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How do human and machine intelligences generate bodies?
• 30. March - 4. May (no class 27. April)
• Online!
• Five-weeks, Mondays, 7-9PM CET
• Small class of participants
• Certificate of Completion
Artist / Student (Full Time)
€245 €195
Freelancer
€265 €215
Professional
€295 €245
Generous Supporter Ticket
€305 €265
Read more about our “Revolution Pricing” reduced fees here.
course
description
This course invites us to think about how bodies perform with and within the latent spaces of technological media. We will consider how bodies are broken apart, analyzed, and reconstructed in generative systems, from dataset fragmentation to diffusion-based reassembly. We will make and share our own experimental artworks while exploring radical and canonical artists and theorists from this multifaceted field.
We will consider the "diffused" body and the generative perspective: how we see and how we are seen within computational fields of representation. The mechanisms underpinning generative AI processes shape the meaning of the image they produce, putting us in a kind of fluid, probabilistic body moving through noise to emerge as a strange new signal. With generative AI, unique possibilities open up to create images that reproduce and fracture identity, merge anatomies, hallucinate motion, and manipulate the very schema of the human form. When we work in node-based generative environments like ComfyUI, we can choose to simulate, recombine, or transcend the real, bending bodies and perspectives. In this course, we will expand our understanding of embodiment with generative AI technology, learning and experimenting with diffusion workflows inside ComfyUI. We will create new image and video works that use these pipelines to remap, reinterpret, translate, and manipulate our own lived and experienced embodiment. We will reflect on the nature of these tools and their complicated histories, as well as their current applications in the world, in order to situate our own creations within this broader critical context.
Course Objectives
Broaden knowledge of the historical evolution of new image-generating machine learning technologies, their precursors, practical applications, and cultural effects, especially regarding representations of the body.
Become familiar with a wide range of artists whose works address, exemplify, or employ mediation of the body, within and beyond the medium of generative AI.
Gain understanding of node-based generative workflows in contemporary creative software (ComfyUI), and apply any combination of the demonstrated methods to a conceptually driven still or moving image project of your own.
Develop a meaningful and applicable knowledge of how relationships between technologies, datasets, and bodies shape identity and society.
Consider expansive definitions of embodiment and agency, questioning cultural constructions of the individual.
Context
Since the dawn of photography, media technologies have rapidly developed to represent and transcend our embodied experiences. But even before these innovations, humans have been compelled to depict and leave traces of their bodies, adding virtual layers to reality by transforming materials into images. A hand print on a cave wall, a body carved from wood, a shadow play with puppets, a painted cathedral ceiling of a God whose hand looks just like ours and reaches towards us–all of these demonstrate the human being negotiating its own reality and coming to terms with its place in the world through its body.
In contemporary mediated culture, we contend increasingly with media that not only host virtual experiences, but as Trevor Paglen puts it, our images are looking back at us, and not with the same kind of eyes or body. With the rise of generative AI, our bodies are not just tracked but scraped, tokenized, and statistically modeled. Our physical forms are entangled within mechanized systems of prediction, control, and infinite reproduction.
What becomes possible when we use these generative technologies creatively? Can we shed light on the problematic logics and perhaps some promising potentials embedded in these tools? Can we break them open or apply them in unexpected, weird, radical ways to offer different visions of what it means to have/be/experience a body in this world?
technologies & tools
The course emphasizes node-based generative AI workflows, specifically ComfyUI. We will cover ControlNet for structural guidance, AnimateDiff for temporal consistency, IP-Adapter for image referencing, and LoRA training for custom aesthetics and characters/identities. We will also consider cloud-based pipelines for students without local hardware.
course
outline
Week 1: The Latent Body
Introduction to the class and to each other.
Technical Setup: Getting started with ComfyUI. Students must have local hardware (NVIDIA GPU, 8GB+ VRAM) or set up a cloud account (RunPod, Vast.ai, or ComfyCloud recommended).
