SUBSCANNERS

Nina Davies

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Recent EU law now allows citizens to complain if they have been harmed by AI, but what if they have co-conceived your offspring without you even knowing it?

 

For Future Artefacts 20th Episode we’re welcoming back Nina Davies with her new work SubScanners, alongside guest co-host Rebecca Edwards. This is the fourth work in a series of fictional traditional dances which loosely follow the structures of western folk dance; agricultural, spiritual, war and courtship. Set within a 15 minute fictional podcast from a nearby future, the characters discuss InterReproduction in the space sector, a reproduction research program for deep space exploration. They share InterRepro’s "counterfeit labour scandal", resulting in the emergence digital offspring and of new courtship rituals called SubScanning.

 

Davies presents questions on relationships with digital personhood inside and outside of a phone screen as well as how reproduction and labour might exist outside of the body. Together we imagine what types of digital kinship might exist for these offspring, how we could care for them as children, and what their material connections to us might be. SubScanners warns us about the corporate consumption of public law, presenting a fiction where digital persons are co-opted by corporate guardianship and the only way people can regain control of their digital selves is to play these companies at their own game and settle the matter in family court.