Taking up Krueger's project of extending the body schema into the uncharted terrain of “artificial reality," we might well ask what happens when the entirety of the perceptuomotor environment becomes virtual—that is, when the technical extension of the body schema is so massive that it affects every aspect of our access to the world?
In his virtual reality environment, Traces (1998-1999), Australian media artist Simon Penny presents us with just such a situation. A project originally designed for networked CAVEs (computerassisted virtual environments), Traces generates a world—that is, a space of sensorimotor interaction—out of the three-dimensional traces of body movement captured by four cameras mounted in the four corners of the CAVE (see Figure 1.5). In this way, it privileges the "bodily, temporal, and kinesthetic sensibilities" of the participant over the illusionism of traditional virtual reality spaces as the vehicle for achieving immersion and the conferral of reality. For Penny, this confrontation with mainstream VR research is necessary to probe the promise of new technology and to pinpoint its humanistic basis. As he explains,
BODIES IN CODE
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