Tuesday 27 February 09:36

Fascia 171208180222 (world premiere) Live AV laser performance at Sonic Acts Academy 2018. By Marija Bozinovska Jones

by Jaime Heather Schwartz Fascia is internal connective tissue, a very thin web that wraps around everything in our bodies. Talking about fascia is strange, strange if you have tuned into its presence in the inside of your body and even stranger if you have not. I’m fascinated and sometimes afraid that I am – we are – alive in a body yet, often so unaware, so unfamiliar with its basic mechanisms. If you don’t know how something works, does it makes it easier for someone to make it work against you? The water is wet? Yes The haptic is not instant, there is a delay in our knowledge networks. Signals of sensation are sent along the spine but somehow our nervous system is the last to know. I want to write about Marija’s performance, how lasers move along meridians, but it’s not working. Images and lines of text move too quickly, I can’t keep up. Ideas are not sticking or staying in one place but spreading out into webs, fascial and digital. I’m tensing up. The water is wet? Yes I caught Marija for a moment between talks. I want to understand what her experience with fascia is. When I ask she is surprised I can pronounce it correctly. Our fascial connection leads to more in common: Yoga, the interest in the science of the mind/body, of breathing. I mention my recent research into Buddhist philosophy as a survival strategy. She smiles. I tell her about how I work in SEO. She laughs. She tells me about participating in a talk at Somerset House in London, on self-optimisation, and we talk about the neo-liberal takeover of far-out ideas. ISPNs on LSD. It’s hard not to sound stoned when talking about this stuff. We muse on the elements of humour in her performance, the misguided statements turned out by machine learning. I share my unease about Deep Learning initiatives to build a better AI by mimicking tools of embodied learning. When we build systems that self-regulate us via the Internet of Things then there is no need for fight, flight, freeze. Smart devices that soothe our nervous systems are the ultimate form of control. Siri, save me from myself. The topic takes an unintentional sinister turn and I say goodbye. The water is wet? Yes Meta data mining produces knowledge without our knowledge. Ignorance is bliss, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. If it doesn’t hurt then you can’t call it capitalism, can you? Think global, act local, a saying that now feels like it was foreshadowing the potential to collect personal data for commercial means. I am uncomfortable knowing that digital devices can possibly relay a more accurate portrayal of myself than I can. And the sky is blue? Yes Classic Deep Learning teaches machines through repetition and random facts. Biological beings learn fastest by interacting with their immediate environment and discovering responses. If we teach AI to think like a human will it have an ego that it needs to shed? The performance ended with Marija stating something about how quantifying breath could turn to quantifying life. I can’t remember exactly what she said. I have a sense that my body blocked the words from registering. Perhaps it didn’t want to accept the notion.