This practice-based research explores the entanglement of AI avatars, extractive economies, and artistic practice, critically examining digital identity as an ideological and material construct. AI avatars, positioned as ‘knowing machines,’ operate within systems of technological capitalism, perpetuating cycles of labour, surveillance, and resource extraction. Through performance, AI development, and expanded digital fabrication, this project interrogates the ecological and socio-political costs of digital infrastructures. Drawing on Kate Crawford’s critique of AI as a system of colonialism and Donna Haraway’s ‘informatics of domination,’ the research traces the hidden economies sustaining AI avatars. By overidentifying with these digital entities, the project highlights the contradictions within technological world-building, revealing the material and ideological undercurrents shaping human and non-human agency in the digital age.
PATIPOLITICS, PEAK FACE & THE ENCLOSURE OF THE HUMAN
We are living in the age of Peak Face: a historical threshold at which the human face becomes the primary site of extraction under algorithmic capitalism. Drawing on Isabel Millar’s concept of patipolitics, Lacanian drive theory, and the evolutionary logic of cephalisation, this contribution examines how the face shifts from relational organ to optimised infrastructure. From Instagram aesthetics to deepfake legislation, faciality becomes a regime of legibility governed by circulation, enclosure, and personalisation. Through the artistic projects END-TO-END and EPIS(T)EMIC EROTIC with the Nansen Fredssenter, I propose friction, opacity, and preserved ambiguity as ethical other counter-practices against the pornographic drive for total knowledge and machinic intimacy.
