What is then singular about these two works as exemplars of digital art and as mediators for digital culture is their use of the concrete technology of virtual reality to stage a disconnection of the (fundamentally motile) body schema from the (fundamentally visual) body image. In the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views, the viewer is technically enabled to utilize the excess of the body schema over the body image to increase his agency as an embodied being.
Such technical mediation of the body schema (of the scope of bodyenvironment coupling) comprises what I propose to call a “body-incode." By this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics. As I shall argue in this study, it is precisely through the vehicle of bodies-in-code that our contemporary technoculture, driven by digital technologies, comes to constitute a distinct concrete phase in our contemporary technogenesis (our originary yet historico-technically differentiated coevolution with technics).
Indeed, if we take the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views as exemplary of this phase, we can immediately comprehend how digital technologies, as the contemporary expression of the originary technical mediation of the human, broaden what we might call the sensory commons—the space that we human beings share by dint of our constitutive embodiment. This is because digital technologies:
- Expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity; and thereby
- Markedly broaden the domain of the prepersonal, the organism-environment coupling operated by our nonconscious, deep embodiment; and thus
- Create a rich, anonymous "medium" for our enactive cobelonging or "being-with" one another; which thereby
- Transforms the agency of collective existence (of individual and collective individuation, to use French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon's terminology) from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation.
BODIES IN CODE
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