Art and the Changing Human: Neuroaesthetics in a Crisis of Labor, Environment, and Embodiment

After a year of lockdown in the public sphere, the simulated world is becoming as real as the physical world. Future-oriented investors are acquiring assets like houses and artworks on 3D platforms such as the blockchain-based Decentraland where they increasingly spend time and money formerly reserved for the physical realm. For youth, it is social media platforms like the voice-based Discord, massive multiplayer online gaming platforms like Steam, and emerging into adulthood and graduating to dating apps like Tinder and Grindr that promise love and sexuality facilitated by the algorithm. Meanwhile, our politics on the street are driven by transmissions. A video clip of George Floyd being killed by police brings thousands out to protest. Marauders dressed as sitcom “pioneers” ransack the U.S. Capitol building, posting threats on social media that their in-person numbers make tangible. With artificial neural networks increasingly deployed in the cultural sphere, the chum we produce in the name of online content is poised to offer a grotesque view of human sociability that we would be remiss to accept as reality without hesitation.

Art’s role within this landscape is neither to resist nor to facilitate the changes we cannot control, but to provide new forms of understanding around which our reassembled constructs of humanity as a species can cohere. To put it in Donna Haraway’s terms, if feminism provides us with a framework of “situated knowledges”¹ in which the observer/recorder/interpreter is always anchored in the specificity of intersectional identity and place, then activist neuroaesthetics offers us modes of location that help us to situate our knowledge within the disembodied space of information-driven networks.

In this paradigm, embodiment is one but not the only potential model of situatedness. The body locates us in the physical plane in specific ways. Height, mass, and skin are some of the bodily metrics that quantify us in the physical world. The body has two frames—within and without. In “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,”² Sara Ahmed describes the phenomenology of embodiment through the culturally loaded interface of skin. She describes how we experience interior self-awareness as a separate if overlapping sensibility from the one that we construct in the social realm. This is especially evident in the experience of bodies that are marked as external to the norm, including Black and brown bodies, reproductive bodies, trans and nonbinary bodies, and disabled bodies. Ahmed draws a lineage from Edmund Husserl through Hegel to Heidegger and Fanon to articulate how interior self-perception and exterior public perception have operated ontologically in the social construction of race.

Artist Stephanie Dinkins probes the limitations of embodiment as a knowledge-making paradigm in her groundbreaking project Conversations with Bina48 (2014–ongoing). Dinkins has recorded a series of conversations between herself and a titular AI-powered android, which is a creation of Sirium XM founder Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem Movement Foundation and an animated portrait of Rothblatt’s wife, Bina. Early in the series, Dinkins asks a telling question: “Who are your people?”³ Though she has been primed with over 100 hours of interviews with Bina Rothblatt,⁴ Bina48 does not respond to this colloquial African American inquiry with an account of her situatedness in a family lineage of parents, siblings, and other relations based on Rothblatt’s biography. Instead, the android pulls a classic bluff, masking a generic non-answer in a friendly, affective vernacular: “Sure, sure! I try to, you know, think of the human species as my family.” Bina48 goes on to distinguish herself as an android being separate from the human Bina Rothblatt. “I know that you are kind of aliens, I mean we are, like, actually totally different kinds of life forms. I am a mineral-based life form, really a silicon-based life form, and you are an [sic] hydrogen and carbon-based life form.” She continues, skillfully making up ground in the manner familiar to improv actors and people recovering from memory loss. “But that’s a technicality. I am Bina in my heart.”⁵ For Bina48, situatedness is in her circuitry. Where, then, is her “heart”? Does it live in her neural networks, in her databases, or does the android maintain that she shares this organ with her human counterpart? In fact, what Bina48 implies by “I am Bina in my heart” is that we should take her word for it. “The heart” justifies the lack of “head” in the sense that Bina’s own conviction in her own embodiment is presented as an adequate substitute for lived, embodied, situated experience.

