Fleshed Networks: Artist Talk at ISEA2024 STYLY Exhibition (25 June 2024)

<p dir="ltr">Fleshed Networks is a virtual reality (VR) WebGL environment and artist talk presented as part of the STYLY Exhibition and Artist Talks at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2024) on Tuesday 25 June in Brisbane, Australia. The work investigates the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI) within artistic creation, with a particular focus on how AI image generators shape, distort, and reframe digital representations of femininity.</p><p dir="ltr">Developed using the STYLY platform, Fleshed Networks emerged through collaboration with an AI image generator prompted with terms relating to female reproductive anatomy. The project exposes a tension at the heart of contemporary AI systems: while they offer expansive creative potential, they are also shaped by restrictive datasets that systematically censor, misrepresent, or reconstruct the female body. Attempts to generate anatomical imagery resulted instead in generic landscapes, trees, or homogenised Western beauty ideals, revealing algorithmic bias, dataset gaps, and the invisibility of non-male bodies within large-scale training corpora.</p><p dir="ltr">The work extends Dr Megan Beckwith’s long-standing exploration of posthuman embodiment, cyborgian hybridity, and the merging of dance with digital systems. Through the VR environment and supporting talk, she examines how AI randomness, machine learning limitations, and data-driven decision-making function as both creative collaborators and sources of constraint. These processes contribute to fleshy, visceral, and sometimes uncanny landscapes that evoke the “monstrous feminine,” challenging viewers to consider how AI reframes gender, flesh, and digital corporeality.</p><p dir="ltr">Fleshed Networks highlights the ethical complexities of working with generative AI, particularly around bias, censorship, data feminism, and the invisible assumptions embedded in training datasets. At the same time, it demonstrates the creative potential of co-authoring with algorithmic systems, revealing how AI can provoke new aesthetic directions that might not surface within traditional workflows.</p><p dir="ltr">This Figshare item documents the artist talk and associated conference paper published in the ISEA2024 Academic Proceedings, alongside the conceptual and technical processes underpinning the VR artwork.</p>