If photography provides a source of the preindividual and of the generic commons, as Stiegler has suggested,29 it is not because it forms an archive of discrete memories whose adoption by individual consciousness necessarily informs the latter's temporalization (and the possibility for collective temporalization). On the contrary, the deployment of photography in Worldskin makes clear that it is the process of exteriorization which forms the source of the preindividual. That is why, again, the ensuing disembodiment is not so much opposed to embodiment as it is to its strict complement; bluntly put, disembodiment is the condition of possibility for embodied human life to sustain its (life-sustaining) contact with the preindividual.
Rather than offering an opportunity for the adoption of archived tertiary memories, Worldskin thus facilitates a self-reflexive experience of one's embodied agency in the world. To the extent that it exteriorizes embodied agency (thereby disembodying it), the work manages to separate it from the viewer's ongoing, constitutive, autopoietic embodiment and thus allows it to be fed back into the latter via a recursive coupling that comprises the contemporary correlation—the new economy as it were—between embodiment and disembodiment.
To the extent that we increasingly act in informational environments and in conjunction with informational agents, Worldskin thereby exposes nothing less than the general condition for embodied agency in our world today. With the ubiquitous infiltration of digital technologies into daily life, embodied agency becomes conditioned (necessarily so) by a certain (technical) disembodiment. Embodied disembodiment (or disembodied embodiment) accordingly forms a strict complement to the ontology of mixed reality conditioning all real experience. Just as all virtual reality is mixed reality, so too is all embodied life constitutively disembodied. Understood in this context, virtuality thus forms the basis for the convergence of the living and information underway everywhere today.
Such an understanding lies at the heart of Benayoun's endeavor in Worldskin, as can be discerned from his extended discussion of the constitutive impurity of virtuality:
When we come to understand that virtuality is, at the origins, a property of the "real" world, we should admit that the exchange between fiction and reality would be balanced only if the dynamic and symbolic properties of the virtual representation become part of the physical world. This explained that, having been a matter of experiment, in search of specific properties that would only belong to the medium, VR and VE are becoming, like the art of using them, more and more impure. This impurity might characterize the mature stage of the medium, and the merging of the virtual and the physical world is probably the extension of the human trend of converting the objective environment into an informational system.30
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