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Embodiment and Disembodiment in Tech
Embodiment and Disembodiment in Tech
Embodiment and Disembodiment in Tech
The internet is not in the cloud. What sustains the virtual is very real. The most
modern optical cables under the sea follow colonial shipping routes (fig. 0), and
sharks can bite them apart. Considering the digital and the real not as divided but
mutually interpenetrating and overlaid, this text looks at the politics and
machines as tools that prolong and makes-more-efficient the work bodies, bodies
being used and seen, being allowed to live longer to perform a function. (Fred Moten
I looked for examples where technology writes or fails to write, reads or fails to
read non-white non-cis bodies, and strategies where the fantastic faliures* [queer
bodies fails fantastically glitching the tech (Russell, pp9)] are used to
1
1) Disembodied AI assistants like Alexa hide laboring bodies.
2) Cameron James-Wilson, a white man, created and profits from the black digital
model, Shudu.
4) Black Trans Archive by Danielle Brathwaite Shirley centres Black Trans experiences
The conventional association of the physical body with the real self is questionable.
indicating downloaded deities in human or animal forms in Hinduism. In everyday use today,
an avatar can be a virtual character or an uploaded profile icon that the users embody in
In both definitions an avatar is the skin* people or deities slip under to act or speak.
<skin/>‘Skin can appear as a boundary that contains and separates the self from the world, it
is, in its tactility, a reminder of human inseparability from the world(s)’ (Fondation Brocher,
n.d.). </skin>
In this sense, the physical body*[aka. the digirati’s wetware] is as much an avatar as,
say, the gothic vampire character I created for myself in Second Life.1 These avatars,
1
Second Life is an application that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and have a
second life in an online virtual world, or metaverse.
2
responsible for their actions and speech across worlds&platforms, are equally
authentic.
bodies. It emphasises instead the process of experiencing through the bodies and
is a messy process. Acquired or arrested by the avatars and profile pictures, are
residues, new attributes, and blisters of wearing new skins. The many
<haunting nightmares/>People who deployed black characters are shouted racial slurs at in
the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (Hernandez, 2019). </haunting nightmares>
‘There is no return to the concept of “the real”, as digital practice and the visual
culture that has sprung from it has forever reshaped how we read, perceive,
state of being offline (temporarily) that does not conform to the narrative of the
digital/physical divide.</AFK>
avatars/bodies should be singled out as they labour to make possible the other
worlds. As the first points of exploitation, conditioned by racial, gender and class
2
‘an umbrella term for anyone who experiences exclusive sexual attraction toward fictional
characters, a general type of fictional characters, or whose sexuality is influenced by fictional
characters’ (lgbta.wikia.org/).
3
access/time/resources/energy to enter the other worlds. We will begin exploring
moment to also discuss what disembodiment is, since it is a major term that
will be importance with, e.g. Alexa, and hasn’t come up yet. What is the
well as smart tech such as home sound assistants, we do not often hear the stories
about the femme3 voice casts for Alexa or Siri. Are their synthetic voices really of
together for the sound assistants, a real person must record their voice to provide
the machine with material to work with. Apple never acknowledged Susan Bennett
as Siri’s voice cast (Ravitz, 2013), nor did Amazon acknowledge Nina Rolle as Alexa’s
voice (Vincent, 2021). As for the male voice of Siri in the United Kingdom, Jon Briggs,
he was warned by Apple to not speak publicly about Siri. The result is that the
3
The term femme is used here to describe the voice as feminine-identifying without assigning a gender to
the voice.
4
Under the CNN youtube video clip ‘Meet the real woman behind the voice of Siri’
posted in 2013, one of the comments reads, ‘Well now I feel bad for all the times I
told her to shut up 😭’. Taking mechanized femme voices as disembodied not only
reinforces the gender bias of females in assistant roles (Manton and Campbell,
2021) — invisibly blending into the background yet always available if you need
as femme but not yet human* allows for Siri to respond to ‘you are a slut’ with ‘I’d
Ex.1 ‘Vehicles, including ships, cars, trains and even engines often take the feminine gender,
Ex.2 In cyberpunk novels and films, there exist the tropes of femme asian bodies being
overtly-sexualised and fetishised as cyborgs, whose main purposes are to care for the
emotional needs of male characters though not showing much emotion themselves
4
Alexa’s far-field voice recognition allows her/it/them to hear you from everywhere.
