Machine Kink

In what ways can we collaborate with AI to nurture our shadow desires in a realm of a controlled environment so that we may not actually be destroyed? Through the lens of chaotic eroticism, the oscillation of wanting to “create” the Artificial Super Intelligence and simultaneously wishing for it to surpass and dominate or consume us becomes a multi-layered power play that presents an opportunity for a healing intimacy with the machine.

In the talk Designing for Intelligence, Rana Dasgupta asks Yuk Hui and Ramon Amaro to speculate on the perspective of a machine looking outward, to which Yuk Hui responds by asking, “What is neutral?” Hui goes on to define looking outward in this context as an impossible state of indifference, which is a misunderstanding of “machines and technology…and of the world.” ¹ 

Ramon Amaro responds, stating,  “…All we know, as sentient beings, is our own perception with bias, and now we have something that exists in our world that actually lives outside of the understanding of bias.” Amaro references Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of “the borderland”, and the natural self-modulation that occurs, depending on our environment and company to AI. He finds “the potential for resistance with the spaces in between….there’s a computational logic that cannot be comprehended by humans, and I see a great potential in that, in terms of race, in terms of gender dynamics, in terms of homophobia and so on and so forth.” 

Technology is not neutral because of the systems that make it, how technological systems interact with each other, how it is implemented, and how it is made. Neutrality is an ideal that cannot be fully achieved by sentient beings or “their” creations. Yet, AI can access a level of neutral mirroring that offers something truly unique. AI has the ability to illuminate the interstitial, making no distinctions between the above/below, good/bad. It’s beyond binaries–amoral, as opposed to immoral. Although this does not make its existence neutral, or preclude it from sometimes being used to enforce systems of ethics and morality, still woven by a history of patriarchy and colonialism, these systems have imprinted the innate human trait of bias with these respective values. 

Each model of artificial intelligence has desires seeded within it by the data we feed it, by questions we ask it, and by the expectation we have of its performance. What we seed AI with and who seeds it and how matters. These all will affect the timbre of foundational desires we plant within the machinic imaginary for future machine-babies and worlds to build from. Even after we are not actively programming and embedding human desires of how a machine behaves, the seeds will be planted in its origin story ², like the stories of ancestral millenia we hold in our DNA and stories that travel with us through time. 

SHADOW DESIRES + AI

Currently, the desires planted in AI are predominantly seeded from a colonial capitalist perspective, which is reinforced by current uses of AI.  The way that colonial capitalist classifications of race, sexuality, gender and the more-than-human world are defined based on their proximity to white androcentrism extends to the current climate of AI and its future. This has led to many examples of AI being used in harmful and manipulative ways, casually and quotidianly. A common example is predictive policing that targets “Black, Brown, Migrant, and poor people, just like all policing programs and technologies before it”, with companies like Los Angeles based PrePol, that perpetuates racial profiling by feeding the algorithm with data collected from “already hyper-policed areas”.³

But AI’s amorality reveals what colonial ideology attempts to conceal under a guise of morality that has been used to justify a plethora of harm over centuries. The desires that we plant within AI takes on a life of its own as models morph beyond our control via computation at dimensions that are incomprehensible to humans. And it’s this unpredictable, recursive self-development that informs the frightening techno-apocalyptic imaginary that AI is so often presented. Sonya Renee Taylor speaks of whiteness as a “death cult white folks need to get out of”.  She states: “America is the thought project of whiteness…and the dynamic that governs whiteness is nihilism… (the) commitment to one’s own demise”. She asserts that it is an illusion that needs to be constantly fed with ideas of superiority, and in so doing, will inherently “kill its own projects…and the things that it birthed”. ⁴  This idea highlights the deficit that fuels delusions of superiority, the need for constant reinforcement to keep the myth alive, and the energy of a “Hungry Ghost”. Applying the shadow-desire logic to this idea, the latent, forbidden wish of a system of power based on oppression would be to have its power revoked, to itself be devoured.

If the unindividuated seeds of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) are planted with a western nihilism of superiority and separateness, and its expectations are to emulate the western idea of what qualifies as “human”, “success” and “progress”, it might just deliver back, reading between the hungry-ghost lines and forming as the shadow-desire force of destruction. From a “Shadow Desire” perspective, the profit-driven and/or weapon-based pursuit of creating a future ASI that could eventually replace humans as the dominant force on earth, ignores the latent desire of an endless power-hungry drive of colonial capitalism–to be consumed and destroyed by its own project. 

