Daniel Rourke
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, / Conference April 20 / Curator: Zane Cerpina
No Upload Required: Deepfakes, Centaurs, and the Language Model Body
Hans Moravec, in a flourish of 1980s techno-optimism, suggested that all we needed to live forever was to render ourselves computable. Retained as an information pattern in the 80s equivalent of The Cloud, for Moravec, our bodies were superfluous accessories, necessarily deconstructed – atom by atom – as we parsed the digital essences we were destined to become. This promise to ‘upload’ ourselves echoed a religious fantasy of transcendence, stretching back at least as far as Early 20th Century Cosmonautism, the Victorian obsession with electricity and spiritualism, and the Cartesian split of mind and body philosophized by Rene Descartes. When N. Katherine Hayles criticized the promise of Hans Moravec in her 1999 treatise on Posthumanism, she wove Moravec’s idea back into these histories, insisting that information could not be separated from its material base. In the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a new paradigm of computationality brings not just Moravec’s techno-Cartesianism, but also the ethical basis of Hayles’ material-Posthumanism into question. What need is there to upload your particular body when generative AI can conjure you a new one from latent space? When media headlines around the world registered the shock that Taylor Swift had been ‘deepfaked’ in early 2024, nobody considered how much of Swift herself was necessary to generate the pornographic image that traversed the internet. Probing the history of uploaded bodies, minds, and everything in between, this essay will try to parse a new kind of body, generated from data collected from many millions of unknown sources, and made lively with the deepfaked face of Taylor Swift. Whose body was actually AI-generated? Who gets to have such a body? Who had to have their body taken away? And what role does language have in the constitution of this new kind of shared body that seems to require no upload at all?
Daniel Rourke (UK) is a writer, artist, and educator based at Goldsmiths, University of London. In his work, Daniel creates collaborative frameworks and theoretical toolsets for exploring the intersections of digital materiality, the arts, and (critical) post-humanism. He is currently working on a speculative writing project perverting generative language models.
machinemachine.net / therourke.bsky.social
Header graphics: “No Upload Required”, courtesy of the artist.