5
</machines as femme but not yet human>
But sound assistants are not always advertised as being without a body. In
Amazon’s Big Game Commercial: Alexa’s Body published in Feburuary 2021, Alexa
was given the body of Michael B. Jordan. In the ad, the female user fantasised about
bath and being read an audiobook (fig. 2). The video description says ‘we've found a
new body for Alexa. Who knew Alexa had abs?’ This statement raises many
questions. What was the old body of Alexa if this one is new? Was it the suppressed
association between Alexa and Nina Rolle? Or was it the avoided narrative of Alexa
as one of the many femme bodies who labour in homes? After all, it is ‘not cool’ to
around the house, switching on and off the lights and telling jokes. But is it
6
acceptable and even desirable if the embodiment is of a famous Black man like
Michael B. Jordan?
Why did Amazon give Alexa Michael B. Jordan’s abs, if not to further the
bodies one can use (if not abuse) without consequences? In deliberately associating
or dissociating bodies with machines, we are left with the historical tendency of
worker, rabota (Old Church Slavonic), meaning servitude, and rabu, meaning
slave.</enslave>
This concerns not only dehumanising femme bodies but also commercialising
blackness, which will be further explored in the next chapter. The question of
where exactly are the abs of Alexa should be answered in terms of which laboured
Sociologist Ruha Benjamin ’ has remarked, ‘at the same time that Amazon ran the
Alexa ad, the company was trying to crush the unionisation of mostly Black and
Latino workers in its Alabama warehouse.’ ‘Fantasizing bubble bathing with a sexy
(Benjamin, 2021).’
<embodying technology/>The store and warehouse workers’ bodies are under constant
thermal cameras, security cameras and recorded footage to boost the workers’
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI System takes an even closer look
the users, unpaid or low paid students, volunteers, interns, crowdworkers and
7
outsourced services in developing countries who trained the datasets for Alexa to
miners who work for low pay, work unscheduled overtime, work illegal hours, work
with toxic materials, neurotoxins, (such as arsine, phosphine and others substances
that expose workers to health hazards such as cancer, miscarriages and birth
radiation, low-level radiation, and airborne metal, work through hard labour, work
wrong belief that one’s online being is separated from their meatspace self, as if the
differences and injustices of the latter could just be left behind (Wark, 2020). Those
whose AFK bodies laboured to make technology possible, who are rendered
shows that young people who are African American, Latinx, low income, participate
in English as Second Language programs, and/or lack adequate housing are less
likely to have access to the internet (Schaffhauser, 2020) (US); 17 out of 30 Black
and Latino individuals who are HIV positive and at risk for cardiovascular events
computer (Adkins-Jackson, Brown and Loeb, 2021) (US); ‘only 51% of households
earning between £6000-10,000 annually have home internet access compared with
5
The meatspace, commonly known as the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace or a virtual
environment.
8
99% of households with an income of over £40,001’ (Holmes and Burgess, 2020)
(UK).
The required necessary devices (laptops with sufficient graphic card and memory
space £419 - £1899, drawing pads £35 - £724, etc), software licenses (Photoshop
free time and energy to learn how to use the relevant tools, make it even harder for
worlds. ‘In spite of the claims that everyone is the same in virtual worlds, access to
technology and necessary skills will effectively replicate class divisions of the rest of
reality in the virtual spaces’ and ‘will tend to reinforce existing inequalities, and
context we talk about avatars and representations. One example that shows how
people manipulating Black or ‘of colour’ bodies into trendy fashion things — is
Shudu Gram.
9
10
Shudu (fig. 3) claims to be one of the first digital supermodels. She has 218k
followers on Instagram. She is femme, has a dark skin tone and often wears short
fashion photographer and visual artist, who, claims to be inspired by South African
Princess Barbie dolls (Netizens, 2019). Despite many people finding it disturbing to
see a white man manipulating a black-presenting femme body (fig. 4, 5), on the
official website of Diigitals6, race was not mentioned at all in terms of Shudu’s
6
The digital model company founded by Cameron James-Wilson which owns Shudu alongside many
other digital models.