Origins of facial recognition in early surveillance strategies and how they feed current datasets.
Muybridge’s Motion Studies as precursor to the fragmented, datafied body.
How is the body reconstructed as mechanical, suspect, or predictable?
Week 2: Prompting the Flesh
Technical Workshop: Building simple ComfyUI networks. Generating images and short videos using text/image prompts and scheduling.
Evolution and innovation in representing the body (painting to photography to film to VR) and how text-to-image models extend and disrupt this history.
Exploring the "latent space" of the body: drifting between human, animal, and machine forms.
How is the body represented in the way we query the system, rather than just as the thing we see?
Week 3: Structured By The Real (ControlNets)
Technical Workshop: Using ControlNets in ComfyUI to structure compositions through diffusion generation.
Using input video of our own performing bodies to drive the composition of generated output.
What does it mean to source a lived bodily experience for movement in a hallucinated virtual world?
Week 4: Training Identity (LoRAs)
Examining methods and case studies of Deepfakes.
Technical Workshop: Training a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) on your own face/body and generating images. Sourcing community LoRAs by others online to craft new aesthetic combinations.
How do we understand our relationship to the machine when it mimics us, or reinterprets us through the lens of other people’s values and desires?
Week 5: Bodies In and Out of Noise
Final Presentations: Sharing of participants’ final works. Final projects may incorporate still and/or moving images.
How do the productions of our trained machines teach us about our own trained beliefs and expectations with respect to bodies?
Discussion: Diffusing the body as a form of digital resistance or submission.
who is this
class for?
This course is suitable for all experience levels and will be exciting for anyone interested in how visual culture and technology shape our understanding and experience of our own bodies. Whether your interests are more with the body or more with the machine, our experiments with the meeting of the two will be enriching for anyone wanting to find more room for creative expression within our current multimediated reality. Those with prior experience in any of the covered techniques will find new ways of thinking about and combining these tools in their work. All participants will have a broader understanding of how and why tracking tools work, and the possibilities for using them counter-to the status quo.
additional costs
A note for students using cloud based services rather than local hardware: RunPod, Vast.ai, and ComfyCloud provide remote access to ComfyUI using high-performance GPUs. Costs range from $0.20-1.00 per hour for usage.
about online classes
Classes are 'live' meaning that you can directly interact with the instructor as well as with the other participants from around the world. Classes will also be recorded for playback in case you are unable to attend for any reason. For specific questions, please email us and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
about
scholarships
We are offering a limited number of reduced fee scholarships for this online class for those facing financial hardships. These allow participants to pay a reduced fee and are reserved for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ who otherwise would be unable to attend. To be considered for one of these scholarships, please use this form.
To apply for a reduced fee scholarship, you must fill in the form no later than one week before the course begins. We will not accept any class sign-ups or scholarship applications after this date, as our regular sign-ups will determine the amount of scholarships we can accommodate. We will therefore notify you only one week before class begins (shortly after the application deadline) to let you know if your application has been approved.
We are a small organisation with no outside funding and like many, we are also in survival mode. We depend on tuition fees for reimbursing class instructors, space fees, and operational costs. We ask you to consider this when applying for a reduced fee scholarship. <3
meet the
instructor
Jess Tucker
Artist, Musician, Educator
Jess Tucker (they/she) is an American and Dutch artist currently based in Berlin. Their performances and installations combine video, electronic music, prints, sculptures, and digital interactivity to playfully examine how machinic mediation shapes our experiences of embodiment, selfhood, and desire. Their work has been featured in international exhibitions and performance programs, including Rewire Festival, FOAM Museum of Photography, Goethe Institut, Sónar+D, the Van Gogh Museum, Mana Contemporary, and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Jess is a 2025 Re:Humanism Prize winner and Lumen Prize Finalist. Jess is currently a Lecturer of Digital Media at NYU Berlin, and they have also taught courses in video and new media art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Iowa, and the China Academy of Art.