Bodymaps opens such a third space by reversing the psychogenetic process through which the child comes to acquire a normal adult perspective on the world. Accordingly, whereas Bick correlates the development of body schema function with a healthy first containing skin, Bodymaps exploits the (relative) primordiality of the body schema within the register of empirical experience (recall its prenoietic dimension) as a means to disempower vision as the dominant sense (a necessary prerequisite) and thereby to create what we might call (thinking of Ong's second orality”) a “second primary tactility," a partial restoration of the primordial dimension of the skin. This is why the work instances the experimental, as Massumi would put it, somewhere in between—that is, beneath the division between—the analog and the digital. Bodymaps uses technics to “connect and interfuse different spheres of activity on the same operational plane." Yet, if it thereby creates “startling effects' by “using proprioception as the general plane of cross-referencing,"xxxv it does so in a way that underscores the primordial technicity of embodiment (and the originary embodiment of technics).
Bodymaps, we can now specify, exemplifies the use of technics to expose the originary technical element of being, the écart constitutive of the being of the sensible. This technical exposure is accomplished through Schiphorst's use of technics to set the embodied enaction of the viewer into feedback with its sensible-transcendental grounding Bodymaps, explains Schiphorst, "uses video images of my own body and images of a digital body whose movement is captured' from my own movement." It thus uses—indeed interfaces—two distinct kinds of image: images of the body in movement and images of the movements of the body. Schiphorst clarifies her aim here:
I am especially interested in how the knowledge of movement and of the body can affect and inform the design of electronic computer technology and the works created with (or through) that technology. All movement in the video images ... was created from within the body, as was dictated by elemental states such a[s] drowning, floating, shivering, crawling, uncovering, hiding. This technique used knowledge gained in physical techniques, ... through movement practices and training. (Schiphorst)
BODIES IN CODE
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