Abstract
European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an empirical reflection on an artistic installation that, through diffracting data practices, turns a space of control into one of encounter. By taking AI oversight to be more-than-human from a soma design approach, we move from the constrained and narrow “human-in-the-loop” to “body-is-the-loop,” opening possibilities for mattering differently.
Keywords
human oversight, AI regulations, affective interaction design, soma design.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1398
Citation
Morais, M., Santuber, J., Tica, K., Hermansen, P., and Chilet, M. (2026) More-than-human oversight: Designing a somaesthetic space for high-risk AI systems, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1398
Creative Commons License
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Included in
More-than-human oversight: Designing a somaesthetic space for high-risk AI systems
European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an empirical reflection on an artistic installation that, through diffracting data practices, turns a space of control into one of encounter. By taking AI oversight to be more-than-human from a soma design approach, we move from the constrained and narrow “human-in-the-loop” to “body-is-the-loop,” opening possibilities for mattering differently.