Plastination: Operation
Is the skin AI makes plastic? Is my skin smooth enough? Normal skin with no pores? Is AI a mirror? A distorting one?
A mirror needs skin to reflect.
There's no skin on AI bodies. Skin is removed by abstraction. A body that went through plastination. The skin of cadavers are stripped off and put on display.
The machine isn’t distorting anything. It is showing what was already there, underneath, normally hidden. The machine isn’t the source of the distortion. It’s the instrument that makes a pre-existing distortion visible.
The aesthetic filter behind these models reproduces “the male gaze within western art history”. (The Algorithmic Gaze: An Audit and Ethnography of the LAION-Aesthetics Predictor Model. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.09896v2)
A plastinated body isn't a person anymore. It's a specimen. It stands in for "the human body”. For the category. The singularity is removed on purpose.
Plastinated bodies get sliced. You see everything at once, muscle, organ, nerve, flattened into one plane. If you type a word into the prompt, you get the same thing: not one human body. A cross-section through every human body in the dataset. Legible in one slice.
Abstraction removes provenance and singularity. Then shows you the statistical body like it’s just a body.
The plastinated bodies in “Körperwelten” says the bodies were donated. Consented. But the history is messy: unconsented cadavers and exhibitions. Whose body ended up in the dataset? Did anyone agree to become the specimen?
I type "transsexual" into my StreamDiffusion drawing tool. The model didn't invent the sexualized-trans-body association. It reproduced it. A pattern already in the data. Already in us.