Davies has spoken of a “seminal" adolescent experience in a field that involved her loss of vision. Recalling her "near mystical manifestation of the confusion ... between inside and out, self and space," Davies cites her “desire to communicate that firsthand bodily experience to others" as her driving motivation and also as the reason why the “medium of immersive virtual space has proven more conducive" to her aim than any other medium. Because they deploy technics to effect a dissolution of the discrete boundaries characteristic of the body as a visually dominant agent, Davies' use of transparency, ambiguity, low-resolution imagery, and fog instance the essential technicity of the indivision of the flesh, as it informs Merleau-Ponty's final project. As Davies explains it, the use of immersive virtual reality technology allows her to catalyze a performative experience of the indifferentiation between bodily interiority and spatial exteriority, and thus, in some sense to compel participants to experience technical psychasthenia firsthand:
As an artist, I ... have two choices: I can either unplug and never go near a computer again or I can choose to remain engaged, seeking to subvert the technology from within, using it to communicate an alternative worldview ... My strategy has been to explore how the medium/technology can be used to "deautomatize” perception (via use of semitransparency, seemingly floating through things, etc.) in order that participants may begin to question their own habitual perceptions and assumptions about being in the world, thus facilitating a mental state whereby Cartesian boundaries between mind and body, self and world begin to slip. (Davies and O'Donaghue, 3)
BODIES IN CODE
136