Klinikè is a multidisciplinary project that explores the ongoing process of hybridization between humans and cyborgs. This phenomenon inevitably tackles the traditional image of the human body, as well as the idea of the eroticism centered on sexual organs and filtered through the lenses of gender, bringing about the emergence of what Benjamin Bratton calls a “distributed body”: a body that has no fixed boundaries and is in a constant state of composition. Klinikè orbits around that the development of artificial intelligence and automation of reasoning imply the automation of sensing, perception, feeling as well. As a result, along- side the AI, an artificial aesthetic also emerges. Intelligent machines, do not only think and cognise, they also see, hear and have even haptic feelings.

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The works delve into skin’s layers that are the place of erotic pleasure and pain. The touch is the most immediate sensation: we learn how to touch, before learning how to see and to listen. The sense of touch is therefore the ground of any aesthetic experience. At the end of Aesthetic Theory, writing about the origin of art, Theodor Adorno affirms that “aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image.” The very ground of the aesthetic experience is now shaken and called into question, and art is called to rethink its deepest stratum. The skin is also what constitutes ourselves as individuals, as it allows us to constantly negotiate our subjectivity with other subjects and the surrounding environment. What happens if the skin does not belong to a subject any longer? Can such thing as a ‘skin without a body’ exist?

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Text by Felice Moramarco