Hacking the Body as a Black Box: AI and Embodied Experience

Intermediartes: Conference on Media, Arts and Interaction School of Media Arts and Design Auditorium Luis Soares Politécnico do Porto R. Dom Sancho I 1, Porto, Portugal How can we reclaim the body in a landscape increasingly contaminated by AI hype? Can technology still become an ally in bringing us back in touch with each other and ourselves, beyond predictability and disembodied interaction? How can we create interfaces that bring the body back to the centre of experience?

AI systems of representation operate through opaque, probabilistic processes grounded in extractivist practices, invisible labour, embedded biases, and regimes of surveillance and governance. They function at a distance from the body, producing inherently unpredictable outputs while serving structures of capital accumulation. These representations circulate widely—mediated, consumed, and normalised across social platforms—shaping how perception, intimacy, and agency are imagined. Artificiality stands in for experience.

This becomes particularly evident in AI-driven sexbots, where the female body is constructed as an object of desire, rooted in a patriarchal visual regime. Like the Odalisque, it is offered to the gaze, simulating consent yet lacking any real agency, reproducing stereotypes and systems of oppression.

What is at stake is not only representation, but the absence of experience itself. AI is not sentient and does not have a perceptual body; it cannot navigate or experience the world in action. What it produces are simulations of perception, rather than lived experience.

In response, this keynote approaches the body as a “black box,” proposing a shift from representation to perception, and recovering care and love as embodied human experiences.