Plastination: Operation
Does AI make plastic skin? Is my skin smooth enough? Normal skin with no pores? Is AI a mirror? A distorting one?
A mirror needs skin to reflect.
There's no skin on AI bodies.
(Art is a way of seeing. It helps unsee what I see so that I can see differently.)
Skin is removed by abstraction. A body that went through plastination. The skin of cadavers are stripped off and put on display.
SLIP
AI slop → plastic skin → not a mirror → abstraction → plastination → no skin → cadaver → skeletal animation → motion capture → cadaver in the machine
Space requirements of the seated operator : geometrical, kinematic, and mechanical aspects of the body, with special reference to the limbs, Wilfred Taylor Dempster, Wright Air Development Center, Aero Medical Laboratory, 1955
The machine isn’t distorting anything. It is showing what was already there, underneath, normally hidden. The machine isn’t the source of the distortion. It’s the instrument that makes a pre-existing distortion visible.
A plastinated body isn't a person anymore. It's a specimen. It stands in for "the human body”. For the category. The particularity is removed on purpose.
There is a cadaver inside the machine. It's a fact. Not a metaphor. In 1955, Wilfred Dempster dissected cadavers to measure the weight, the center of gravity, the range of motion of every limb. Numbers from real dead bodies. Those numbers became the standard reference for how a body moves, still used in biomechanics, in animation, in the rigs that make a computed body bend at the joint. Somewhere under the surface of a generated body, a cadaver from 1955 is still setting the terms.
The same thing happened to beauty. One founder, Christoph Schuhmann, built the aesthetic filter behind these models on his own taste. The filter reproduces "the male gaze within western art history." A small body of data becomes the invisible standard. Every image these systems generate now passes through it.
The aesthetic filter behind these models reproduces “the male gaze within western art history”.
The Algorithmic Gaze: An Audit and Ethnography of the LAION-Aesthetics Predictor Model
Plastinated bodies get sliced. You see everything at once, muscle, organ, nerve, flattened into one plane.
Type a word into the prompt. Not one body comes out. All of them do. Every body that word ever touched, blended into one. Legible in one slice.
Abstraction removes provenance and singularity. Then shows you the statistical body like it’s just a body. A normal body.
The plastinated bodies in “Körperwelten” says the bodies were donated. Consented. But the history is messy: unconsented cadavers and exhibitions. Whose body ended up in the dataset? Did anyone agree to become the specimen?
What do you see when I say transsexual?
I type transsexual into my StreamDiffusion drawing tool. The model didn't invent the sexualized-trans-body association. It reproduced it. A pattern already in the data. Already in us.
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35 FPS: Computation
Iromatik: Apparatus
Slop: Salope
Cadaver: Material