Even though the IRC sessions could have been projected on the arsenal by covering most of the façade, an interface was designed to prevent all of the text from being visible at one time. The interface is called "tele-absence" and it consists of an “active" shadow that reveals the text on the building. To read the building, a participant standing in front of it must wear a small wireless sensor and walk around the courtyard. As he or she walks, two pigi 7kW Xenon light sources track his or her position and project his or her shadow onto the façade of the Zeughaus. By using robotic lighting control, the shadows were focused dynamically so that regardless of the participant's proximity to the lamps the shadows were always crisp and well defined. The final effect was a “dynamic stencil" whereby the shadow of the participant was an active architectural element which "revealed" the IRC texts that appeared to be within the building, as though the shadow was a cutout or an x-ray of the building. (“Re: Positioning Fear")
Defined as "the technological acknowledgement of the impossibility of self transmission ... the celebration of where and when the body is not" (“Re:Positioning Fear"), tele-absence is less a simple disembodiment of the self-present human body than it is its re-embodiment in different, expanded form—namely, as an amplified shadow that is simultaneously the trigger for the dynamic informatization of a static physical building In his commentary on the work, Brian Massumi astutely discerns the complexity of Lozano-Hemmer's dance with (dis)embodiment:
If you think of the shadow ... as casting “absence" as a potential next action, ... the “where and when the body is not” becomes “where the body may relay," and "the impossibility of self transmission" becomes a reminder that every stretch of the body is not just a displacement of it but a becoming. A body cannot transmit itself. But it can project its vitality. Its activity may take on a new dimension.
Massumi's perspective here perfectly captures the indifferentiation of absence and presence, of embodiment and disembodiment, that characterizes human life in the informational age: "Seen in this way," he continues, “tele-absence' is perhaps not so different from teleembodyment, the term relayed into in later work."33
Given my aim of introducing technics into Merleau-Ponty's final phenomenology, it is hardly incidental that Lozano-Hemmer's tele-absent extension of embodiment (and its qualified embrace of disembodiment) breaks with the model of prosthetics which, as we have seen, informs (and compromises) Merleau-Ponty's explicit thinking of technics. Lozano-Hemmer's work makes clear that such a model simply cannot forego privileging the individual body and thus cannot tap the potential of technics to support “alien" forms of embodiment that do not coincide with the body and its potential prosthetic extensions.
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