This third-person description manages to capture the transductive identity between the user's bodily action in the environment and the (algorithmically processed) imaging of the traces of his or her movement. Not only does neither one exist without the other and outside of their relation (the definition of transduction, according to Gilbert Simondonxvii), but also, as the description of the interaction's cessation makes clear, both are wholly dependent on the environment's technical deployment of the body schema—that is, the operational perspective of the user. This is precisely why the artist only discovered the significance of the problematic of perspective during the exhibition of Traces. As Penny notes:
An amusing aspect of the graphics development was the transition from the 3rd person view (while developing off-line) to the first person view in the CAVE. Solutions which were very satisfying in the simulation mode were useless in first person. For example, if a person is moving forwards, the trace is developing behind her and she can't see it! Worse, if she moves even a voxel backwards, her head is encased in a form which is the head location at the previous time step, so she can't see anything! (Penny et al., citation modified)
This discovery taught Penny that, at the limit, all descriptions of the environment (including the user's description of her body image within it) depend on (and are subordinate to) the bodily activity of the user. For this reason, it seems, Penny is able to appreciate the significant ergodic dimension of the work, a dimension linked directly to the demands made on the body schema of the user.xvii
- SPECULARITY BEYOND THE MIRROR-IMAGE
Conceptualizing the body image as an emanation from the body schema asserts the derivative status of the body image (and of the image, per se, as an ontological categoryxix) and—even more importantly for our present concerns—puts the category of the visual (the “nobility of vision, to use Hans Jonas' felicitous term) into question. I shall return to Jonas critique of vision in Chapter 2; in the present context, Merleau-Ponty's derivation of vision from touch is my ultimate concern. Indeed, what follows can be understood as an effort to explicate the following passage from one of the most enigmatic but also most pregnant working notes of The Visible and the Invisible:
BODIES IN CODE
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