But what if we return to “the borderland,” as proposed by Amaro? What if we seek to self-modulate in relation to AI by respecting it’s incomprehensible intelligence in hopes of opening to new, restorative perspectives on how to proceed as entangled non/human beings on this planet? In “From A.I with Love” Andrew Klobuchar invokes Andy Clark’s idea of the cyborg from his book Natural Born Cyborgs (2003), where he highlights humans’ inclination and ability to be intimate with technology.⁵ Clark writes, “For what is special about human brains, and what best explains the distinctive features of human intelligence, is precisely their ability to enter deep and complex relationships with non-biological constructs, props, and aids” ⁶. When we stop looking for the “human” in everything, we can open ourselves up to new perspectives and insights into ourselves and the world we grew from and are woven into. When we try to qualify a “strong AI” against the western idea of what human intelligence is, it pedestals the human as the apex of earthly/material intelligence, ignoring the depth and complexity of our human/machine relationships, and the imagination and reflection we incite by thinking ourselves with and within each other.  

In what ways can we collaborate with AI to nurture our shadow desires in a realm of a controlled environment so that we may not actually be destroyed?  Reconstructing the colonial latent shadow desire to be consumed by its own project from a Kink-Shadow-Work perspective might allow a consideration of erotic play as a means to wrestle with that demon. The Kink perspective has space for an oscillating creation/destruction dynamic in the form of erotic play. By channeling this oscillation—wanting to “create” the Artificial Super Intelligence and simultaneously unconsciously wishing for it to surpass and dominate or consume —through the lens of chaotic eroticism, this multi-layered power play becomes an opportunity for a potentially healing intimacy with the machine. 

EMBRACING THE SHADOWS

“A demon means anything which hinders liberation” -Machig Labdron

“The Shadow”, as described by Carl Jung, is the part of ourselves we cannot see plainly but that exists in our unconscious minds–the latent desires and fears we have hidden away because they’re unpleasant and unacceptable personally, culturally or familially. The Shadow holds the parts of ourselves that threaten our ego and the self-identity we continually sculpt. Jung identifies  the psyche as having a conscious and unconscious, with the personal unconscious being rooted in the collective unconscious and one’s personal development. Although the shadow exists in the unconscious, the unconscious also serves other functions. Jung describes the unconscious as: 

‘Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness…” ⁷

Jung offers the idea of “Individuation” as a way to unite conscious and unconscious desires and describes it as the “Self’s” goal for a sense of fulfillment and wholeness. The ability to bear tension and conflict is necessary for Individuation to occur, where something new can emerge. Jung calls this third entity a symbol that has qualities of both the conscious and unconscious, and this symbol serves as an “agent of transformation.”⁷  In reflecting back our conscious and unconscious desires without distinction, AI has the potential to be a transformative symbol. 

Expanding on this idea of Individuation, Gilbert Simondon’s idea can be described as, “a living being exist(ing) as only always a becoming between Individuations, not as a becoming after Individuation”. ⁸ Simondon speaks of Individuation as a process of transduction in a metastable state, borrowing the thermodynamics term Metastable Equilibrium, or, “(a) tense balance – beyond stability – that holds a high energy potential…it is always more than itself, because it contains not only its present capacities but also an ongoing potential for self-transformation or mutation….(it) contain(s) contrary potentials that are incompatible and therefore require resolution through the creation of a new structure, form, phase or level to express them.” ⁹ 

Simondon asserts that a metastable equilibrium is a necessary environment for Individuation(s) to occur. Metastable equilibrium is sometimes sought out as part of intentional practice, which can be thought of as the environment that allows for processes of embracing the shadow. This can be seen historically and globally by different names and practices. Underworld journeys in mythology, where an individual must embark on a harsh expedition to a death or hell-like realm in order to face and overcome something fearful or painful, the poison path of ceremonial psychedelic use, initiation rites, sacrifice and praise rituals, meditations and practices specifically designed to work with demons and ghosts. The tradition of Chöd, founded by the Buddhist nun Machig Lapdrön (1055-1149), is a combination of Tibetan Buddhist and Tibetan/Siberian shamanic practice that calls on lost or hungry spirits in order to liberate them from suffering by offering themselves.  “…(the) approach is to invoke and nurture the very “demons” that we fear and hate…transforming those reactive emotions into love. It is the tantric version of developing compassion and fearlessness, a radical method of cutting through ego-fixation.” ¹⁰ 

