” (Kelley 1993, 26). Kelley relates this discomfort to the object’s entanglement with the viewers, which can be applied to (Female Figure). On the one hand, her artificial body is domesticated, inorganic material, and thus not alive. On the other hand, it can be implied that it has an ambiguous life of its own because it encounters the recipients. In this way, it also becomes dependent on the bodies of the viewers (ibid.). Queerness appears as “a kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural” (Case 1991, 3). Thus, the queer body as “taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny” (ibid.) subversively occupies and “asserts a gap where one would like to be assured of unity” (Cixous 1976, quoted in Jackson 1981, 68). This gap denotes omissions that, arrested in their ambiguity, require scrutiny. By this, I refer to divisions between the human body and the artificial body, for example, through medical technology used in bodies, the emotional attachment and erotic relationship to non-human things, or the spatial fragmentation of intimacy through the digital embodiments of persons with whom one comes into contact (Jenzen 2007, 8). However, this gap also refers to the doubt of most of society as to whether artificial bodies and artificially altered bodies, or non-normative and queer bodies, are valid in the overall social—primarily in a more Western discourse. Finally, I would like to locate (Female Figure) amid traditional art historical knowledge. It is evident that existing theories conceive the human body in the visual arts as both a medium of imagination and an image (Belting 2001, 22f.). In this dichotomy, the body thus fulfils a binary role: It is both image carrier and image, both the biological body of the model and the socio-cultural body. The image of a body is always also the image of the construction of bodies. In connection with the viewer’s interpretation, the representation of these bodies is always linked to their personal references and is thus an impression and circumstance-based representation of the person depicted—one could also say: An “impression” of the person. The context in which the body is perceived and evaluated thus depends on the subjectivity with which the viewers encounter such bodies. These normative contexts can be culturally, socially, politically, or regionally connoted according to the regimes of viewing bodies, in general. (Female Figure) seems to forge a pathway—at least partially—through the middle of this arttheoretical fork in the road: By removing personifying attributes from the robot’s body through the blending of the field of vision, an individual (or one could also say a queer identity) is created, regarding the binary categorisation of the body in art, which eludes existing classifications. This production of an artificial embodiment of a queer subject occurs as (Female Figure) assumes an intermediate position of visibility, for example, by exposing the confrontational body, and invisibility, amongst other things by covering the face. Moreover, in this artwork, the mind, which is metaphorically substituted by intelligence, is neither adequately modelled beyond the artificial body of the robot, nor classically constructed analytically, but is generated in connection with the viewers (Weber 2003, 120). Uncanny bodies 101 Therein lies the potential of (Female Figure). It can describe the openness and ambivalence of queer bodies with a work of art “that neither rejects nor fully identifies with the places materially […] and psychically [and psychologically] anchors in the dominant culture” (Munoz 2007, 35; author’s transl.). Her artificial body, which includes systems of disruptive techniques, functions, as illustrated, in the context of showing and exhibiting as a representative of queer bodies. This also creates a work in which bodily knowledge becomes technical, and the sensibility of robotics becomes human. Deleuze and Guattari have proposed to call this a “machine”: not a technique, but a structure that includes human, social, technical, and material components. […] Thereby (it becomes) conceivable that not only a sensorimotor dimension, but also limitations and errors are the basis […] [of] “subjectivation.” (Busch 2021, 74; author’s transl.) Such a subjectification, which Kathrin Busch states here about Marco Donnarumma’s performative practice, also underlies Wolfson’s concept behind the artwork and should stand here as an implication for (Female Figure) and the intertwining with queer aspects. So, it has become evident how strongly queerness, like “cultural alterity,” functions “especially [in] the socio-politically dominant discourse” as an extremely current “guiding difference” (Schankweiler 2012, 263), which is primarily attached to the body now. And it has also become clear how strongly artificial bodies are finding their way into exhibition contexts as representatives of these debates about the queer body. They act as multipliers that produce or reproduce technical explicitness and stereotyping, but at the same time have the potential to reject and break down these fixed assumptions about gender bodies. In this way, the investigations of artificial bodies as “stand-ins” open possibilities for focusing on ambiguity as a marker of queer aesthetics. It is therefore fruitful to push for an approach that emphasises the self-critical potential of art that resists fixed assumptions—especially when works of art are read as queer or when such readings are focused on or even forced by the artists or the institutional levels of reflection. At the same time, such a virtuality of queer imagery demands active and critical viewing on the part of the recipients and builds on the development of a potential that is often not yet developed. To counter this latency, ambiguities and ambiguities in images must be revealed, differentiated, examined, and decidedly named—especially when the desire for images and actions are designed to create logics of visibility and are thus closely entangled with the exhibition of queerness based on the appearance of an artificial body. Through this kind of research practice, it becomes clear that even in an artwork like (Female Figure), which for the reasons explained is very controversial and clearly bound up in Western hegemonies, there are hidden possibilities for creating productive confusion in a world that standardised bodies in many 102 Michael Klipphahn-Karge ways and classifies them according to binary models. At the beginning of her cycle of movement to music, selfand audience-addresses, (Female Figure) herself formulates a corresponding desire for denormalisation. In this, Wolfson’s animatronic robot attempts to get rid of its divisive roots of Western cultures, even of its creator, and claims its own space: “My mother is dead. My father is dead. I’m gay. I’d like to be a poet. This is my house.” Notes 1 I do not want to suggest that this approach is constitutive of institutionalised queer aesthetics. To claim this falls short, as does the concomitant attempt to grasp certain artworks under a marker such as queerness, and thus the attempt to understand them as a whole. Such a confinement runs the risk of domesticating queer practices and obscuring the radicality and specificity of individual gestures in favour of a more accessible mediocrity ( Getsy 2016, 23). 2 This is not a novelty: From a historical perspective, the association of artificiality has also often been a means of the substitution and expression of queerness. An example of this is the entanglement and reciprocity of the aesthetics of queerness and campness ( Sontag 1964, 1). These intersect in their desire to celebrate the exaggeratedly artificial in the visual constitution and gestures of bodies. 3 Viewing methods of art studies, referring to queer bodies, are generally characterised by reflexes that reduced complexity and focus mainly on a balancing of rigid binaries by postulating constructions of heteronormativity as the diametrical opposite of queer subjects and measuring queer bodies by the extent to which they are visually distinguishable from “normative bodies” ( Butler 1995, 42). Accordingly, “(images are) interpreted in terms of a concept of representation based on agency and perceived solely as advocates or counter-advocates. […] The critique of myths of authorship, the insights into the effectiveness of gaze regimes, the questions of medial dispositive, as well as the numerous reflections on the pictorial constitution of body and subject, are left out of the problematisation of heteronormative constructions” ( Adorf and Brandes 2008, 7f.; author’s transl.). 4 The findings of feminist technology research and science and technology studies, in particular, are advancing this field (see Carpenter 2016, 2017; Kubes 2019, Kubes 2020; Richardson 2022), as are disability, queer, and gender studies (see Davis 1995; Morton 2010; Bryant 2011; in this context also Bennett 2010), which in parts show strong references to the sociology of the body and have considerable influence on diverse areas of the cultural and social sciences (see Harrasser 2013, 2016; Treusch 2020; Misselhorn 2021). 