Tactile Intelligence: Rethinking Consent through Embodied AI Prototyping

MZ* Baltazar’s Lab Jägerstraße 52-56 1200 Wien

This hands-on workshop explores the ethical, emotional, and sensory dimensions of AI-driven human-machine interaction by approaching the body as a “black box”—both as an artistic strategy and as a critical lens through which to examine how interactive technologies, and AI in particular, engage with bodies. Rather than prioritising control, prediction, and optimisation, it focuses on intimate, situated experience while questioning how bodies are shaped, abstracted, and often excluded and discriminated against within these technological paradigms.

Participants will engage with simple AI models and DIY touch-responsive interfaces using microcontrollers and open-source machine learning tools to examine how consent, agency, and embodiment can be both problematic and reimagined within artificially automated systems. By building interactive prototypes and experimenting with real-time feedback, the workshop invites critical reflection on intimacy, power, and the politics of touch in today’s technosphere, engaging ecofeminist and disability perspectives.