What does it mean to be a fully embodied being? This project explores the politics and poetics of embodiment in the age of AI through the phenomenon of the “soft machine”. A soft machine is a bioinspired design whose materiality mimics the adaptability of biological organisms. This project reads artificial intelligence through the lens of bioinspired technology. It explores the materiality of consciousness by grounding itself in biopolitical theory and histories of body augmentation. Body augmentation as an infrastructural process in which electrical, chemical, and biological systems actively construct states of being. These processes are only made more complicated by the introduction of artificial intelligence. This project frames the technological and biological body as a contested site where organic and inorganic materials—metals, pigments, gels, and hormones—actively generate new possibilities of subjectivity, embodiment, and creative expression.