More than a simple desire to buck the technicist trend, Krueger's work is informed by his conviction that the best way for us to bring technologies to bear on human existence—to shepherd our ongoing technogenesis as it undergoes its most accelerated phase to date—is to channel them through our evolutionarily acquired embodiment. This explains his lifelong commitment to a humanist model in which human interaction (encompassing interaction with the self, with others, and with machines) prevails over any notion of technicist instrumentalization. Krueger's environments function practically, following the characterization of Howard Rheingold, as "laboratories for finding out how humans might harmonize with" technical environments whose sway is (and has always been) inescapable.iii,3
The benefits of such an artistic (and scientific) program are twofold: On one hand, human embodiment serves to "naturalize" technical modifications of the world (and, potentially, of the body); on the other hand, these modifications provide an important source for decoupling or deterritorialization by which the body's habitual intercourse with the world gets disturbed and (potentially) expanded. Embodiment accommodates and self-reorganizes in the face of the ever expanding scope of technics in our world today.
In a series of works culminating in the ground-breaking video projection system Videoplace, Krueger has sought to materialize his conviction that "the focus of interface research should be on human nature, not on the transient computer" (Krueger, “An Easy Entry," 147). This conviction has led him to construct environments that eschew the logic emanating from computer code in favor of emergent logics rooted in social conventions. Never an end in itself in Krueger's work, the computer is always a vehicle for exploring and expanding embodied (human) interaction with the world and with other human beings. "In the ultimate interface," he stresses, "input should come from our voices and bodies and output should be directed at all our senses. Since we will also interact with each other through computers, the ultimate interface should also be judged by how well it helps us to relate to each other” (147).
This principled emphasis on human embodiment as mediator between computer and world represents something new in the history of our technogenesis: in its role as primary access to a (now) highly technologized lifeworld, embodiment serves to couple body and world, as well as to actualize the potential of digital (virtual reality) technologies to modify the lifeworld (and, thereby, to infiltrate that primary enactive, worldconstitutive coupling). Embodied enaction is, quite literally, the agent through which technics has an impact on life and the lifeworld.
BODIES IN CODE
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