Through its particular specification of the process of informational framing, the work thus produces the experience of embodied disembodiment, meaning that it actively dissolves (in order to reconstitute anew) the differentiation according to which embodiment and disembodiment have been set into opposition in our culture and in Western thinking more generally. To be yet more precise, Worldskin catalyzes a double transformation in the economy linking embodiment and disembodiment. On the one hand, the technical extension of vision (and of memory) carried out by photography is repurposed as a functional element of the viewer's embodied agency within the digital environment: the viewer literally acts through the camera, which is equally to say that the camera alone allows his or her embodiment to matter here. On the other hand, the viewer's embodied movement within the environment—the actual kinesthetic activity——is exteriorized (or distributed) in the technical traces created by his or her intervention into the image space. To the extent that these traces (the modifications of the images as well as the paper print-outs) inscribe the singular movement of the viewer, they literally comprise “embodied disembodiments," material extensions of the viewer's embodied agency that, while remaining correlated with the latter, nonetheless function autonomously from it.
The aesthetic impact of this double transformation is perfectly emblematized by the work's redeployment of photography as a vehicle for the viewer's direct engagement in the (present) moment of interaction (or intervention) with the environment. As Anne-Marie Duguet has astutely pointed out, Worldskin playfully—though altogether seriously— asks its viewers to “photograph the virtual" (211). Because photography-the indexical medium par excellence—simply has no purchase in the domain of the virtual, what hangs in the balance is the status of what Roland Barthes long ago called the “photographic referent," the photograph's material inscription of the "that has been" [ça a été], the unique convergence of the real and the past. Worldskin in effect stages a dissolution of this function and, with it, a critique of photography's role as storage medium, as the exemplary form of what Bernard Stiegler has called "tertiary memory" (the memory of that which has not been lived by present consciousness but yet conditions its temporalization). More specifically, Worldskin aligns the storage function of photography (and of tertiary memory more generally) with the insulated, distanced stance of the first-world image consumer. When it compels viewers to destroy the tertiary image-here invested specifically as the material support for this self-protective stance—Worldskin accordingly suspends photography's storage function. In the process, it redirects attention from the content of the image to its capacity to trigger embodied activity that paradoxically yields disembodiment as its material trace.
BODIES IN CODE
92