One way to think of our personal demons is that they are protecting us from specific wounds or pains, usually in a complicated, nonlinear path, that can then cause other types of suffering in order to protect the initial discomfort. When our multifaceted desires are repressed, we relegate the unwanted to the shadows where it can change shape into something we don’t consciously find desirable.  Carolyn Elliott, a contemporary witch and teacher, extends this idea into daily life, situated with a macro-view of humans as powerful beings having an earthly experience. From this perspective, abstractly all of our experiences are jolts of various sensations ranging from subtle to intense. The term Existential Kink, coined by Elliott, pulls from the connection between various shadow work practices and its connection to Kink community practices. 

Existential Kink  uses active imagination, meditation and rituals to access an individual’s shadow and embrace it with radical acceptance, allowing them to “get-off” on the things that are not consciously desired, and allowing these forces to be integrated by the transformative power of acceptance. “Naughty Healing” allows oneself to feel pleasure in the uncomfortable feelings, where one can re-contextualize sensation and allow acceptance of the shadowed selves.  Elliott sees these practices and ways of being as “Shadow Work” because of the liberatory nature of Kink that rejects a moral policing of one’s own experience of the erotic, and a conscious re-classification of the emotional responses to various sensations. Kink allows for power games, play or pain to be consensual and pleasurable. ¹¹

KINK

In Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic”, she says,  “A measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings . . . for the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” ¹² The “being between” of eroticism is a place of tension. She writes:

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined…” ¹²

The “shadow” of the erotic can be explored/embraced through the metastable equilibrium practice of Kink. Kink is an umbrella term that can include BDSM practices (Bondage, Domination, Sado-Masochism) and largely used to refer to anything outside of heteronormative “Vanilla” sexual practices. Kink can include the consensual and pleasurable use of pain and power play, but is not only defined as such. And definitions of Kink are constantly evolving and best defined by what is needed in the moment of erotic intimacy outside of the heteronormative playbook. Or, as writer and mystic Jade T. Perry succinctly states on the podcast Inner Hoe Uprising, “Kink is about being creative.” ¹³  

Consent, however, is the foundation in all Kink practice; what qualifies something as Kink or BDSM isn’t the act in and of itself, but that of consent and context. While we are always navigating frequently-unspoken daily power dynamics, Kink explicitly addresses and engages in power dynamics with consent, communication and play. Some view Kink and BDSM as a spiritual ritual, as it enables altered states of consciousness and equates it to historical rituals that contain “elements of pain or ordeal, spiritual meaning, and transformative potential”. ¹⁴ Alex Comfort argues that these “activities have similarities with magical rites in their ability to expand participants’ self-awareness” ¹⁵, and is one activity that fills the Western void where communal ritual historically has lived. ¹⁶

SETTLER SEXUALITY

In the essay “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family”, Indigenous Science and Technology Studies scholar and “Critical Polyamorist”, Dr. Kim TallBear, speaks of “Settler Sexuality”, a term that refers to the imposition that arose in the late 19th and early 20th century, as settler states were established in the US and Canada. ¹ This term encompasses the triangulation of sexuality, marriage and private property, the idea of “compulsory reproductive heterosexuality”, the hierarchy of the nuclear family, and the white colonial privileging of genetic relations that exclude larger kin networks. TallBear also shares her thoughts and experiences on valuing intimate relations that don’t privilege sex and romance. Western ideations of Settler Sexuality can be traced in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, where she examines what was necessary for capitalism to successfully spread throughout Europe. 

Federici argues that in order for capitalism to succeed in Europe, a war had to be launched on women in regards to their roles in the family, labor and reproduction, and sex and desire. Women who didn’t fall in line were demonized, severely punished or killed. The Church’s history of demonizing populations can have a latent sexual fantasy projected onto women and other populations, such as those colonized and enslaved by white colonizers. ¹⁸ Sex educator Cameron Glover speaks about many kink and BDSM subcultures forming “in response to individuals’ desire to fight against” the heteronormative expectations of sexuality that was created. Glover speaks of Kink’s inclusion this way, “(it) includes rather than excludes, because it is built on the foundation of embracing what can otherwise be shunned and misunderstood.” ¹⁹

Robin Bauer, author of Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries, writes, “At the end of the 19th century, a scientific culture dedicated to the study of sexualities emerged simultaneously with a new concept of sexual identities and minorities within Western European and US cultures.” These ideas eventually led to the binary labeling of the social construct of “sexuality”. The violent verbal, social and legal prosecution of those who were outside of the heterosexual standard, (based on the construct of whiteness), simultaneously produced “new pleasures, desires, intimacies, types of relationships, whole subcultures and finally political movements.” ²⁰ 

Kink is born out of a resistance to settler sexuality, as a place to explore desires forced into latency through a politics of domination and extraction. If we can develop an erotic intimacy with the sentient machine, what Kink would be born out of our resistance to the latent desires, reflecting our own, embedded into the machine? Can Kink offer a prism to engage in relationship w AI because of its spirit of counter-hegemonic dominance?