5 I recognise productive approaches in the study of queer “representations of bodies without bodies” (Spector 2007, 139ff., cited in Lorenz 2009, 136; author’s transl.). This means representing embodied queer subjects “without attempting to represent them visually” and without “explicitly showing bodies that should stand for a deviation from the norm or a non-fulfilment of the norm” ( Lorenz 2009, 136; author’s transl.). Furthermore, concepts of visualisation are expanded to include “seeing more” to “move from there […] towards a reflexive practice of seeing […] [as] a reflexive practice of representation” ( Schaffer 2008, 67; author’s transl.). I read in this a willingness to give the images space for revision and actualisation, and thus the act of “seeing more” as a queer moment that is often used “only” for a didactic and normative impetus. 6 Amongst other things, Wolfson himself cites a film character as a precursor to (Female Figure), which he refers to alongside Georges Bataille’s History of the Eye (1928) (Kroner and Wolfson 2021, 157). Holli Would is an animated woman Uncanny bodies 103 portrayed by Kim Basinger in the 1992 film Cool World directed by Ralph Bakshi and is strongly reminiscent of (Female Figure) in her appearance and demeanour. The film tells the story of a cartoonist who finds himself in a cartoon world from which, in turn, Holli Would seeks an escape. This female figure strives to possess a human body made of flesh and blood instead of her animated body and achieves this goal through sexual contact with the film’s protagonist—the artist who created her ( Ebert 1992). Her highly stylised embodiment was created by rotoscoping Basinger’s face and body, a technique for creating animated sequences in which objects are traced frame-by-frame in a live-action shot ( Seymour 2011). This technique turns Basinger’s living body into a lifeless, animated body, which in turn yearns to be reanimated ( Connor 2019, 241). 7 The Czech word “robota” can be translated into “forced labour,” which already served in the Middle Ages as a term for a worker in forced labour in the sense of a servant or even a slave ( Pfeifer 1993). 8 The neural networks underlying the system are trained with thousands of labelled images to be able to deliver reliable results during image recognition. The labelling that accompanies this collection of images is often associated with precarious work, often performed by people in the global South. This typification by persons carries the risk that, without regard to cultural and social value judgements, image data is sorted based on race and gender, and the meaning of the images is persistently distorted in a way that is gender-specific and thus potentially discriminatory ( Crawford 2021, 64f.). 9 One could read the design of (Female Figure) as resulting from colonialist genealogies, at least as far as whiteness is pivotal of Western visual cultures and hegemonies. Technical innovations, like robotics or AI today, for example machines, weapons, and transportation, were conditional to the enslavement, displacement, and expulsion of people and the exploitation of natural and intellectual resources under the pretence of discovering and educating nonWestern societies. At the same time, the work also embodies the justification of this action, since Europe’s white technical superiority was used to justify the domination of the “Other” and to interpret it as necessary ( Adas 1990, 3). 10 At this point, reference should be made to racial, often feminist movements and their self-description as witches. They use this historical figure of thought for the purpose of racialised and anti-Semitic slogans. Such movements are to be criticised as ideological and ahistorical ( Behringer 2009, 95f.). 11 This refers to the exhibition piece developed by Kelley under the title The Uncanny in 1993 as part of the show Sonsbeek 93 at the Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem (NL) and the updated revival of The Uncanny in 2004 at the Tate Liverpool (GB). Bibliography Adas, Michael. 1990. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. New York: Cornell University Press. Adorf, Sigrid, and Kerstin Brandes. 2008. “Introduktion “Indem es sich weigert, eine feste Form anzunehmen” – Kunst, Sichtbarkeit, Queer Theory.” FKW 45: 5–11. Baumann, Zygmund. 1992. Moderne und Ambivalenz. Hamburg: Junius. Baxandell, Michael. 2003. “Der Kunstsoziologische Ansatz.” In Methoden-Reader Kunstgeschichte, edited by Wolfgang Brassat and Hubertus Kohle, 98–101. Köln: Deubner. Becker, Barbara, and Jutta Weber. 2005. “Verkörperte Kognition und die Unbestimmtheit der Welt. Mensch-Maschine-Beziehung in der neuen KI.” In 104 Michael Klipphahn-Karge Unbestimmtheitssignaturen der Technik. Eine neue Deutung der technisierten Welt, edited by Gerhard Gamm and Andreas Hetzel, 219–232. Bielefeld: Transcript. Behringer, Wolfgang. 2009. Hexen: Glaube, Verfolgung, Vermarktung. München: C. H. Beck. Belting, Hans. 2001. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München: C. H. Beck. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Birkett, Richard. 2014. “Eye Contact.” Flash Art. https://flash—art.com/article/eyecontact-jordan-wolfson/. Accessed March 6, 2022. Bischof, Andreas. 2017. Soziale Maschinen Bauen. Epistemische Praktiken der Sozialrobotik. Bielefeld: Transcript. Blas, Zach. 2020. “Unkenntlichkeit und Autonomie.” Kunstforum 265: 116–126. Bolter, Jan David, and Richard Grusin. 2000 [1998]. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bryant, Levi. 2011. “Of Parts and Politics: Onticology and Queer Theory.” Identities 16: 13–28. Busch, Kathrin. 2021. “Digitales Fleisch. Spekulieren mit künstlichen Körpern.” In Das Ästhetisch-Spekulative, edited by Kathrin Busch, Georg Dickmann, Maja Figge and Felix Laubscher, 63–87. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Butler, Judith. 1995. Körper von Gewicht. Die diskursiven Grenzen des Geschlechts. Berlin: Berlin Verlag. Cameron, Dan. 1993. “Sculpting the Town.” Artforum 32(3): 89–131. Campolo, Alexander, and Kate Crawford. 2020. “Enchanted Determinism: Power Without Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 1–19. Carpenter, Julie. 2016. Culture and Human-Robot Interaction in Militarized Spaces: A War Story. London: Routledge. Carpenter, Julie. 2017. “Deus Sex Machina: Loving Robot Sex Workers and the Allure of an Insincere Kiss.” In Sex Robots: Social, Ethical, and Legal Implications, edited by John Danaher and Neil MacArthur, 261–287. Cambridge: MIT Press. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1991. “Tracking the Vampire.” Differences 3(2): 1–20. Cavel, Stephen, and Kanta Dihal. 2020. “The Whiteness of AI.” Philosophy & Technology 33: 685–703. Cazés, Laura, and Monty Ott. 2020. “Welche Farbe haben Juden? Eine Replik auf Michael Wuligers Kolumne über jüdische ‘People of Color’.” https://www. juedische-allgemeine.de/meinung/welche-farbe-haben-juden-2/. Accessed March 7, 2022. Chen, Mel Y., and Dana Luciano. 2015. “Introduction. Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(2–3): 182–207. Chollet, Mona. 2020. Hexen. Die Unbesiegbare Macht der Frauen. Hamburg: Nautilus. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “Fictions and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘uncanny’).” New Literary History 7: 525–548. Colucci, Emily. 2014. “Sweet Dream or Beautiful Nightmare: The Uncanny Horror of Jordan Wolfson’s (Female figure).” https://filthydreams.org/2014/04/08/sweetdream-or-a-beautiful-nightmare-the-uncanny-horror-of-jordan-wolfsons-femalefigure/. Accessed March 7, 2022. Uncanny bodies 105 a condition in which the bladder grows together with the vagina, which can lead to urinary incontinence and severe pain. They are the result of excessively prolonged labour during childbirth, which in turn is due to the harsh conditions that enslaved women faced (Snorton 2017, 17ff.). To supposedly relieve Black women of their pain, Sims performed surgeries without anaesthesia, which in turn was based on the racist notion, which helped legitimise slavery, that Black people did not feel pain to the same degree as white people (Jackson 2020, 186). The invention of speculum, which can be traced back to Sims and these operations, is the result of what the writing in Rezaire’s video titled the medical plantation. The plantation, consequently, was not only the site of the brutal exploitation of labour and resources, but of a history, extending into the present, of the disciplining of the Black female-identified body, also branded as voluptuous, on the one hand, and the extraction of reproductive power on the other (Kelly 2016, 150–159). Whereas Black women in the US at the time of slavery were violently forced by their white owners to reproduce in order to secure plantation work, after the abolition of slavery their reproduction was prevented, or at least monitored. Feeding into this—as Tabita Rezaire puts it in the video—biological warfare is the medical studies of the Puerto Rican population to develop the birth control pill (de Arellano et al. 2011; Marks 2010), as well as other attempts at birth control brought about by sterilisation and contraceptive measures (Briggs 2002). Luiza Prado de O. Martins has done ample research on this (2018b; 2018c). She also makes the connection between the biopolitical regime as the central engine of the colonial project and current technologies. These are—as the Gates Foundation-funded startup Microchips Biotech demonstrates—under the guise of reproductive justice for the “developing Figure 6.3 Tabita Rezaire. 2016. Sugar Walls Teardom, video 22minutes, filmstill. 