The central theme of Liquid Views is the well in which Narcissus discovers his reflection. He initially sees water as someone else, as another body. Like the small child in the various “mirror stages" described by Lacan, he decides to recognize his fictive body as himself. This installation has the objective of arousing the observer's curiosity and seducing him to undertake actions that bring him into contact with his senses.... Instead of pressing keys and buttons, the observer must experiment with his own sense of touch.... Attracted by the sounds of water and a room of shimmering lights, the visitor approaches the virtual well. Seeing the image of himself he is tempted to touch it. Touching the image with his fingertip, the image in the water breaks up. Drawn by the sensation triggered by touching his own image in the water, the observer immerses himself in the situation. (Fleischmann and Strauss, "Images")
What is striking about the experience of Liquid Views is that the image's scattering, far from ending engagement (as we might expect), in fact catalyzes a transition to another realm—to the realm of the disintegrated image. That is precisely why Fleischmann depicts the installation as an effort to open the access to the self closed up by Narcissus' "drowning in himself": "The central theme is the transition from the upper to the lower world.... The Narcissus of the media age is watching the world through a liquid mirror that questions our normal perception."15 If this means that the “mirror becomes the actor," it acts necessarily in conjunction with the embodied spectator, whose immersion in the situation is enabled by the self-reflexivity characteristic of touch as the most primordial of the senses, as the root of premodal sensation.
The spectator's touch—touch as trigger for the image's scattering—materializes the power of imaging qua dimension of organismic being. Transformed from an external, visual image of the self into an internal correlate of the organism's imaging potentiality, the mirror of Liquid Views thus comprises what Fleischmann and Strauss call an "unsharp interface," an operator of the fusion of realms constitutive of the mixed reality paradigm: "The interface is not interpreted as such. It goes unnoticed and is not consciously perceived. These natural references turn Liquid Views and Rigid Waves into virtual reality." (Fleischmann and Strauss, “Images")
BODIES IN CODE
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