Abstract
Much more than their machinic reality, current iterations of AI rely on imagined divisions of human and non-human properties and skills that have genealogical ties to colonization. For this reason, research efforts have recently been made to historicize these imaginaries, connecting them to colonial ideals that delegate black and brown colonized people into the realm of the non-human. Atanasoski and Vora (Surrogate humanity. Race, robots and the politics of technological futures, Duke, Durham and London, 2019) have called this a “surrogate humanity”, where narratives of autonomous technologies function to disappear precisely the formerly colonized peoples that are enveloped in its production process. At the same time, the gendered and racialized roots of this maternal figure represents an opportunity to uncover and critique the invisibilization of embodied resources necessary to produce AI, precarious bodies labouring to produce algorithmic infrastructures in a manner that can be considered in a genealogy of carework and reproduction. These genealogies complicate the detachment suggested by the surrogate figure and go beyond it to proclaim a more generative function of the relationship between the black maternal figure and AI. The article analyses Tabita Rezaire’s multi-media artwork Sugar Walls Teardom to think through decolonial and queer renderings of the black female bodies upon which technological imaginaries rest, to extend beyond AI surrogacy and towards notions of kinship, care and world-making by producing an AI aesthetics that is relational, embodied, and celebratory of other ways of liveness.
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Notes
For example, Inke Arns (2017) discusses a number of such works playing with the relationship between essential workers and technological infrastructures in two exhibitions she curated (“Alien Matter” in 2017 and “World Without Us” 2016), where the anthropomorphization of AI corresponds with the disappearance of the labourer’s body. Christoph Ernst, Jens Schröter and Andreas Sudmann (2019) not only relate this problem to the discourses on future of work, but also autonomous weapons and language translation, thus showing how deep “autonomy’s” ties are to a Eurocentric understanding of the universal.
Although the setup is most definitely part of the installation narrative, the analysis will mainly concern itself with the video, as I was not, unfortunately, a visitor of the original exhibition, but have instead engaged with Rezaire’s portfolio courtesy of the artist.
Rezaire uses the term womxn to refer to people, whose wombs have been dispossessed throughout the work. However, she does not re-essentialize the connection between “woman” and womb, indeed, the x implies a crossing out of this connection that implies an inclusion of different iterations of femininity beyond the biological. In the womb meditation that makes up the final part of the multimedia installation, Rezaire explicitly calls upon people without wombs to participate in the collective experience she makes possible. Following this suggestion, I use the term womxn, not to designate the existence of a uterus, but to point out a specific type of labour in which people are or become feminized and disappear.
Of course, recognition does not mean reparation. I do not speak of freedom, but, with Joy James, of leverage (cf. James 2016)
“The Mechanical Turk” as the most famous ‘artificial intelligence’ avant la lettre came to be known, consisted of a large box with a puppet attached to it, which supposedly commanded a automatized chess-playing machine. The puppet was dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban, to suggest the inspirited exoticism that occupied the Western imaginary of the East. Of course, the machine was an elaborate illusion, which made it look like chess pieces were moved through autonomous workings of the machine, while in reality, a chess master hid inside the box and controlled the pieces with pulleys and levers. But the automaton also doubles as a reference to the fact that the success of early industrialization was in large part due to the slave-like labour conditions in the colonies, which allowed the countries of the West to prosper. “The Turk” has inspired poetics such as those of Edgar Allen Poe and is an introductory example to Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history”. Until this day, “The Turk” is evoked in genealogies of the automaton and informs notions of AI, as variations of the chess- master-machine have continuously been employed to measure the level of “intelligence” in the machine. When a machine was said to supersede human intelligence in 2016, it was because it had mastered the complex Asian board game Go better than any human had.
In the colonial context, intelligence itself was defined through aesthetic properties that were generally ascribed to settlers, while the presence of any capacities of the mind were denied to colonized folks
Whether or not this is already decolonization has been subject to debate in the past. Especially Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s text Decolonization is not a Metaphor (2012) boldly and respectfully states that the liberation of the mind is not enough by any standard of decolonization. However, brought together in conversation with concept of critical fabulation, one can also note that reiterating the racism and material dispossession that black bodies are made to endure brings no new knowledge about the way to overcome these colonial trajectories. Instead, I build upon Sylvia Wynter’s claim that “the bourgeoisie order itself creates the condition of possibility of its own subversion” (Wynter, cited in McKittrick 2021).
Perhaps relevant for this context is that a similar debate is happening between Afropessimism and Afrofuturism as critical dispositions with regards to blackness and the historical relevance of the transatlantic slave trade. While Afropessimism questions the possibility of any form of black liveliness to emerge and be acknowledged in this world, Afrofuturism dares to imagine a future in which this world that thrives on anti-blackness has ended (cf. Morais dos Santos Bruss and Williams 2021).
Here, it might make sense to engage with Sylvia Wynter’s critique of biocentrism, which denigrates “life” to biological frameworks, themselves embedded in colonial violence. As Wynter has argued, biocentrism not only falsely reduces life to biology, but also makes impossible any iterations of black “liveness” (cf. Wynter 2003).
This resonates with Donna Haraway’s passing mention of how Zoe Sofia taught her that all technologies are reproductive (cf. Haraway 1992), and in extension, with the notions of surrogacy introduced as a gendered figure above. But bringing in Haraway here is productive further, as she points out the implied repetitiveness (“and boredom”, she states) of reproduction that suggests cloning the “the one true copy, mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist self-birthing” (ibid).
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Morais dos Santos Bruss, S. Artificial reproduction? Tabita Rezaire’s Sugar Walls Teardom and AI “liveness”. AI & Soc 39, 43–51 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01762-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01762-6