Body: Computation
The problem is not that AI cannot represent trans bodies correctly. They expose that recognition itself is always a computational process: performed by a state, a human observer, or a machine. AI does not create the problem of misrecognition, it shows the mechanisms that were already there.
Trans bodies are not always illegible, they just make visible the process of recognition that is normally invisible.
Computation happens through machines, but also wherever bodies read other bodies. A gay bar is a recognition system: a space where bodies are continuously translated into signs of desire and masculinity.
So what happens to bodies as they slip through computation, understood here as systems of recognition that render bodies legible?
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35 FPS: Computation
Gay Bar: Material
Slip: Phenomenon
The body is not produced by computation, but the ways bodies become recognizable are.
Computation begins when a body is translated into signs, categories, and information that can be read by a system. It operates across different scales: from everyday acts of perception to institutional classifications and technological systems.
These signs can become slop. Something too recognizable. So coherent it feels known, yet wrong. It is information compressed into a familiar pattern that erases the complexity that produced it.
A body is recognized when its signs align with the categories available to read it. But what happens when the signs do not align?
A slip happens when these signs do not form a coherent image. The body does not disappear. It produces an excess of information that the system can not fully organize. A body becomes legible through an assemblage of visible and invisible information. To be legible is not simply to be seen. It is to be made readable according to an existing system of recognition. These systems allow bodies to enter spaces and relationships, but they also produce the conditions under which that entry becomes possible.
I am interested in these moments of excess: when a body is recognized and misrecognized at the same time, when it belongs through not belonging, when it becomes visible through the difficulty of being read.
The slip and the slop are not errors in the system. They are where the system becomes perceptible. In the slip, the body exceeds what computation can organize. In the slop, computation exceeds the complexity of the body.