Body: Computation
What happens to bodies as they slip through computation, understood here as systems of recognition that render bodies legible?
Computation does not begin with machines. It begins wherever bodies are translated into signs, sorted into categories, and ready for recognition. It operates across different scales: from everyday acts of perception to institutional classifications.
These signs can become slop. Something too recognizable. So coherent it feels known, yet wrong.
A body is recognized when its signs align with the categories available to read it.
But what happens when the signs do not align?
A slip happens when these signs do not form a coherent image. The body does not disappear. It produces an excess of information that the system can not fully organize.
A body becomes legible through an assemblage of visible and invisible information.
To be legible is not simply to be seen. It is to be made readable according to an existing system of recognition.
These systems allow bodies to enter spaces and relationships, but they also produce the conditions under which that entry becomes possible.
I am interested in these moments of excess: when a body is recognized and misrecognized at the same time, when it belongs through not belonging, when it becomes visible through the difficulty of being read.
The slip and the slop are not errors in the system. They are where the system becomes perceptible.
In the slip, the body exceeds computation. In the slop, computation exceeds the body.