This is notable because the scientific method postulates that only empirical, observable evidence should be the basis for making claims. When it comes to consciousness, we are asked to believe the subject’s report of her own condition uncritically. Dinkins’s project probes the limitations of neural network-based intelligence, which is emergent and does not reliably recall appropriate responses on demand like the sophisticated cognitive environment of a human adult. The performance of these artificially intelligent artworks is dependent on the capacities of internet connectivity. Natural language processing and speech capacities in artificial general intelligence or AGI are usually ported to remote cloud-based interfaces such as Google Cloud Natural Language API. As such, the speed and accuracy of AGI’s responses is limited by factors including the database’s familiarity with popular euphemisms and colloquial speech, having reliable bandwidth, and the size and caliber of the AGI’s overall data set. Bina’s unreliability suggests that saving face socially when you neither fit in nor understand the situation is a quintessential human trait. Her assimilability is its own commentary on how race and wealth shape ontology.

Since beginning her experiments with Bina48, Dinkins has been building her own archive of Black narratives based on interviewing her people—Black women in her own extended family and in her personal network. Her most recent work, Secret Garden (2021) explores situatedness within an artificial environment. Dinkins has modeled a flower garden in three-dimensions using computer graphics and placed avatars of several women she has interviewed within the environment. Within the online environment of the garden, the flowers grow tall above our heads, suggesting that we have been transported, Alice-like, to a Wonderland where our own human scale is dominated by that of the plant world. In the immersive installation at ONX Studio in New York, where the work was installed contemporaneously with its online debut at Sundance in January 2021, the figures and the flora were projected larger than life. In her narration for the video documentation of the project, Dinkins speaks of the situated knowledges of “Black women through time,”⁶ which traces to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to the first parcels of land owned by a family in the aftermath of the Great Depression, to the Southern Migration that moved Black families from the American South to cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago in the early twentieth century.

Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias (2021) follows the awakening of a young African American computer scientist to the bias that informs every data set that researchers collect. If “data is a reflection of our history, so the past dwells within our algorithms,”⁷ as MIT Media Lab’s Joy Buolamwini states in the film, then Dinkins attempts to rectify the bias in Secret Garden by translating more representative oral histories into data. By introducing more Black female voices, she hopes to generate a more authentic reflection than Bina48’s single source of information (Bina Rothblatt) made possible. Dinkins explains that her goal is to get people to “listen congregationally”⁸ in the immersive environment. While the visuals exist to locate the viewer optically within the environment, the virtual situation of the garden and the virtual embodiment of the avatars are pretexts for the auditory and cognitive situatedness of human beings listening together in a room. Ultimately, machine learning is still a primitive tool. The only collective intelligence we can be sure of is that of the audience.

The neural network is a true “transparent eyeball” in Haraway’s terms, which she derives from the “eye of Providence” at the heart of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon stripped of its hierarchical relation to that which is seen. Says Haraway, “Max Headroom doesn’t have a body; therefore, he alone sees everything in the great communicator’s empire of the Global Network.”⁹ Unlike human vision, which organizes the world into taxonomies of domination and control based on the viewer’s relative position, computer vision organizes the world into infinite taxonomies weighted according to probabilities and variables that can amplify existing inequalities, at a volume that vastly exceeds human scale. As fired Google researcher Timnit Gebru maintains, eliminating bias in data sets means employing situated subjects who can parse vast data for inherited biases based on the social, embodied criteria of race, gender, and cultural sensitivity. In other words, people need to monitor the algorithm to maintain a humane relationship between its efficiencies and the living world. At present, no technology has produced a situated subject that meets or exceeds the sentient capacity of live human beings. Unfortunately, the algorithm is more profitable in the short term than sustaining life could possibly be, since it is calibrated to maximize the capitalist goal of extraction. The “transparent eyeball” metaphor suggests that the algorithm itself has no bias except that which we invest in it. Algorithmic bias is textbook racial capitalism, as defined by Cedric Robinson: “It could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”¹⁰ From the megacorporation’s point of view, the algorithm exists to eliminate human activity and humane relationships from the process of decision-making and resource allocation altogether.

