Videoplace, Krueger's interactive platform, marks a further and, in some sense, ultimate, stage in the restoration of autonomy to the responsive environment, understood as encompassing—and indeed as the interactional domain structurally coupled to —the embodied visitor. Like Psychic Space, Videoplace works by capturing an image of the visitor's movement, only in this case the image presents the outline of the visitor's body processed (and distorted in various ways) by the computer. Several different programs facilitate viewer interaction with the schematic traces of her bodily movement; for example, they allow her to fill in the space within the lines with colored images of body parts or to interact with temporally divergent and continually reverberating captures of her movement (see Figure 1.4).
More than anything else, Videoplace is differentiated from Krueger's earlier responsive environments by the technical and aesthetic accomplishment of complete action-response synchronicity. Here, the computer does not react to the visitor with a discrete response that in turn triggers an action on the part of the visitor (and so on); rather, because the computer's activity—some programmed modification of the data capturing the visitor's movement—coincides absolutely with that movement it becomes (or is experienced as) an indissociable part of its agency. This accomplishment of synchronicity shifts the aesthetic interest of the environment from the clarification of the visitor-system correlation (Krueger's guiding concern up to this point) to the newfound capacity for expanded agency:
BODIES IN CODE
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