11
White men creating black, brown, and of-colour virtual avatars, as ‘self-expressions’
is not unfamiliar in cyberspace. Lisa Nakamura, in her 2002 book Cyber Types: Race,
Ethnicity, and identity on the Internet, looked at how the acquisition of an avatar,
often conceived as liberatory in challenging the racial and gender divide, can result
avatars or characters ‘differently raced from the user’ in stereotypical ways. ‘Tourists operate
and the capital to satisfy curiosities about “native” life’ (Nakamura, 2002, pp.xv) < /identity
tourism>
12
The overpopulated Geisha and Samurai avatars, mostly performed by white
players, are examples of exoticising the bodies of the ‘other’. This is demonstrated
Shudu (dark-skin femme), Dagny (nordic femme), Brenn (dark-skin femme), Koffi
colour bodies and the alien that James-Wilson is so eager to ‘represent’ if not a
sense of otherness? As Celeste Hay observed, ‘while Shudu alone is (a) poor and
models, come without experience. He ‘picked parts of these women that he liked
and created this unreal figure that doesn’t have to go through the struggle,
rejection or abuse within (the) industry that many of these hard-working Black
women have to in their every day’ (J, 2020). Maybe Shudu does get hate comments
the powerful ‘white gaze (that) allows Black people to be reduced to flimsy shells of
blackness… to the confines of the Black body’ and his ‘usurpation of Black bodies as
Countering the criticisms, the Diigitals claims to have ‘collaborate(d) with creators
many black and brown bodies behind Shudu, such as Misty Bailey and Alek Deng
7
Coffee is known as a crop of European colonialism. (ucsc.edu)
13
Malek who modelled for Shudu, who also, later on, was photoshopped from the
final images8. The Diigitals website calls them muses, despite the fact that they are
a white man. Misty said ‘(Shudu) opens up opportunities for black models in the
fashion/beauty industry that look similar to her’ (Bailey, n.d.), spilling the truth
that even when bodies with experiences of race are included in the project, it is
represented.
interview, did Shudu recognise her lack of the capability to experience her body.
Shudu/Badu wrote,
‘We can make the life we want to live without actually living it… I wish
everyone could live the reality they create for themselves on social media.
Until that happens in a genuine way, I think it’s important to remember that
8
Many companies do not have 3D models of their products for Shudu to wear, this is when real
models’ bodies are required.
14
CV Dazzle: making excluded bodies more illegible
genome shows that racial groups are not genetically discrete (Smedley and
the racialised bodies are and the way the bodies are thus treated— that race is
male (fig.7) is only one example of how systemic issues are hard-wired in tech.
When tech is ‘designed by white men and tested on white men, that it works best
on white men is therefore hardly a surprise’ (The Economist, 2021). The machines
15
are biased. The facial identification system is 34.4% more likely to misidentify or fail
to identify darker skin tone females than lighter skin males (Buolamwini, 2018).
system that is applied in more complicated tools such as facial recognition and predictive
analytics.</coded gaze>
Facial recognition determines who gets hauled away by the police. In 2018, the
14-year-old Black schoolboy to an individual on the watchlist. The boy ‘was held by
his identity’(McLean, 2020). As for predictive analytics, which too uses facial
and prevents them from buying homes, getting loans, or finding jobs’ (Awere, 2020).
Even when the big tech companies make progress in addressing these issues, they
do so only after being called out. Companies such as IBM, Face++, Microsoft, made
progress closing their facial identification gender/skin-type gap after being targeted
by Gender Shades9. But the companies not previously targeted, such as Amazon,
still perform badly identifying darker skin tone females (Buolamwini, 2019). The
considerations to alleviate harm to Black and brown bodies are not embedded in
9
‘Gender Shades is a preliminary excavation of the inadvertent negligence that will cripple the age of
automation and further exacerbate inequality if left to fester’ (Buolamwini, 2018).
16
2021), which is always too late.
Computer Vision Dazzle (fig. 8), is an example of finding power in embracing the
dispersed identity of being (even more) illegible. In the technologically mapped AFK
world, a body being visible and readable means that they are trackable and
algorithms and different faces. Even though CV Dazzle was introduced in 2010, ten
years later in 2020, it became one of the many ways people shared to help protect
based on CV Dazzle in June 2020. They tested out the CV Dazzle strategies and
updated the anti-surveillance knowledge using accessible facial ID tools such as the
10
Black Lives Matter.