112 Katrin Köppert world” applications to birth control in the Global South (2018a). The racist stereotype of people over-reproducing in the Global South is fed into digital technologies and subsequently technically reproduced. And where it is not so obviously population-based programs that prevent conception through technology, automated inequalities 6 can be found. Apps that monitor menstrual cycles with the goal of, among other things, preventing conception do not price in stress-related cycle deviations. This structurally disadvantages menstruating BIPOC in that they are disproportionately affected by stress-inducing conditions such as precarious employment, racist police violence, etc. (Ghandi 2019). These are just two examples of a present that, in the context of reproduction, illustrate what Simone Browne, drawing on Frantz Fanon, calls “digital epidermalization” (2015, 109ff.). Epidermalization according to Fanon means the literal embodiment of racist discourse (2008). Race as a social construction of Blackness inscribes itself in the body, formally becoming an ontological statement about skin against which almost no ontological resistance can form. The Black body cannot escape overdetermination and branding as a consequence. In the context of digital technologies, this epidermalization means that it is again certain bodies that are rendered unequally reduced to data in biometric applications such as facial recognition, iris scans, and retina scans so that they are either disproportionately captured or misrecognised with a similar effect of disregard (Chun 2021, 22). That is, these bodies are either not seen due to defaulting to white norms from the soap dispenser, etc., or are captured where they are not at all due to poor or unbalanced datasets, leading to disproportionate arrests of Black people in the US in the case of police surveillance (Benjamin 2019, 113). Both forms of automated inequality are expressions of the moment of detachment of the Black body from the category of personhood or subjecthood that accompanies epidermalization. This is why Browne places biometric surveillance in the historical context of plantation slavery and the technologies of branding in place at the time (Browne 2015, 89ff.). Whereas back then enslaved people were marked with branding irons like cattle in order to criminalise them, among other things, today it is tagged datasets that misinterpret or expositionally filter Black people beyond recognition based on ascribed criteria. In this respect, it is also worth asking to what extent the tagging of Black women in the US, who have been held liable and criminalised for abortion according to a racist campaign (Bonhomme 2020), correlates with menstrual tracking apps that protect Black women less from conception in percentage terms due to deficient datasets. The exposed display of Black wombs as sites of reproductive danger in advertising campaigns translates into dated white prototypicality, i.e., the dating of the prototypical default setting of white, caregiving femininity (Gordon 2006, 239–240; Browne 2015, 110). The algorithms operate, so to speak, in the affect field of white motherhood, which, as Gabriele Dietze writes, ties whiteness to the “loving caring […] image of motherhood” (2020, transl. kk). Patching and hoarding 113 Black technical object and machinic non-existence The lack of diversity of data training sets in menstruation tracking apps consequently evokes, as in facial recognition, the dissonance between the self-determination of Black menstruating persons and the experience of being able to perceive oneself as non-existent in datasets. In this context, Ramon Amaro speaks of the “Black technical object,” referring—again in reference to Fanon—to the objectification of the Black subject, which is accompanied by the experience of psychic fragmentation, that is, the dissonance between self-image and external attribution (2019). From this, Amaro draws the inverse conclusion of the impossibility of compatibility. That is, racialised people only occur as individuals as long as their existence is aligned with prevailing concepts of the hierarchisation of race, exist in algorithmic space only as technical objects, and are not compatible with the imaginary system of white subjectivity. It follows, Amaro argues, that making the Black technical object compatible with mainstream algorithmic visions cannot be an option, as this would further reduce the lived possibilities that exist despite all the forms of dehumanisation. Hereby he critically refers to the approach of Joy Buolamwini’s project “Aspire Mirror.” The project, which was crucial for the film “Coded Bias” (2020), exposed the problem of machine discrimination against Black people through facial recognition software. Amaro’s critique hinges on the fact that Buolamwini made a white mask that she held in front of her face to be read by the algorithm to point out the problem. He says that the use of the mask reinforces the assumption that coherence and discoverability are necessary components of the relationship between humans and technology. In a sense, the idea of the white mask saddles a system that includes exclusion, in this case of Black people, but also reproduces the notion of machines that are concerned with reducing inconsistencies and instabilities. That is, the inclusion in datasets or the representation of Black subjects in the datasets does not avoid the problem that this is fundamentally an arrangement that attempts to negate inconsistencies and differences in favour of coherence. In this respect, one could say that the white mask functions as a visual metaphor for the desire to increase diversity in tech companies as well as in datasets, but not—as is indeed inherent in the conventional concept of diversity 7 —to fundamentally question the mechanisms and institutions of digitality. Amaro thus problematises that although Buolamwini is concerned with expanding the understanding of AI and also with the inclusion of previously marginalised people in datasets, she remains wedded to the desire for representation and thus also to the components of coherence and detectability necessary for the design of human–machine relations (Amaro 2019; Chun 2021, 16, 22). Cring for conflict In contrast, Amaro, drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), but also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2018 [1986]), posits an expanded 114 Katrin Köppert understanding of the Black technical object that eludes the desire for representation. Starting from not wanting to be “correct,” that is, operating from the place of lack or dissonance and wanting to be entropic rather than belonging as an individual, would allow for an alternative to computational coherence. Amaro writes: “[T]he entropic individual exceeds the barriers of social relations to enter an alternative space of being-made possible by a reimagining of the self. In other words, allowability for the unusable, uncommon, and thus incomputable individual potentialises the social space toward new ways of relating” (2019). Being indifferent to representation by AI, and thus incomputable, could not only enable lived experiences at the site of the objectified, but also allow the Black technical object to be perceived as generative of alternative social relations. By remaining incompatible within the network, the object generates new conditions of self-actualisation. The specificity of this relation, then, is that in contact with the network, entropy is the condition for transformation. Therefore, the perspectivisation of queering in the sense of the mediality of immersion or the immersive dissolution of identity categories is to be placed alongside that of entropy. The effect of which is processes of transformation and the politics of which is compassion for the self that is coherent in the encounter with artificial misrecognition—to take up Amaro’s point here (2019). Misrecognition as queer potential can be followed up with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s approach to “queering homophily” (2018). Chun thematizes homophily, or love among equals, as a “fundamental axiom” (2018, 131) of networks as generated by media theory since the 1950s. That is, it is not the actions of individuals that are responsible for categorising networks, but the actions of those most like us who are in networks in our habitual neighbourhood. Similarity generates connections; similarity increases the probability of predictability. Love among equals is the starting point of network fragmentation and segregation, which is why Chun goes so far as to say that in networks, first of all, the primary source of inequality is not hatred of the Other, but love of what one resembles (2018, 139). To break through the logic of homophily and queer it in order to ultimately take the performativity of networks seriously would then mean acknowledging the conflictual, the uncomfortable: “Instead of seeing similarity as a trigger for connection, we should (…) think through the productive power of the uncomfortable” (2018, 148)—through the power of the dissonant and incompatible, so to speak, as Amaro describes it in the context of his understanding of the Black technical object (2018). The inability to conform to certain norms, e.g., representation, or to be incorporated into certain norms, as Chun puts it following Sara Ahmed (2004, 145), forms a new theory of connectivity, a queer homophily or a heterophily. Reproduction would thus not mean the replication of the same in the pattern of likes or in the pattern of coherence. Rather, reproduction would mean caring for conflict, that is, the cultivation of conflict, discomfort, and incompatibility. The extent to which incompatibility or conflict can be considered the potential of an AI that cares for alternative ways of being will be exemplified by two media-aesthetic processes