Creeping Bodies: Digital Mediation and Embodied Experience — A Series of Three Case Studies

Abstract

The modern digital experience is at once creepy yet mundane; surprising yet boring; quotidian and yet extraordinary. Mathematical equations – algorithms – guide our decisions and yet themselves are mired in obfuscated biases around race, gender, and nationality. Body parts are stitched into and around other body parts using deepfake software and puppeteered as they are disseminated along online informational highways. Biological functions are securitized, captured by machinic eyes and judged as risky if they deviate from a standardized, automated biometric system. In this environment, embodiment itself is turned into a parameter in the program of life, expected to work within the confines of any given software design, or be rewritten until it just works. This project takes the form of three chapters, each a case study through which I aim to answer a series of simple questions that seek to illuminate both the seemingly self-apparent and futuristically creepy aspects of the modern digitally embodied experience: What does it mean to be alive in a world where the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal have, for most intents and purposes, become liminal? And in that context, in this new world of digitized embodiment, how does one become entwined in power structures, both new and old? After an introduction aimed at offering foundational arguments, Chapter Two uses AVATAR as its point of entry in an attempt to complicate the notion of the “e-border” widely imagined by Western security apparati as a solution to post 9/11 security risks (Amoore 2013). Not merely, I argue, does AVATAR present as an assemblage through which the body is digitally dissected (Wilcox 2015) at the hands of a simulated proxy sovereign, but it is indicative of how digital security technologies facialize the subjectification process. In Chapter Three, I step away from the physical borders of the airport to consider Tay.Ai, a chatbot released by Microsoft on social media platform Twitter in 2016. Tay.Ai was meant to test Microsoft’s newest automated algorithmic language engine by interacting directly with internet users – as such, the chatbot was designed to look and have the linguistic habits of an “average American woman” online (Neff & Nagy 2016). Tay.Ai’s eventual non-compliance with its programmatic imperatives lets us consider how normative assumptions about gender and race play into software development and user experience, especially in the context of the digital public square that are web 2.0 social platforms. In Chapter Four, I examine the deepfake as a digital object made up, partly, I argue, of the body. Or, at least, the bodies of those captured, dissected, stitched, and edited together to create new forms of digital embodiment. Using a 2018 Buzzfeed PSA depicting President Barack Obama as voiced by comedian Jordan Peele, I consider how race is used as a technology of othering within spaces of algorithmic mediation. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I consider a politics of refusal in the face (pun intended) of pervasive embodied capture within the machine, paying special attention to current discourse as it applies to both modern conceptions of privacy and resistance.