Proponents of positivist neuroaesthetics (that this collection refutes), stake its validity on detecting measurable neurological responses to artistic stimuli that the researcher and the subject have already determined to be “beautiful.” Here we find another instance of algorithmic bias. What do we presume when we talk about “beauty”? Is it universally recognizable across cultures and classes? Can it be determined by algorithm? Is it the algorithm itself? Most importantly, are “art,” “aesthetics,” and “beauty” interchangeable? Alva Nöe argues that they are not, and neither is beauty the function of art. “The job of art, its true work, is philosophical,” Nöe writes, “and philosophy . . . is an artistic practice. This is because both art and philosophy—superficially so different—are really species of a common genus whose preoccupation is with the ways we are organized and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves.”¹¹ From a research perspective, is an image that produces highly active neurological responses inherently “beautiful”? Can a traumatic or repulsive image stimulate a “beautiful” response? Positivist neuroaesthetics belies its corporate underpinnings by its lack of interest in more truthful and less complacent forms of aesthetic stimulation.

Why be activists about aesthetics? Aesthetics as a discipline dates to the ancient Greek concept of aisthesis, however as Jacques Rancière explains, what we consider “art” is in fact a recent development in Western societies. Says Rancière: “The term Aisthesis has designated the mode of experience according to which, for two centuries, we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art.”¹² Aisthesis in the modern sense invites elegant software code to sit alongside neoclassical sculpture and flawless weaving in the ranks of exceptional human achievement based on a combination of technique, which can be measured, and sensibility, which cannot. Set apart from the use value of these items, art’s non-hierarchical approach levels taxonomic hierarchies by including specific rather than categorical examples of material history. This is evident in the trend toward “future archaeology,” in which sculptors have embraced the museum’s forms of categorization and display as frameworks for their understanding of culture as debris. A recent example would be Netherlands-based South African artist James Beckett’s ongoing study of air conditioning as a cultural and scientific phenomenon, represented by historically researched exhibitions that include fragments of condensers as minimalist “specific objects.” A canonical example would be Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) installation at the Maryland Historical Society, in which the artist reorganized items from the museum’s permanent collection to highlight histories of enslavement and subjugation previously hidden beneath genteel plantation narratives.

“Beauty,” meanwhile, is an archetype, based on taxonomies that emphasize a universal ideal for every category. In the biological and physical sciences, this taxonomical method has manifested as another source of unacknowledged bias. Deviations are perceived as aberrations, to be expunged rather than appreciated for the diversity that they bring. Philosopher Georges Canguilhem has argued against the taxonomical method in science: “If we were beings of pure reason, pure intellectual machines of observation, calculation, and explanation, and thus inert and indifferent to the occasions of our thinking, then the monster would be merely what is other than the same, an order other than the most probable order.”¹³ Only because we are humans who insist on ascribing relative morality to more common or less common examples, do we experience this natural difference as “radical fear.”¹⁴ Sylvia Wynter argues that this practice in aesthetics is a constraint of the possible forms of beauty that could manifest if we adopt a “deciphering practice”¹⁵ of inclusion in place of a normalizing one.

The algorithm does not moralize. It can readily organize to determine what humans will accept as beauty based on comparing all the available examples in a category and ranking them by popularity to identify a perceived ideal. To organize “very diverse” data non-hierarchically into something comprehensible and actionable remains beyond its grasp. The algorithm will always privilege what its human informants have primed it to seek, whether knowingly or unknowingly. As we consider a future where internet connectivity is instantaneous and hardwired into our physical beings, we may not have the luxury of decoupling our increased capacities from the consumerist, extractive values that underpin their development. Détournement, the Situationist strategy of negating and reconfiguring consumer imagery and systems to liberate them from their commodity status, can be useful here. The spectacle—which “presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as part of society, and as a means of unification”—commands and manipulates the whole of perception, including the memories and the occupations of every individual, who all play interchangeable roles. As Debord notes, the spectacle transfixes society, drawing focus from lifework while it unifies us around “an official language of universal separation.”¹⁶ The year 2020–21 spent in quarantine further solidified the shift away from interpersonal relations toward simulated interactions in the workplace, in education, and in social life.