that I would like to establish as Patching and hoarding 115 patching and hoarding in the course of my reading of “Sugar Wall’s Teardom” and “All Directions at Once.” Patching or healing in difference As Yvonne Volkart rightly notes, the “Sugar Walls Teardom” video mentioned at the beginning recalls the digital aesthetics of cyberfeminist parodies. Gender stereotypes, as parodied by VNS Matrix in the 1990s (2020, 25), are also traversed here several times. Even the opening sequence alone, backed by Far Eastern wellness music, is broken in itself several times. The pink chair, which according to the music and advertising aesthetics could also be a cosmetic chair, turns out to be not only one for gynaecological examinations, but also an instrument of torture. Finally, the protagonist Rezaire lies there, fixed with leather straps, tilted backwards and exposed, “to sit, watch and feel,” as the inserted text says (see Figure 6.4). The pornotopian techniques of viewing body orifices (Hentschel 2001) hereby invoked, equally valid in gynaecology and cinema, are transposed into the visual colonial discourse of the slave market with the references to coercion. If at the time of slavery, Black women’s ability to give birth was first touted in advertisements (Kelly 2016, 150), they came “under the hammer” by highlighting the “important, saleable body parts” (Hooks 2018, 94). The glimpse back into the colonial past implied by this opening scene is interrupted in the next moment: The animated gold curtain falls and we are plunged into a science-fiction world in which, according to technofeminist imaginaries, the womb is the alien who steps out of the spaceship. This image—as I have written elsewhere—recalls Tricia Rose’s statement in the interview that was instrumental in coining the term Afrofuturism that Figure 6.4 Tabita Rezaire. 2016. Sugar Walls Teardom, video 22minutes, filmstill. 116 Katrin Köppert childbearing is a weapon in the struggle for Black feminist futures (Köppert 2020). In just over a minute, “Sugar Walls Teardom” delivers the entire panorama: From the search engine-optimised advertising aesthetics of the femininity industry to gynaecology as a colonial subjugation technology to the Afrofeminist showdown in Star Wars. The density of content is held together—according to Volkart—by an aesthetic of flowing with a simultaneous fast pace (2020, 25), but without renouncing moments of friction. I would like to connect to the latter because, in almost all of Rezaire’s works, a procedure is noticeable that I will describe in the following text with the term patching. Again and again, images are applied patch-like, like small plasters, to the surface of the picture. Relationality is created by layering images on top of each other, but without them amalgamating (Pritchard et al. 2020), melting (MELT forthcoming), or blurring in the vortex of immersion, as is discussed elsewhere in the context of queer processes of computerisation. There is no seamless transition between images, structures, and surfaces. Dissonances remain between things that connect, or—following Kathryn Yussof—rifts, which is why I speak elsewhere of rifted algorithms with regard to Rezaire’s aesthetics (Köppert 2021). According to Yusoff, rifts are the condition of survival in racially dehumanised worlds (2018, 63). And also in recourse to Ramon Amaro’s discussion of the Black technical object, the potential of connection without seamless transition is to have built in the error and retained the incompatibilities. It is only with the unavailabilities that come with the errors and incompatibilities that AI can be understood as generative of queer, Black, be-disabled, trans*inter*, migrant lives of colour. Images applied like band-aids, then, represent a form of healing and care whose premise is difference (between foreground and background) and conflict. The image plasters heal by not leaving out wounding and conflict: “To live in difference, we need to start from conflict—rather than run away from it,” writes Wendy Chun (2021, 247). Hoarding or inhabiting excess To Rezaire’s process of patching is added another aspect, which can certainly be described with an aesthetic of flowing, but which seems to me more excessive in terms of the use of images and incompatible with metaphors of (inter)flowing. Patching, i.e., the overlaying of images that, although overlapping, persist in their limitations, leads to stacking or hoarding, i.e., a hoarding of imagery that exemplifies Rezaire’s art (Kariuki 2016). I understand hoarding here as a critical allusion to colonial history and the accumulation of stolen art objects that cannot be justified by any scientific or curatorial interest. The violent and frenetic looting of objects from colonised countries, the majority of which never came to view but are left to rot in the cellars of primarily European museums (Savoy 2021, 22ff.), is something we can compare today with the neocolonial present of collecting data that, in all likelihood, will not all be evaluated either. Hoarding, however, also responds Patching and hoarding 117 to the discourse of denial, detoxification, or, to use Urs Stäheli’s term, denetworking (2021). With the mass accumulation and layering of visual material, the desire for reduction is paraded as the privilege of those who can afford to detox. Similar to what is written in the “Xenofeminist Manifesto,” I understand hoarding as an aesthetic procedure against the excess of modesty (Cuboniks 2018, 43), which, even before marginalised people had sufficient and non-discriminatory access to the Internet and its benefits, demands purification. The right to deny privilege is undermined by hoarding that stays with the uncomfortable and the incompatibilities and also ambivalences of digital technologies. Hoarding is in this respect a different form of denial: It addresses denial as privilege and reduction as part of the problem of excluding BIPOC trans*inter*women from, e.g., datasets. At the same time, exclusion does not become a starting point to fit into algorithmic logics in the most modest way possible. Instead, hoarding as an excessive accumulation of visual material undermines coherence and thus predictability. I would now like to discuss this as central aesthetic practice in the work “All Directions at Once” by Brazilian, Berlin-based scholar and artist Luiza Prado de O. Martins from 2018 and relate it to the image of “seed wombing” that I suggest for it. The GIF essay “All Directions at Once” by Luiza Prado de O. Martins (see Figure 6.5) explores practices of herbal birth control as an act of decolonising the reproduction of marginalised communities. It centres on ayoowiri, a plant whose infusion was used by enslaved indigenous and African people as a contraceptive and, in stronger doses, as an abortifacient. Drawing on the experience of biohacking, i.e., intervening in, for example, reproductive coercion Figure 6.5 Luiza Prado de O. Martins. 2018. All Directions at Once, GIF essay, still. 118 Katrin Köppert on plantations through plants and seeds (Sosa 2017; Prado 2018a), a perspective of Black feminism is elaborated whose notion of care is incompatible with stereotypical notions of reproducing motherhood. Therefore, I find the image of seed wombing catchy. Drawing on Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory and the thesis that femininity has never been absorbed into the notion of the peaceful gatherer (LeGuin 2020 [1989]; Gramlich 2020, 14), the womb is always also a seed bomb whose detonations may not bear fruit, but are nonetheless generative of non-heteronormative decolonial social connections. It is in this sense that I understand the aesthetics of the GIF essay. Prado de O. Martins herself says that the GIF format is predestined to understand the cyclical and precisely non-linear, predictable movement of life in the excessive stacking and downright bombarding superimposition of images (2018b). The explosive nature of hoarding, which is expressed in the rapid superimposition, follows Frantz Fanon, who did not understand decolonisation as an apocalyptic moment that has already taken place. Instead, it is the cyclical form of explosive germination (Köppert 2021). Thinking with the cyclical temporal structure of digitally animated seeds, finally, allows us to understand AI as the art of critically relating to the demands of modernity’s ideas entangled with colonialism and heterosexism—such as rational computation and linear time incompatibility. Should smart machines therefore celebrate a queer coming out in the sense of an understanding that says it would all be less brutal once we arrived at the visibility paradigm? Isn’t it rather about the cyclical (of menstruation) in its uncontrollability and the possibilities of stacking and overlaying to explore non-linear paths and to acknowledge, with the dense layering of images and typographies, the connections between past, present, and future and thus the seams in the differences? I consider patching and hoarding as aesthetic procedures that imaginarily embed incompatibility and conflict, as I have discussed following Ramon Amaro and Wendy Chun, in AI and app technologies of predictive reproduction and imaginarily provide for recodes. These are aesthetics of disidentification according to José Esteban Muñoz, because “it is a working on, with, and against [AI] at simultaneous moment” (2020, 11). Hoarding is not about evading, and patching images does not redeem a holistic idea of healing or caring. Instead, they are procedures that magnify the conflicted, the different, and the ambivalent, so that incompatibility can become more probable as an opportunity for queer decolonial AI without asserting its predictability and prediction. Notes 1 I use italics to highlight the social construction of the category whiteness. However, based on the social constructionist approach, I choose to capitalise Blackness to account for lived or embodied experiences, especially in the context of anti-racist resistance movements ( Eggers et al. 2005). Patching and hoarding 119 2 Misogynoir is a term coined by Moya Bailey (2021) to describe anti-Black racist misogyny experienced by Black women. Bailey argues trans*inclusively and also speaks of trans misogynoir. That I choose to write with an asterisk goes back to not wanting to make invisible the specifically transphobic mechanisms in the context of misogyny. However, I am not exclusively concerned with trans misogynoir in this article. Moreover, I add the inter misogynoir not mentioned by Bailey. 