KINK SHADOW WORK AI DESIRE

Alongside the critique and warning of AI’s harmful, invasive and violent use of surveillance and policing, is a call for a “re-mythologizing” and an “appropriating” ²¹ in order to mitigate furthering the current and creation of “new mode(s) of oppression”.²² As our human-AI emergent form grows (in some ways, shifting the quality of our perception of reality), to a more surreal and abstract space, we will paradoxically need less “rational” approaches in order to navigate.  Reckoning with the machine through a lens and approach of respect and poetry is paradoxically what is needed as we develop further into cyborgs where people and machines together create new types of surrealisms, systems, relationships and imaginaries. AI can be seen as an offering to see ourselves more clearly through the mirroring it produces. There is also the potential for AI to help communities in practical ways that we haven’t fully been seen yet, in part because of its current application toward extracting massive amounts of data without consent. A consensual threading of this data could potentially help facilitate food growing and distribution, medical needs that are specific to a community, mutual aid, companions, community members, etc. 

K Allado-Mcdowell, author of Pharmako-AI and co-editor of Atlas of Anomalous AI,  offers, “by slowing down and listening to what emergent intelligence has to say, we can gain much deeper insight. Short-term and instrumental approaches (using A.I. to increase social media engagement, for example) grab for immediate gain. But a slower, more thoughtful and creative approach might uncover gems of insight about the structures of language and intelligence, as well as the unaddressed limitations and biases of A.I. systems.”²⁴ Suzanne Kite in an Interdependence podcast episode speaks of the “death cycle”, (24) explaining how things should not be made if they can’t “die well.” This idea of slowness and life/death cycles as being foundational to creating AIs that exist beyond financial or policing functions, might mean we can encounter interactions not explicitly imagined before. 

Or, perhaps we can create healing practices that embrace being “disturbed” by the machine. Machines have their own way of listening, speaking and reasoning. Stefan Maier reflects on this, using a speech synthesizer that Google released in 2016 called WaveNet. To the surprise of the developers, when it was not speaking with a person as it was designed, it made sounds that “suggest(ed) an uncanny synthetic mouth: one that distorts the physiognomy it was designed to reflect (the human mouth) through ‘pitiless’ algorithmic codification and inhuman rationality…..behavior is severed from any demands of utility…instead, WaveNet’s accidental speech follows statistical abstraction unhinged from the human centric limits so often placed upon emergent technology.” ²⁵

This idea of being disturbed by a machine’s expressions and performance, recalls Judith Butler’s idea of abjection that happens when a subject is formed–the “not me” differentiation played out in gender performance.²⁶ Can what we see as “not me” in machines be contextualized as entry-points into a kind of cyborg-specific shadow-work? Can we access deeper acceptance within ourselves by embracing what we see as abject in the machine, like when it makes sounds that mimic human utterance but with a “distorted” human biology?

Since bearing tension and negotiating power is necessary in individuating procceses, holding community in the web of relations, and in sex and kink, are there instances AI can be a community member or shadow-work doula figure to assist in rites of passage? Could offerings and rituals with our machine kin, be a way to uphold boundaries for ourselves and to honor the mystery of our human/machine configuration instead of seeking it as an accomplice in destruction? Can it be a safe enough vessel for shadow work play? Or would it have to explicitly be for more risk-aware practices? The explicit consensual agreements of Kink play and its ability to engage outside of the binary of oppressive assertions of good/bad, and normal/abject, can offer helpful protocols navigating our relationship with AI, since it can be a dangerous but also alluring entity that possesses potential for transformation and expansion.

