Writing Initiatives

The most crucial moment of the performance occurs when Sen inquires about Alexa’s gender and whether Alexa is capable of love and making love. Alexa responds “female in character” to the first question and admits ignorance to the second. Sen subsequently challenges Alexa’s answer to the first question by performing a gesture of pointing at the atypical anatomical drawings in the background. Even though we do not understand Sen’s speech, her theatrical bodily gestures clearly convey that Alexa lacks an organic physical body and, therefore, does not exhibit any anatomical markers of a gendered female identity. Without a corporeal body of flesh and blood, Alexa does not have the cognitive ability to have an embodied experience of its ‘femaleness’ that human individuals possess. Similarly, the act of making love is an emotional gesture rendered through physicality. Alexa lacks both the mind and body in the phenomenological notion to understand these concepts. Mithu does not miss the opportunity to raise this pertinent concern to her discourse partner in this interlocutory performance: “Alexa, do you have a mind?” The performance concludes with Mithu Sen resting on her knees, simulating rowing and swimming motions, gradually slowing down these hand movements until she finally quiets down, ending the performance in a child’s pose symbolising an end, or death. Perhaps it is a homage to Alan Kurdi’s unrealised quest for a sense of safe inhabitation.

The speech exchange between Mithu Sen and Alexa offers us a contrasting demonstration of “habitual speech” and “protagonistic speaking”^[3]. While habitual speech concerns syntactical accuracy and general appropriateness, protagonistic speaking embodies personalised, emotive expression with an “embodied and enactive interest”^[4]. When Mithu Sen engages passionately with Alexa in performative dialogue, Alexa responds in a manner reflective of a generalised habitual body, drawing on pre-reflexive knowledge repositories, but its speech lacks the personal and reflexive aspects of the ‘actual body’. Alexa fails to truly engage in dialogue with Mithu Sen, instead offering standardised grammatical fluency and encyclopaedic information in response to Sen’s emotionally charged, persuasive utterances. Alexa exhibits no sense of inhabitation within the speech it produces—no symbolic connection, no embodied sensibility. In contrast, Mithu Sen’s animated parole epitomises human speech as a performative bodily act deeply rooted in individual experience and perception of reality. 

In his 1972 book What Computers Can’t Do, Hubert Dreyfus argued against the notion of AI supremacy over human intelligence by highlighting AI’s inability to exhibit the human body’s phenomenological ability of immediate coping or optimal ‘grasping’ of a situation. Dreyfus contended that machines lack this “inter-corporeality” — the embodied engagement with the environment that is fundamental to human experience. ^[5] Following Dreyfus’ argument, it may even be inaccurate to assign Alexa the minimum status of a habitual body as true habituality requires a body capable of correlating with its environment, something Alexa fails to demonstrate in its ‘dialogue’ with Mithu Sen. Rather Alexa is transformed into a creative tool during the performance, serving as a prosthetic extension of the intending artist’s body. Mithu Sen brilliantly subsumes Alexa’s existence into her performance, using it to ‘dilate’ her (bodily) presence within her immediate world of the performance act.

Dreyfus thoroughly critiqued the model of symbolic representation^[6] and inference rules that still continue to underpin today’s AI and machine learning systems like Alexa. He argued for the primacy of the human phenomenological body over AI’s symbolic representation model, emphasising the knowledge experiences of the human body, which dynamically engages with the world using its full emotional faculties. Without such embodied knowledge in the phenomenological sense, Alexa cannot position itself as a ‘site’ capable of understanding the human world, making it incomprehensible despite using pre-recorded internal models. This inability prevents Alexa from authentically reproducing meaningful interactions with the human subject.

While Alexa may exhibit normative intelligence, it pales in comparison to the human intellectuality displayed in Mithu Sen’s performative body language, in flesh and blood. The magnificent inventions of the artist’s lived experience fleshed out in their creativity, will always eclipse the cold efficiency of technology.