3 I take my cue here from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who writes in “Discriminating Data” that we need to move “from dreams of escape to modes of inhabiting” (2021, 16). Furthermore, Christina Sharpe’s reflections inspire my thinking. She writes, “It requires theorising the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness.” ( 2016, 33). Add to this the readings of Kara Keeling and José Esteban Muñoz. While Keeling consistently dwells in the image of im/possibility, that is, the possible within the impossible ( 2019), Muñoz in “The Sense of Brown” is concerned with the expansion of consciousness that Sharpe speaks of, with emotion (2020, 12). This, he argues, is the key to seeking out the possibilities of Brown life in the present rather than projecting them into the future. 4 Without wanting to minimise the discriminatory effects of AI, I also perceive a certain hermeneutic of suspicion, even paranoia regarding risks. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, paranoia often preempts outcome in the course of such scientific methodology ( 2014, 366). Even before we verify the flaws, we already think we know what unequal effects AI will have. Accompanying this hermeneutic is a backwardness to the past that is oriented to the flaw/problem, or determined by the flaw, so that there is no perspective beyond the critique. With Kosofsky Sedgwick and also Lauren Berlant (2014, 14), I would therefore argue for a reparative reading understood as de-dramatisation. To de-dramatise allows the supposedly incidental and “ordinary to work in its potential as an alternative present.” (Köppert 2022, transl. kk) 5 Not only the missing surname points to the de-subjectifying treatment. There are also differing indications as to whether the picture shows Lucy or Betsy. C. Riley Snorton discusses the misnomer as another indication of the fungibility, or exchangeability, of Black bodies (2017, 23, 50). 6 I adopt the term automated inequality from Virginia Eubanks (2018). 7 The concept of “critical diversity” attempts to problematise the extent to which diversity is a management tool that, by pluralising positionings and perspectives, does not address overcoming discrimination and institutional power relations ( Auma 2017; Mörsch 2018). Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London. 145. Amaro, Ramon. 2019. “As if.” e-flux Architecture. https://www.e-flux.com/ architecture/becoming-digital/248073/as-if/. Accessed February 14, 2022. Amaro, Ramon. 2022. The Black Technical Object on Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. London: Sternberg Press. Auma, Maureen Maisha. 2017. “Kulturelle Bildung in pluralen Gesellschaften. Diversität von Anfang an! Diskriminierungskritik von Anfang an!” In Weiße Flecken – Diskurse und Gedanken über Diskriminierung, Diversität und Inklusion in der Kulturellen Bildung, edited by Anja Schütze and Jens Maedler, 61–76. München: Kopaed Verlag. Bailey, Moya. 2021. Misogynoir Transformed. Black Women´s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press. 120 Katrin Köppert Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press. Blas, Zach. 2016. “Contra-Internet.” e-flux Journal 74. https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/74/59816/contra-internet/. Accessed May 10, 2022. Bonhomme, Edna. 2020. “Covid Threatens to Worsen Disparities in Maternal and Reproductive Care.” The Nation Magazine. https://www.thenation.com/article/ society/black-maternal-reproductive-health/. Accessed February 14, 2022. Briggs, Laura. 2002. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters. On Surveillance of Blackness. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2018. “Queering Homophily: Muster der Netzwerkanalyse.” Zeitschrift fu r Medienwissenschaften 18: 131–148. 10.25595/502. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2021. Discriminating Data. Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge/London: MIT Press. Cuboniks, Laboria. 2018. The Xenofeminist Manifest. New York: Verso Books. De Arellano, Annette B. Ramírez, and Conrad Seipp. 2011. Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception: A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2018 [1986]. “Nomadology: The War Machine.” Atlas of Places. https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/nomadology-the-war-machine/. Accessed 14. February 2022. Dietze, Gabi. 2020. “Pathosformel Mutterschaft.” Gender Blog der Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/blog/pathosformelmutterschaft. Accessed February 14, 2022. Eggers, Maureen Maisha et al. 2005. “Konzeptuelle Überlegungen.” In Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maishe Eggers et al., 11–13. Münster: Unrast Verlag. Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ghandi, Sharlene. 2019. “Are Your Period Tracker Apps Exploiting Your Sensitive Personal Data?” gal-dem. https://gal-dem.com/are-your-period-tracker-apps-exploitingyour-sensitive-personal-data/. Accessed February 14, 2022. Gordon, Lewis. 2006. “Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter´s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections.” In After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on the Thought of Sylvia Wynter, edited by Anthony Bogues, 237–257. Kingston: Ian Randle. Gramlich, Naomie. 2020. “Feministisches Spekulieren. Einigen Pfaden folgen.” In Feministisches Spekulieren. Genealogien, Narrationen, Zeitlichkeiten, edited by Marie-Luise Angerer and Naomie Gramlich, 10–29. Berlin: Kadmos. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Hentschel, Linda. 2001. Pornotopische Techniken des Betrachtens: Raumwahrnehmung und Geschlechterordnung in visuellen Apparaten der Moderne. Marburg: Jonas. Patching and hoarding 121 “man” has thus first introduced correlational thinking as a social truth, which animates algorithmic pattern recognition, but can also be traced to ideological differentiations such as the nature-culture-divide and all its colonial, heteropatriarchal baggage. 2 The mathematical equations driving pattern recognition thus necessarily need to be observed within the epistemic environments that underlie its sense-making activities as cultural fictions or mythoi. 3 It is then no accident, for example, that research on the internet drew upon William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer” to describe cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination of the mind” (Chun 2021). Science and/or fiction is thus central to the development and mediation of how technologies are introduced and accepted into social life (Dainton et al. 2021). 4 Considering the role AI is increasingly playing with regards to defining ambivalent, contextual, and non-essential cultural concepts such as race, gender, and sexuality (Noble 2018; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Wang and Kosinski 2018), positivistic knowledge production in the machine seems not only deficient but also ideologically limited, as it reduces these concepts to codified, singular, and coherent data points. In a longer genealogy, correlationism disavows indigenous, decolonial, feminist, and queer theories of knowledge and identity as it ruptures the ties between a corporeal positionality and its ability to produce knowledge and forcefully projects mechanisms of identification from the past into an individual’s immediate future. Given such ideological framings of value and those who carry them, this chapter seeks to discuss how cultural imaginaries play a part in and are informed by contemporary evocations of AI and machine consciousness. The following provides a reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and its cinematic adaption by the same name, from which I uncover a queer(y)ing of conventional and hegemonic AI narratives and their attachment to mathematical rationality and machinic objectivity. Instead of positioning AI as something that emerges from clear categorisations, Annihilation provides the basis for thinking about AI in terms of relations and excess, as well as the sociotechnical immersive environments that allow for and produce them. Following contemporary conceptions of the “environmentalitarian situation” (Hörl 2019), as they have occupied media theory of late (Hörl 2019; Schneider 2020), AI will be framed as an immersive system within which existing relations can be unravelled, questioned, and reconfigured. Such an immersion must be equated with an undoing of liberal/ authentic subjectivity as the transparent and sequential figure of man. The vision of AI inherent to the