MACHINE X BODY ⟡ Ideas Week ⟡ Open Office Hours ⟡ Session A

Our theme for August/September is Machine X Body! So please drop by Office Hours to share your ideas on programming related to that theme. I'll be doing some casual work at Easy Tiger and will be happy to see you + discuss further.

Some directions an event might take:

• The body machines act on — the factory floor, the algorithm, the surveillance camera, the medical scanner, the dating app, the prison, the border, the credit score, the gig dispatch, the school's behavioral software
• The body we engineer — prosthetics, birth control, IVF, hormones, surgery, the quantified self, Ozempic, egg freezing, cosmetic intervention, fitness optimization, sleep tracking, the wellness-industrial complex
• The body we fear losing — to AI, to automation, to dependency, to obsolescence, to chronic illness, to climate, to the screen, to the algorithmic feed, to our own outsourced memory
• The body machines can't replace — and what that claim is actually worth, who keeps making it, who benefits from us believing it, what counter-evidence we keep ignoring
• The body making and unmaking art — what the hand still does that the prompt doesn't, what embodied knowledge gets lost through AI use, what the dancer knows that the motion-capture rig can't see, the studio practice in an era of infinite output
• The body desired, the body alone — sex robots, OnlyFans, dating apps as machines for sorting flesh, parasocial intimacy with chatbots, the loneliness epidemic, what happens to touch in a touchless economy
• The body as input — labor that trains the machine (the content moderator, the Amazon picker, the data labeler, the Uber driver), the human cost hidden inside "automation," whose body absorbs the friction so the interface feels smooth
• The body as data — the medical record, the genome, the menstrual tracking app under new abortion laws, the face in the training set, the voiceprint, the gait, the heart rate; what it means that your body is now a corpus

xoxo
Rachel

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Event Pitch Form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19ZOGziWeiT2Vll_Cu1ABnQ_5TX52CqWxU_M8gnl1UYo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.jyjo1s2v02ie