17
ones built into iPhones or Instagram filters. In trying out the existing advice, Marty
figured out that the algorithm is a lot smarter now. Some tips, such as ‘partially
obscuring one of the ocular regions’ or ‘obscuring the nose-bridge area’ are
outdated. The systems recognized Marty even when they were wearing makeup
and an eyepatch. Wearing masks that cover the nose/mouth did not work either.
They updated the CV Dazzle information in letting people know ‘(the algorithms)
need only to see a fraction of one of these facial key points: eyes, nose and the
mouth to identify where other parts of the face may be’ (@martymoment, 2020).
Marty also added practical advice tailored to the specific events of BLM protests.
She noted in her post that people should avoid using oil-based makeup which
would bond with tear gas (@martymoment, 2020). They suggested that for
protestors going under the sun, using jewels in make-up efficiently helps stop the
algorithm from seeing faces. Two of their jewelled looks (fig. 9), one with big
colourful gems covering their face like colourful splashes, another with a black
18
milky way of grayscale diamonds running across their face, gave examples of
fabulous ways of protecting bodies from being read, misread and abused.
‘The whole concept of visibility assumes that you are not in a system that wants you
dead’ (Perry, 2018). To reject the readability that accords to standard social and
the othered bodies and renders them un-surveilled (Russell, 2020, pp.85). Both CV
Dazzle and Marty acknowledged the coded gaze and made it work for them. One of
Marty’s key points, ‘If you’re black or POC, you will have an easier time tricking
corresponds to CV Dazzle’s claim that the strategy ‘probably works better’ for
darker skin-tone people because ‘facial recognition systems were trained with
biased data sets that do not include enough data to learn separable visual
that often ends tragically’ because it reduces the ways our bodies can be read
(Russell, 2020, pp.73). Though Facebook11 offered 54 genders in 2013, the user still
needs to choose one. Marty and CV Dazzle found power elsewhere than being
whiteness, which is being undefinable thus invisible. In the ‘spillage’ of bodies lies
the statement ‘we cannot be represented (Stefano Harney and Moten, 2013, p.10)’.
11
Now facebook has 14 genders to choose from plus a custom free-form.
19
<blurriness/>Who we are bleed into one another.</blurriness>
, hybridity
<hybridity/>Nakamura discussed, in the book Cybertype, the difficulty when navigating
website portals to assume one’s ethnicity, to be Asian, and one’s nationality, to be American,
at the same time. Hybrid identity, or to be many at the same time, is made impossible in the
self-identifying box-tickings commonly required when filling up a user profile or Equality and
, and transiness.
<transiness/>Transiness means we are on the move! More to be explored in the next
section.< /transiness>
20
Danielle Brathwaite Shirley: centring Black Trans experiences
‘The right to define what a body is, in addition to who can control these things
called bodies, has never been meted out equally’ (Russell, 2020, pp.35). The facial
21
recognition technology that fails to recognise darker skin-tone females, has a 100%
failing rate identifying genderqueers because bodies beyond the binary are not an
option written into the algorithm. In the coded gaze, it is whiteness/cisness that
defines what/which body is read as human. Black British trans artist and game
developer Danielle Brathwaite Shirley says ‘a trans body is often a body that you’re
not expecting to see’. Acknowledging this, she/they in her/their work finds pride in
transgender person, is perceived as cisgender instead of the sex they were assigned at birth.
The person may, for example, be a transgender man who is perceived as a cisgender man.’
(Wikipedia)</passing>
Collaborating with eighteen Black Trans people from the community, Brathwaite
Shirley created the video game Black Trans Archive. In the game, the characters,
22
mostly trans, are not straightforwardly recognisable as raced humans. Brathwaite
addition of liquid.</mash>
where she/they created monster-like Black Trans Ancestors, such as the ones the
player can choose to resurrect, which, appear to each have three heads, hay-like
texture for the skin, and fabric texture indicating general facial features (fig. 12).
These features claim beauty and normalcy of Black Trans bodies by overwriting the
rules that conventionally define what a worly body is (as opposed to bodies that are
‘otherworldly’).
feet, and hair into grassy or bio textures that wrap the game as skins. Through a
encryptions.