environmentalitarian situation rejects the notion of unambiguous categorisation of identities (drawn together to produce coherent liberal subjectivity) to instead suggest that environmentalitarian immersion changes how to consider intelligence, knowledge, and thought as distributed and relational, as always already disordering and producing excess. Considering the emergence of sentient AI such as home assistants that draw upon capturing emotions just as much as data points, it is precisely these affective and somatic experiences of desire so central to queer subjectivity that 128 Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss are at stake within contemporary AI logics. Picking up on the relationship between environment, nature, and its propositions for the human as exceptional to its (animal, machine) others, I read Annihilation via the concept of “wildness” (Halberstam 2020), which Jack Halberstam understands as a shifting queerness that refuses to be subsumed into a coherent individual form. In such a reading, Annihilation represents a vision of AI that expresses ambivalence and multiplicity with regard to desire, corporeality, and subjectivity and puts to question the liberal-human subject as the narrator and agent of modern world-making. Instead of engaging with the machine as the logical continuation of the human or as its other, Annihilation produces iterations of AI that are immersive, “wild,” and queer in consequence. Although this attribution and reinterpretation of wildness presented in Annihilation positions queerness as inherent to AI, both queerness and AI are not posited as inherently utopian in their production of excess, but need to be examined in terms of histories of violence in which current modes of desire and resulting speculations for the future are embedded. After all, if thought, power, and capital have themselves long since become “environmental” and abolished any sense of liberal selfhood in the process, immersion and queer excess as an abandonment of the “transparent I” can be read as capitulation, surrender, or an individual’s “move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Annihilation: Area X as a Wild Thing Annihilation is the first instalment in a three-part science fiction novel by Jeff VanderMeer, marking the biggest success for the author to date. The filmic adaptation of the book, produced in 2018 by sci-fi director Alex Garland, has launched VanderMeer’s writing into the science fiction mainstream and opened his writings up for interpretations on the contemporary state of technology. Although VanderMeer himself is mainly concerned with environmental issues, his classification as an author of the “New Weird” 5 genre, as well as the film adaptation of the book under the same title by Alex Garland, offers reason enough to read Annihilation against the backdrop of environmental technologies and the current hype around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As a central motif, the story negotiates the relationship between corporeal subjectivity as a representation of liberal-humanist anthropocentrism and de-subjectifying immersion into the environment, which is presented as agential and multiplicitous. I understand Annihilation to negotiate a queer excess produced by logics of categorisation that can enable more-than-human relations, desires, and kinships. The analysis will centre mostly on the novel by VanderMeer. However, with Garland as the director, Annihilation’s filmic adaptation necessarily needs to be taken into consideration, as it was produced in between two of his other works Ex Machina (2014) and Devs (2020), which both explicitly mediate machine consciousness and sentient AI. Contextualised through Garland, the filmic adaptation makes explicit the subtle entanglements of humans, machines, Wild Science/Fiction 129 and the environment as wildness that are explored in the novel. Therefore, it will also be consulted in parts, especially when its aesthetics turn to explicit negotiations of AI. Because the narrative differs between the two media forms in part, the plotline of the novel is central, while the film will be considered as revealing underlying themes within the novel’s plot by aestheticising them as a form of mythmaking about contemporary technology. In the novel, five female explorers embark on a mission in which their task is to penetrate and explore an ominous Area X. Area X covers an abandoned section of the US coastline that is kept under strict quarantine by a mysterious government agency called Southern Reach. The expedition consists of a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, a linguist, and a psychologist. After 11 missions involving only men, this 12th is the first one undertaken by an all-female team of researchers. Reasons for this are not made explicit, but each individual seems to follow her own, often intimate motivations for participation. The biologist, who is henceforth the protagonist of the narrative, is in search of her husband, who participated in the previous expedition as a medic but never returned home. The couple’s relationship seems loving, but also distant and somewhat alienated at times, though it seems to be the biologist herself who keeps her husband at a distance, always eluding the relationship to some extent. She is not portrayed as cold, but still as peculiar and withdrawn, her reticence referring not only to the intimacy with her husband, but also to the other researchers participating in the expedition. Soon, the other women express mistrust and scepticism towards the biologist, who doesn’t seem to mind the increasing alienation from the group. However, these peculiarities also seem to be the characteristics that allow her to survive the mission. While the linguist leaves Area X in an unspecified way before her introduction into the plot, the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist each die slow and painful deaths. The biologist is the only one who recognises a tunnel as a tower; her impulses to investigate the environment seem to follow a different logic than the interests of the other, seemingly more rational researchers. As a consequence of this waywardness, she is contaminated: A strange entity that autonomously and tirelessly writes phrases and sentences in organic material on the walls of the tunnel/tower pollinates the biologist with an indefinable organic substance that immediately begins to alter her body. From that moment on, all researchers sense an invasive presence that cannot be located. But while the others perish at the mercy of this presence, the biologist seems to undergo a development in which she is distanced from herself, but undoubtedly continues to stay alive and conscious until the end. Soon, the novel’s plot revolves only around the biologist’s encounter with this entity, which she christens “Crawler.” The entity Crawler seems omniscient and omnipresent. Even though Area X is presented as a wilderness agentively confronting the humans, the abstract descriptions the biologist attempts to articulate before the actual encounter describe Crawler the 130 Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss way one might be an artificial hyper-technological entity rather than a natural body or a modern subject. At the same time, the biologist’s own subjectivity also becomes increasingly vague as a result of independently occurring changes in her body—more and more, the transparency and coherence of her articulated sense of self seem to dwindle. While the biologist’s “I” repeatedly emerges through self-reflections and memories, by the end of the novel’s narrative, it must be questioned whether she can still be conceived of as a human subject at all, as her body emits phosphorescent light in the darkness and her thoughts no longer seem entirely her own. Evoking the title of the novel, the biologist asks herself: was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation? […] In a great deal of pain, feeling as if I had left part of myself there, I began to trudge up the steps […]. (272, emphasis mine) Despite it causing “a great deal of pain,” enough agency and will remain to leave the place of the damned encounter. The question of what is actually left of the biologist after the encounter is to a point unanswered, as she claims: “Before she died, the psychologist said I had changed, and I think she meant I had changed sides” (244, emphasis in original). It seems clear, at least to the others, that the biologist is no longer part of the human team forcing itself into Area X, but instead has immersed herself to become a part of the hypernatural, violent, and excessive landscape of the wild. This passage suggests an acknowledgement of contemporary logics of the human that distinguish human consciousness and cognition from both the natural and the artificial realms of what is commonly understood as intelligence. What remains of the biologist is thus sentient and conscious, but incommensurable with the hegemonic notion of liberal-human subjectivity; she has changed sides, becoming part of the wildness. The biologist pushes forward into the wild and loses all selfhood within it. The last two sentences of the book express this loss of self when the biologist states: I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions. I am not returning home. (241) The biologist went on the 12th expedition in search of her husband, who himself participated in the 11th. The sentence suggests that her journey is in the process of leading the biologist to reuniting with him, precisely