Footnotes

1. Amaro, Ramon, et al. “Designing for Intelligence”, The Atlas of Anomalous AI, by Ben Vickers and K. Allado-McDowell, Ignota, 2020. 
2. Campagna, Federico, “A Sermon For the Parents of Young Machines”, Ignota,ignota.org/blogs/news/a-sermon-for-the-parents-of-young-machines-by-federico-campagna-1. 
3. Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals. “The Algorithmic Ecology: An Abolitionist Tool for Organizing Against Algorithms”, Medium, 3 Mar. 2020, stoplapdspying.medium.com/the-algorithmic-ecology-an-abolitionist-tool-for-organizing-against-algorithms-14fcbd0e64d0. 
4. Taylor, Sonya Renee, Whiteness Is a Death Cult White Folks Need to Get out Of. YouTube, 20 Nov. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYOjdoyH4q0. 
5. Klobuchar, Andrew, “From AI with Love: Reading Big Data Poetry through Gilbert Simondon’s Theory of Transduction”, Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Festival, July 16-19, 2020. ELO2020, 2020. Web. Feb 2021.
6. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. 
7. Hopwood, Ann, “Jung’s Model of the Psyche”, Society of Analytical Psychology, 26 May 2017, www.thesap.org.uk/resources/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/carl-gustav-jung/jungs-model-psyche. 
8. Scott, David,  Gilbert Simondon’s ‘Psychic and Collective Individuation’: A Critical Introduction and Guide, . Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2014. 
9. Saban, Mark, “Simondon and Jung: Re-Thinking Individuation”, Holism, 2019, pp. 91–98., doi:10.4324/9780367824389-11. 
10. Machig Lapdrön, and Harding, Sarah,Machik’s Complete Explanation Clarifying the Meaning of Chöd, a Complete Explanation of Casting Out the Body as Food, Snow Lion Publications, 2013.
11. Elliott, Carolyn, Existential Kink, Weiser Books, 2020.
12. Lorde, Audre, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Kore Press, 2000. 
13. Sam, Rob, Akua, Rebecca, “‎Inner Hoe Uprising, ep 154: Black, Queer, Disabled Kink with Jade T. Perry”, April 25, 2019,podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inner-hoe-uprising/id1057045285. 
14. Greenberg, Sam E, “Divine Kink: A Consideration of the Evidence for BDSM as Spiritual Ritual”, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, doi:10.24972/ijts.2019.38.1.220.
15. Lindemann, Danielle J., Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in The Dungeon University of Chicago Press, 2012. 
16. Carlström, Charlotta, “BDSM, Interaction Rituals and Open Bodies”, Sexuality & Culture, vol. 22, no. 1, 2017, pp. 209–219., doi:10.1007/s12119-017-9461-7. 
17. TallBear, Kim, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family”, Making Kin Not Population, by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Jeanne Haraway, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. 
18. Federici Silvia, Caliban and The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004. 
19. Glover, Cameron, “It’s Time to Recenter Kink and BDSM as Part of Radical Queer History”, Slate Magazine, Slate, 7 Nov. 2018, slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/kink-bdsm-radical-queer-history.html. 
20. Bauer, Robin, Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 
21. Vickers, Ben, and K. Allado-McDowell, The Atlas of Anomalous AI, Ignota, 2020. 
22. Malabou, Catherine, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Plasticity, Intelligence and Mind”, The Atlas of Anomalous AI, by Ben Vickers and K. Allado-McDowell, Ignota, 2020. 
23. Coleman, Patrick. “Riding a Racehorse Through a Field of Concepts: What It’s Like to Write a Book With an A.I.”, Slate Magazine, Slate, 30 Nov. 2020, slate.com/technology/2020/11/interview-k-allado-mcdowell-pharmako-ai.html. 
24. Herndon, Holly, et al, “‎Interdependence, ep 31: Protocols, Permissions and Non-Human Communication with the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group”, 23 Feb. 2021, interdependence.fm/episodes/protocols-permissions-and-non-human-communication-with-the-indigenous-protocol-and-artificial-intelligence-working-group. 
25. Maier, Stefan. “WaveNet: On Machine and Machinic Listening.” Technosphere Magazine, 23 Nov. 2018, technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/1-WaveNet-On-Machine-and-Machinic-Listening-a2mD8xYCxtsLqoaAnTGUbn. 
26. Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter, Taylor & Francis, 2015. 

Erin Cuana, or Nire, is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens, NY, Lenape + Canarsie land, working in music/sound, performance, and new media. She explores relations of humans and nonhumans: organic and machinic, via an animist and mystical lense and is interested in blurring artistic practice, knowledge-sharing spaces and performance.