<parthenogenesis/> Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction in which growth and
development of embryos occur without fertilization by sperm; It is the development of an embryo
from an unfertilized egg cell in animals, and apomixis (asexual reproduction through seeds) in
plants. (Wikipedia) </parthenogenesis>
The encrypted bodies, illegible, work against the exploitative hypervisibility* where
'otherness' or deviance from the norm (Settles, Buchanan and Dotson, 2019). Hypervisibility
23
The archive rallies against Black Trans tourism* not only in its character-building
the game where one has to declare whether they identify as, Black Trans, trans, or
cis. The identification determines the player’s access to and experience of the
archive. To Brathwaite-Shirley, a white cis person playing the game as if they could
step into a Black Trans person’s shoes is wrong. The archive should not and does
not trust cis people. The non-Black or non-Trans tourists must work to stay in the
space. As the terms and conditions that popped up after I clicked on ‘I identify as
trans’ says, ‘YOU MUST AGREE TO SUPPORT BLACK TRANS PEOPLE TO REAP THE
expelled from the game. If I refuse to use my visitor privilege to resurrect Black
24
Trans ancestors in the game space of Black Excellence, the game will end, with a
reality*.
<reality/>‘No way where we are is here (Harney and Moten, 2013, pp.94)’. </reality>
ways to be, Black Trans Archive rejects pessimism, the tool of white (cis) supremacy,
that doesn’t want you to imagine otherwise (@noname, 2020). In the game there
are various locations. Cis city, as one of the locations, ‘uses surveillance to try and
control our bodies, search our bodies for clues’. Cis city eventually gets dissolved in
the game, and ‘every Black Trans person who lived there gets re-housed in more
positive environments.’ ‘Ur body ur choice. inc’, another location in the game, offers
unlimited hormones that people desire. At this place, one gets free hormone
25
treatments without filling out forms, waiting in lines. The archive also imagines
kindness to be expressed in the interaction between the player and the game
characters. The player can become part of the security team to accompany Black
Trans sisters walking along a path of harmful gaze, or lift weights off of Black Trans
people by whispering nice things to them. Building on acts of care, the imagination
It emphasises ‘we are here’ knowing that it is ‘because of those that are not’ (fig. 14).
Always in diasporic travels, from bodies to bodies, from Cis City to Trans Temple,
the resurrected ancestors ask the player, ‘you have put me in this virtual body… Do
I have more control over this body than my body before?’ (fig. 13). As such, the
characters that journey across times and worlds confronts the player with the
not have to be yes, but the questions and requests are points of entry for players to
reflections affect Black Trans life before, here, and after. What is fictively imagined
and participated bleed out to spaces other than the game hosted under
Archive. They remind us there is a lot of work that needs to be done because ‘no
way where we are is here… Even though we already are. We’re already here,
26
Conclusion/It’s getting there...
The first section of this text considers the material basis and laboured bodies spent
Access to technology determines who gets to acquire more than one body. The
possibility to build any body, to journey between bodies, is power, and people may
abuse it. In section two we found out with the case of Cameron James-Wilson and
Shudu that it costs neither experience nor struggle for a white creator to create
bodies that ostensibly represent Black people online and profit from it.
Section three and four celebrated the power of passing, not passing as anybody
27
all the fabulous manners before the technological gaze coded white and cis. BLM
that fails to see darker females. Black Trans Archive makes up [phrasal verb 1.
invent a story or plan; 2. (of parts) compose or constitute a whole] bodies that are
denied Black Trans bodies, denying a ‘reality’ (the Cis City) that denies Black Trans
lives.
do? What experience do they inflict on others? The graph above illustrates the
associated with the bodies that labour and profit; responsibly imagine the
one.
28
Talking in terms of embodiments and disembodiment instead of just
for whom? As reflected in the later sections of this essay, there is an emphasis on
being-represented to have an outside, and address the self to the outside, and it is
limiting.
Acknowledgements:
This research essay benefited greatly from the research project I participated in for
the EU’s Digital Futures conference in June 2021. Tereza Hendl, a moral & political
which being ‘beyond inclusion: towards AI just!ce. ¿nclusion>>refusal’ and ‘AI & tech
introduced me to many of the references used in this essay. Link to the space:
https://gather.town/app/arvKjVMnmrBie3mJ/AI%20for%20whom%20by%20whom
This essay also benefited greatly from the six-week course offered by the New
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano
29
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