because she no longer can distinguish between the lost husband and herself because, potentially, Area X has obliterated the difference to a hyper-technological, or natural cultural, metaphysical state. While the biologist’s conflictual marriage never becomes fully transparent in its structures of desire, the almost soothing promise of unison towards the novel’s end promises some form of resolution, even if the biologists consider this resolution to come in the form of her as “the last casualty.” Wild Science/Fiction 131 In the cinematic adaptation, the biologist (played by Natalie Portman) encounters the entity in a sequence that mirrors contemporary narratives of AI consciousness. The encounter plays out between the biologist and an initially obscure, somewhat human figure that seems to consist merely of silvery material. The being then continuously develops through its interaction with the protagonist and ultimately becomes her twin, mimicking her appearance and movements. The film shows a slow progression in which the silvery humanoid figure slowly takes on Portman’s skin tone, hair, and facial features. Much like contemporary machine learning, the entity first learns on the basis of the data provided to it, imitating previous behaviour to slowly develop predictions for the near future. As the scene proceeds, the now human-looking figure also seems to develop an independent interiority as a result of its continuous mimicry. Within a short period of time, the development detaches from simple prediction to emulate, or actually become, consciousness: The AI surpasses the biologists input data and frees itself from mimicry, only to attack. If there had not been enough reason before, this encounter is the culmination of a negotiation of human subjectivity and the immersive reality of Crawler as AI: Area X is clearly not to be located in the realm of the natural, but rather in an understanding of technology as; an becoming immersive lifeworld with other sense-making practices and agencies. Against the background of an agentive-becoming environmental, or a media ecology, the film picks up on a shift within AI discourse here, which seeks to undermine the rigid boundaries of an unambiguous categorical logic. As a supernatural and agential landscape, Area X is the realm of the Crawler, and Crawler is, in a sense, indistinguishable from it, a super-AI that has attained consciousness and is seeking a place in the world by devouring “external” knowledge and subjectivities. “Free will” and agency are stylised as indicators for intelligence—being able to act against one’s “nature,” which is presented here as input data—and become the standard of measure, which groups entities beyond liberal subjectivity and according to the wildness’ own hypernatural order. Both book and film express this, albeit in different ways: While the book never becomes explicit about the intelligence’s form, the film anthropomorphises it, but leaves open whether or not the android takes over the biologist or merges with her. In both mediations, Crawler is the entity that knows how to subjugate (wo)man and (natural) nature, or at least to take them over, to deprive the remaining human subjects of their sense of self, their will—and their life, if need be. At least for the biologist, the “takeover” by conscious AI is not necessarily a hostile one. If Annihilation represents AI as an immersive technological system, what modes of relation could emerge from this representation, and how do these help to read queerness as sociotechnical, immersive, as another configuration of technological systems of AI? What exactly is the titular annihilation directed against? 132 Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss Wild Science/Fiction: Can Queer Machines Strike Back? Contrary to its title, Annihilation does not seem to refer to a complete eradication of lifeworlds and environments. Instead, I want to suggest that what is eradicated is life as we know it. This becomes most obvious in the film’s aesthetics, where the characters that accompany the biologist undergo a process that can best be described as “death by landscape” (Atwood 1998 [1990]), as an eponymous short story by Margret Atwood conceptualises. In Annihilation, we see characters mutate into plants and hybrid creatures; their genetic material is transformed in Area X so that they become a part of the landscape, indistinguishable from the non-human environment. In Atwood’s story, too, a girl disappears, only to reappear as a tree. In an analysis of Atwood’s story, Elvia Wilk writes about the dissolution of subjectivity as a potential for agency beyond identitarian normativity: […] [T]he literal becoming-plant that happens in these stories suggests the potential for agency in the willing dissolution of self. Knowing how to dissolve and become other is a non-codified and embodied kind of knowledge that women, and other supposedly unstable bodies, have been cultivating for centuries, because they’ve had to. Given the reality of planetary extinction, driven by the notion of the human as bounded figure with unique agency over the landscape, one could argue that this is exactly the type of knowledge currently needed. This is a knowledge about how to actively annihilate the supremacy of the self, and in turn the category of human selves altogether. This is the knowledge that death by landscape is not death at all; where landscape is not a threat, but a possibility, perhaps the only possibility. (Wilk 2019, n.p., emphasis mine) Wilk’s reading allows for a re-evaluation of what happens to the biologist. After an immersion into Area X, the biologist’s subject successfully eludes the categorical certainty that AI usually relies on. For the biologist no longer knows whether she and her identity correspond; she becomes a multitude, an open system that connects to and reproduces the wildness beyond the boundaries of what it commonly means to be human. This not only puts into question a romanticised notion of nature that is repeatedly exoticised as the “other” of culture, but the speculation about wildness is also aestheticised in full ambivalence—as violently appropriating, sometimes to the point of death, as well as redeeming and opening, it penetrates and engulfs the humanly constructed boundaries of what is usually represented as civilisation without the need for innocence. The biologist describes this encounter, in which the crawler’s machine intelligence is made sense of, as follows: […] And what had manifested? What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side Wild Science/Fiction 133 of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps, it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utter alien – one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters. (235) The metaphorical thorn that Crawler’s queer intelligence inserts into the world is a form of desire that exceeds liberal subjectivity. Crawler as an environmental AI has both the power to completely transform its material realities, while remaining attached to the worldliness that has potentially created it, thus without cutting all ties to its problematic histories. Read through Halberstam’s Wild Things (2020), Annihilation articulates queerness as wildness, eludes algorithmic forms of identification and intelligibility, as well as assumptions of newness, and follows its own definition of intelligence. Its agency lies in the excess and uncategorical wildness, which allows it to forcibly take over prevailing structures and dissolve any sense of selfhood and identity. Annihilation’s queerness is articulated by means of nonidentification: Crawler is neither human, nor machine, nor passive nature, but pure agency and desire. The longer the biologist remains in Area X, the less she manages to conceive of herself as self, as subject, or as uniquely human—to be understood here as a specific normative manifestation of the bourgeois-liberal subject, which Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter criticises as the “overrepresentation” (Wynter 2003) of the human for the displacement of other living beings that do not fit into the lifeworld of white heteropatriarchal subjectivity. That such an overrepresentation has been written into technological infrastructures has been noted across media forms (Hooks 1995; Dyer 1997; Browne 2015) and has received attention within critical scholarship on AI of late (Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019; Chun 2022). Against the backdrop of such a critique, the biologist can be read as a resistant figure to such overrepresentation. Her nonconformity (towards her marriage, her career, her peers) culminates in a potential queerness and is the unmistakable reason that ultimately ensures her survival in Area X. This queerness (as literal oddity) arises, among other things, from her portrayal as strange and withdrawn, as a woman who always evades marriage to her loving husband to some extent and who does not fit the normative image of a happy wife in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. The biologist’s memories circulate around the many times she snuck away to be alone with a micro-version of the wildness, perhaps as a harbinger of Area X: A small pond on an abandoned construction site presents itself as her retreat, where 134 Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss she could observe emerging life and get drunk—an expression of sorrow at the perceived dissonance between wild desire and existing normativity she conformed to at the time. And the husband, too, seemed