That this conversion informs both the integration of virtuality into the “real" world and the disembodying exteriorization of human embodiment only confirms the urgency of rethinking embodied agency in the age of digital immateriality. Because contemporary technics facilitate a dissolution of the body-world distinction (an “indivision") that is fundamentally informational in its (im)materiality and because human embodied activity is, in some way, the agent of this dissolution, we can no longer constrain embodiment to the body, can no longer contain it within the (organic) skin. We must—as Benayoun's title suggests— extend it into a “worldskin." As a concept for the contemporary technically facilitated indivision of the flesh, worldskin perfectly captures the complementarity between informational environment and disembodied embodiment that—as a technically specific actualization of the transduction of primordial tactility—ensures the “essential" embodiment of the former no less than the “essential” technicity of the latter.
- THE TELE-ABSENT BODY
No contemporary media artist has been more directly concerned with this complementarity between informational environment and disembodied embodiment than Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In a series of performance installations collectively titled “relational architecture," Lozano-Hemmer has variously deployed information technology to energize urban space. Defined as “the technological actualization of buildings and public spaces with alien memory,"relational architecture aims to transform “the master narratives of a specific building by adding and subtracting audiovisual elements to affect it, effect it and re-contextualize it."31
Accordingly, Lozano-Hemmer's relational architecture installations deploy media interventions into existing architectural space precisely as a means of triggering embodied reactions (reactions which, as we shall see, tap into the disembodiment constitutive of embodiment). When these reactions subsequently enter into resonance with the media transformations triggering them, they establish feedback loops in which embodiment and information mutually catalyze one another's ongoing evolution, rendering it a coevolution that perfectly expresses the contemporary stage of the technogenesis of the human.
BODIES IN CODE
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