We must struggle to comprehend, then, how mixed reality can be both a minimal condition for experience of and a concrete moment in the history of human technogenesis in which the constituting or ontological dimension of embodiment is incontrovertibly exposed. (This is equally to fathom how mixed reality can harbor a “generic" technical element of experience, a technical-transcendental structure, at the same time as it demarcates a concrete technical stage of the history made possible by such a structure.) Let us say that mixed reality appears from the moment that tools first delocalized and distributed human sensation, notably touch and vision. (Following paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, this would mean from the “origin" of the human.viii Placed in this context, mixed reality, then, designates the general condition of phenomenalization ensuing from the “originary” coupling of the human and the technical. It names an originary condition of real experience, a condition which can only be thought under the category of the transcendental because it can only be known through its effects.
To think our situation today, we must ask what happens when the transcendental structure underlying mixed reality—mixed reality as the technical conditioning of experience as such—gets exposed through and as the concrete technical configuration that specifies its being in the world today. Otherwise put, what remains unprecedented in the history of mixed reality (that is, of experience as such), and what is thus singular about our historicotechnical moment, is precisely the becoming-empirical, the empirical manifestation, of mixed reality as the transcendental-technical, the condition for the empirical as such.
Blindspot (1991), a recent work by American artist Tim Hawkinson, perfectly captures this leveling of the divide between the empirical and transcendental structures of mixed reality (see Figure 0.1). Blindspot is an anatomically arrayed photographic portrait of all the surface areas of the artist's body that he cannot see with his eyes. It brilliantly interweaves a paradigmatic expression of the minimal condition of mixed reality—the externalization of the gaze afforded by a reflective surface— with the technical condition of our being-in-the-world today: namely, our being subjected to and made subject by the technically-supported and technically-generated gaze of others, by the images of ourselves (including images through which we see ourselves) produced by and through society and the media.ix
INTRODUCTION
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