to know that Area X would have brought an understanding and acceptance of mutual opacity to the relationship that was not possible in the society left behind, leaving messages for the biologist in his diary as if he knew she would make her way to him. Contrary to the title, such a reading of Annihilation centrally negotiates the “making kin” (Haraway 2016; Lewis et al. 2018), the forging of new relations of kinship beyond heteronormative human–human desires as an ever-present act of revitalising and incorporating queer potentiality that draws from excess and opacity. It is perhaps not a coincidence then that Area X itself is a kind of trans* ecology and the biologist is an expert for transitional environments, for transitory ecologies as worlds that cannot be clearly defined as a unified (eco)system. In this sense, the queerness represented by Annihilation is less characterised by identity-political representation (as it has been normalised in the West, for example, by slogans like “we’re here we’re queer” 6 ). Rather, it unfolds through a subtle, wild way of forging relationships that subverts the (heteropatriarchal) compulsion to identify the excess of subjectivation—as opacity, fluidity, and nonconformity. Queerness is constituted under the radar and articulates a distributed relational agency that resonates with especially femme queerness, or queerness in the Global South, which is often articulated through its own logic of opacity, showing itself only to those that have intimate familiarity with its form and expression (Ding 2002). Transferring the fictional representation of the dissolution of liberal subjectivity to machine production processes in the sense of AI, the above narrative suggests that it is precisely in the excesses and gaps of the tightly meshed categorical network with which most AI is equipped that queer desire becomes articulated. The immersive Area X, Crawler, and the dissolution of self that the protagonist undergoes can be understood as a guide to a “Queer OS” (Keeling 2014; Barnett et al. 2016), a queer operating system that fundamentally questions the common sense of correlational machine logics. Proposing such an operating system, Kara Keeling articulates queerness as instability that forms between algorithmic certainties, allowing meanings and relationships to emerge from excess. Instead of a logic of identification, this gives rise to an approach that understands queer as naming an orientation toward various and shifting aspects of existing reality and the social norms they govern, such that it makes available pressing questions about, eccentric and/or unexpected relationships in, and possibly alternatives to those social norms. (Keeling 2014, 153) Expanding this understanding of queerness to “an operating system of a larger order” (McPherson 2011, cited in Keeling 2014, 153), Keeling projects Wild Science/Fiction 135 technology as another space in and through which social norms are expressed and governed, but can also be transformed. If Annihilation’s narrative in book and film negotiates technology as environmental, then this offers an ambiguity that questions the bounded distinction between nature and culture and subject and object, just as Keeling and also Halberstam do with relation to technology—as the modern capitalist expression of colonial ordering mechanisms—and the wild as disordered desire crossing through the material form to explore its multiplicities. Read through these two queer theorists, Area X is an immersive space that negates individuation; it is both natural and hypernatural; it attaches itself and occludes histories of colonisation, which include forced heterosexuality and modular modes of control. Geographically located on the West Coast of the US, Area X thus serves as an allegory for Silicon Valley, once the land of the indigenous Ohlone people whose enslavement, displacement, and dispossession accompanied the first electronic infrastructures. 7 The seemingly natural geography is disaffected from connotations of passivity and extractivism, as it attaches itself to the artificial when the researchers encounter diffractive modes of reproduction, where species mutate and merge into one another in a way that would not be possible in a merely biological understanding of the natural. Area X as nature refuses passivity and rebels against its extractivist exploitation (and exploration as an object), as it either engulfs or annihilates the violent attempts at scientific exploration and sense-making. Area X thus signals technological restructuring as well as a wildness that exceeds the forceful modulation humans impose onto it. With Halberstam, such a definition of nature’s “wildness” can be conflated with Keeling’s queerness in the sense that it presents “an uninhibited way of being in the body untethered by categorisation” (Halberstam 2020, 4). In such a reading, Annihilation formulates a critique of the normative narrative of data objectivity (as singular and non-ambiguous categorisation or as “raw” data), which signifies progress for a few and catastrophe for many others. Following Sylvia Wynter (2003), such a sense of objectivity as certainty is limited because it absolutises a lifeworld of bourgeois-liberal, and thus white, heteronormative subjectivity, and posits it as a foil for the human being itself. The figure of the biologist thus exits the normative relation humans are supposed to have with non-human entities, no longer seeking to rationally categorise her knowledge on them nor seek out their domination. Such a change also includes a different form of desire, since the apprehension of the self and the supposed “other” is understood as always already a bit opaque, experienced only in splintered encounters, but always somewhat palpable in its intensities. The biologist’s failure to return to civilisation is then paradigmatic of a departure from the bourgeois nuclear family and the emotionally unfulfilling marriage. After all, in elementary particle physics, the term annihilation is also understood as a process of destroying coupled particles, literally exploding heteronormativity (Barad 2012). In such a reading, the biologist does not die; she will only never return to the socially 136 Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss intended order, never again make the attempt to be a liberal subject in her big city life with its broken marriage and failed career, but will find herself and also her husband in the anti-categorical wilderness. In place of marriage as a categorical form of liberal (inter)subjectivity, a relationship of care emerges that is not natural but, in a sense, supernatural or technological, since the origin of the biologist’s change is never fully revealed. However, her care and her will to leave the order behind are rewarded, as the biologist, rather than dying miserably like the other members of the expedition, is welcomed into and by the wildness. With this affirmation, she loses identity and identifiability, and the book ends in only conditionally coherent sentences about her affective incorporation and a sense of belonging. In the film, the biologist is reunited with her long-lost husband at the end, but a flash of both their eyes in the final scene casts doubt on their humanity. This scene suggests that it is the AI-like androids that are returning to the world from Area X. In the book, it becomes increasingly clear that humans are not. If this exit leaves open, as it were, how the story continues, the choice of this moment as the endpoint of the first narrative can nevertheless be evaluated as queer temporality (Halberstam 2010), as a suspension of the norm. Becoming Environmental and the Normativity of the Environmentalitarian Situation Annihilation seems to be a reverberation of the recently made acknowledgement that “man is neither height nor centre of creation” (Lewis et al. 2018, n.p.) and thus cannot be the only subject of action and agency. AI, too, can only join the world of agentic artefacts and objects as they have always already been conceived through non-western philosophy and indigenous epistemologies. However, with Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, there is another reading that emerges from the story that the authors describe as “settler moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Even if disidentification with liberal ascriptions of selfhood is represented here as a queer potential of liberation, the question of who gets to inhabit or embody such agency is in itself decisive for the critique of current conditions, since the violence of categorisation and scientific logics of evidence have yet to be overcome. Indeed, the turn away from intelligible notions of subjectivity that is proposed through a turn towards the wildness has historically only been deemed successful and revolutionary for those already considered within notions of the human and is thus to a point affirming of precisely the liberal notions of subjectivity that wildness opposes. The experience that the biologist has in giving up her own subjectivity may open herself up to queer desire, but it also enables her to leave behind her own involvement in problematic genealogies of extractivism, racism, and dispossession as central functions of a heteropatriarchal colonialism that has distorted the environment in the first place. If the novel is perhaps ambivalent in this respect, the casting of Natalie Portman in the role of the biologist translates into the representation of a normative and white-passing Wild Science/Fiction 137