Conference Agenda

European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an empirical reflection on an artistic installation that, through diffracting data practices, turns a space of control into one of encounter. By taking AI oversight to be more-than-human from a soma design approach, we move from the constrained and narrow “human-in-the-loop” to “body-is-the-loop,” opening possibilities for mattering differently.