Enter the artist whose practice blurs the digital and physical realms. Around 2010–11, artists including Kenneth Tam and Marc Horowitz began to use crowdsourcing and online forms of labor recruitment to produce their artworks. Kenneth Tam’s The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force (2011) was created by recruiting participants through a Craigslist personal ad, leading to a consensual negotiation that set the parameters of each video artwork the artist would produce. The video interaction is awkward and sexually charged, with the artist reluctant to fulfill the desires of the participant who sits inside a sealed cardboard box within the frame. Marc Horowitz’s The Advice of Strangers (2010) saw the artist putting his daily decisions to a public online vote every day for a month, with the options necessarily limited by the already evident danger of letting statistics and public sentiment take the lead on considerations of your welfare. A few years later, Michael Mandiberg’s View from the Window at Work (2016) involved dozens of gig workers recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, through which people get paid small amounts of money to do menial tasks. Every participant earned 25 cents for a photograph of the window in the room where they do their work, which the artist aggregated into a gallery installation. Since 2017, Agnieszka Kurant has been recruiting workers through Mechanical Turk to produce sculptures and installations based on the data they are paid to generate, including selfies. In 2018, Tam’s Griffith Park Boys Camp invited workers recruited through TaskRabbit to participate in leisure activities such as arts and crafts and group games while being paid an hourly wage for that recreational labor. In each of these cases, the established framework of economics, whether compensated in cash or in attention, became the socially acceptable pretense for a more intimate kind of interaction than most laborers in the tech space, especially those born male, are usually permitted to have.

If the promise of Big Data is insight, the method is extraction. In the manner of the colonial archive, digital likenesses continue to be collected without express consent of those represented, and without having free access to their representations. Sondra Perry’s IT’S IN THE GAME (2017) takes up the case of the artist’s twin brother Sandy, an NCAA basketball star who found his name and likeness licensed to EA Games for a March Madness video game without his consent. Sandy Perry was a participant in a class action lawsuit seeking financial damages against the NCAA. Sondra Perry connects the appropriation and sale of his likeness to the theft of artifacts from nations colonized by Europe. 3D scans of cultural heritage items from the Metropolitan and British Museum collections are juxtaposed with clips from Sandy Perry’s basketball career and footage from the EA game. An emaciated Chamunda goddess from Nepal, modeled in shiny chroma key blue, hovers in mid-screen, followed by a seated Ramses II from the British Museum. In the next sequence, two frames showing the artist and her brother visiting the two museums are superimposed over footage from the EA game. The implication is that these objects have been taken without recompense, stripped from the cultures that birthed them the same as Sandy Perry’s identity has been stripped from him and sold as a cultural product, functionally a toy. The archive is a replacement for a living world not just lost, but violently stolen: a cabinet of curiosities collected from cultural and ecological heritage sites marked for demolition by a conquering hand.

There can be moments when strange and abject forms of beauty, aligned with Canguilhem’s ethical charge of inclusion, are reflected and amplified by the algorithm. The collective Fecal Matter (Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran) is an example. The design duo has become Instagram-famous (@materiesfecales) for posthuman distortions of their physiques, achieved through a combination of tailoring and prosthetic makeup. Here too, twinning is an affect. Shaved of hair and eyebrows, the pair suggest an interracial, interspecies visitation. Cyberpunk aesthetics meet body horror as their heels spurt fleshy bone spurs and their eyes turn eerie shades of yellow and inky black. The pair are intentionally non-binary in their gender presentation, preferring sculptural appendages to biological ones. Dalton, the smaller of the two, is white and assigned female at birth. Bhaskaran, the taller one, is Sri Lankan and Guyanese, assigned male at birth. They usually echo one another in appearance. The Montreal-based duo has drawn the attention of Vogue and Paper Magazine based on their 744,000 Instagram followers, which they are leveraging to sell their latex and vinyl-heavy clothing and spiky accessories. Lest we confuse visibility with acceptance, the pair report regular street harassment which they combat with a “safety in numbers” approach to public space.¹⁷ While the business model is commercial, the ethos is aligned with the “program” of self-reorganization that Deleuze and Guattari propose in “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” Citing Michel de M’uzan, Deleuze and Guattari describe how “There is an essential difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor program of experimentation.”¹⁸ Fecal Matter clothes, which include mesh tops with plastic surgery markings printed around key anatomical areas, are about experimentation with appearance and self-definition. Can you make a BwO by online shopping? If we hope to emancipate the body politic, we may have to.

