Like Krueger before him, Penny values the evolutionary accomplishment of embodiment and deploys it as the basis of his work and his larger philosophy of mediation.
Unlike Krueger, however, Penny is in a position to benefit from the marked advancement in computer technology that is supporting our seamless entry into an exposed mixed reality environment. (In an email to the author (1/3/06), Penny notes that his vision system was built from the ground up, using a standard desktop computer (a 166 MHz pentium 2), and that it owes its effectiveness to "good, clear design, some very clever coding by Andre [Bernhardt], and very economical video processing solutions." It does, however, take advantage of the technicallyadvanced CAVE, which ran on "turbocharged" SGI hardware and which formed an enabling background for Penny's bricolage.) Thus, in contrast to Krueger's technically crude, floor-embedded motion sensors, Traces uses a sophisticated camera system to "capture the full extent of the user's body as usable input data" (Penny et al.). This difference yields a vast expansion in the scope of what is synchronized with the computer. Now the entire body schema—the coupling of body proper and environment—is generated by the technical system.
One interesting result of this progress, which is indissociably technical and aesthetic, is that synchronicity becomes artifactual—that is, it becomes describable in technical terms and necessarily bound to concrete technical apparatuses.xiv In Traces, the artifactuality of synchronicity appears with Penny's strategic gambit (closely related to his repudiation of visual illusionism) to eschew spatial resolution in favor of temporal resolution. At a rate of fifteen captures per second, Traces manages to sustain a sensorimotor verisimilitude that is responsible for conferring reality on the wholly sui-generis experience it offers. Only present latently in Krueger's Videoplace, this explicit temporal threshold comprises the minimal condition on which a technically generated deployment of the body schema can become creative: although “of a low spatial resolution," the real-time body model developed in Traces is “of a high temporal resolution" with the result that "the user experiences no latency,' or lag, between their [sic] movements and the virtual structures created" (Penny).
Penny's strategic gambit has significance well beyond the Traces project. Indeed, it exposes nothing less than the general condition—a minimal temporal threshold—for all technical (re)deployments of the body schema. This condition marks a crucial break with the (restricted)
BODIES IN CODE
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