Preface to Roth, Alina Michela. 2025. _Invisible Bodies and Alternative Futures: Data, Embodiment, and Resistance in the Age of AI_

In the age of digital technologies, the increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence and data-driven systems deeply impacts how body-subjects are categorized and controlled. This master’s thesis explores how datafication through Artificial Intelligence reshapes the constitution of subjectivity, which reduces its complex interplay of individual and structural identificatory layers to a fragmented, for machines processable pixelation. Particular attention is given to the digital and lived realities of marginalized groups, who are disproportionately affected by the reinforcement of existing societal structures of oppression. By drawing on feminist, post-humanist, and neo-materialist theories, it investigates the process of digital disembodiment and analyzes contemporary activistic projects as well as artistic works, in order to reveal how digital systems invisualize marginalized bodies while simultaneously surveilling and over-exposing them in controlled spaces. Consequently, the concept of digital disembodiment is critiqued not as a true separation of the body from digital environments but as a mechanism to manage and control these bodies. In the second part, the thesis highlights how activistic counter-movements act as re-embodiment practices with the aim of reclaiming agency and imagining alternative futures. These speculative practices, including Afrofuturism and queer disidentification, challenge normative identities and offer new perspectives. They ultimately are being used as the foundation for feminist art projects that envision new techno-imaginaries that transcend existing structures and advocate for a future in which technological innovation strengthens diversity and the redefinition of human embodiment.