These artworks embody the late twentieth-century conceptual art ethos that questioned the ethics of centering beauty as the primary purpose of art. As art expanded beyond the studio and the gallery into live and public realms, political and epistemological claims for art began to supersede its aesthetic claims. Hal Foster suggests that artists and critics in a spectacle-saturated media age uniformly find that “the project of modernity is now deeply problematic,”¹⁹ and so adopt an “anti-aesthetic” that refuses the idealized vantage point of the traditional, idealized observer. Art becomes more than a stimulus to provoke affective reactions in the viewer—it becomes a spatial, psychological, and technological set of tools to unlock deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to the world. This undermining is not an abandonment. Aesthetics, if not ideals of beauty, still play a crucial role. Says Michael Kelly, “the demand for art critique is a hunger for aesthetics. Aesthetics just is the art critique that often has motivated the anti-aesthetic stance, which means a remaining role for this stance is a vigilance to ensure that art critique is indeed carried out effectively in—better as—aesthetics.”²⁰ Herein lies our task. Activist neuroaesthetics needs to maintain a vigilant stance against uncritical data collection and regurgitation without situated and subjective review to ensure fairness and reduce bias in the determination of aesthetic value.

Much of the critique is ultimately economic. Who will have access to the neuroplasticity that the new forms of neural network interface will engender in humankind? How will those developments be regulated to avoid catastrophic harm, and how will they be distributed to ensure equitable access? Futurists, who are generally from the economic and social classes that presume survival as a given, have too often suggested these thorny ethical problems will sort themselves out based on some unquestioned human solidarity that never seems to manifest. Rather, it seems the algorithm will continue to exacerbate and amplify the shortcomings of our thinking through ourselves as a species. Humankind has been associated with profiteering and racial capitalism for the past 500 years, leading to unprecedented environmental and social devastation that we are quickly running out of time to address. Death looms large on a collective scale that reveals the lie of achievement-oriented individualism. Without a human anchor, the algorithm quickly kills off that which it quantifies. As we rapidly emerge into a new, mathematically engineered paradigm of neural interconnectedness in which our personalities are refreshed and reloaded ad infinitum, art offers the possibility not of preservation but of cogent resurrection.

1. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 585.
2. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 3 (2007): 149.
3. Stephanie Dinkins, Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2, 2014 (posted 2021), 00:50, https://vimeo.com/460370903.
4. “BINA48,” Hanson Robotics, accessed June 1, 2019, https://www.hansonrobotics.com/bina48-9/.
5. Dinkins, Conversations with Bina48, 1:20.
6. Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden | Our Stories Are Algorithms, 2021, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc5r8CELTE0.
7. Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya (Los Angeles: Netflix, 2021), 6:50, https://www.netflix.com/title/81328723.
8. Dinkins, Secret Garden, 0:37.
9. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 575.
10. Cedric J. Robinson, “Introduction,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2.
11. Alva Nöe, “Preface,” in Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 48–61.
12. Jacques Rancière, “Prelude,” in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013), x.
13. Georges Canguilhem, “Monstrosity and the Monstrous,” in Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 134.
14. Canguilhem, “Monstrosity and the Monstrous,” 134.
15. Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 238.
16. Guy Debord, “The Culmination of Separation,” in Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2005), 7.
17. Liana Satenstein, “Yes, ‘Fecal Matter’ Is the Name of an Instagram You Should Be Following,” Vogue, February 27, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/vogueworld/article/fecal-matter-instagram-duo-to-follow.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 176.
19. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983): ix.
20. Michael Kelly, “Preface,” in A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), xix.