{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":111,"pdf_page":124,"physical_index":124,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"437add93fc79a4d73a8f9044a34cafa87911be8631b0b109b9db5bf52c71b790"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Davies' explicit desire to create an interface to the immaterial can be understood as a fulfillment of a hypothesis: to wit, that disenabling sensory stimulation from a richly material environment would lay bare the embodied processing that serves to confer reality on experience. In a recent commentary, Davies stresses the \"hands-free and hands-off\" emphasis of her work in a way that perfectly illustrates this retooling of the VR interface into a kind of laboratory for exploring embodiment: in perfect resonance with the movement from actual tactile experience to the embodied technicity of primordial tactility, Davies describes her aim to be that of catalyzing \"the interior kinesthetic and proprioceptive experience of being a lived body in space, of self-movement through space, of being enveloped by space\" (email to author). She further emphasizes her deliberate choice “not to involve haptic perception,\" meaning \"handson or literal touching, skin to skin, surface to surface,\" so that she could catalyze an experience akin to the interlacing described by Merleau-Ponty—the interlacing “of one's own bodily surface with the visible surfaces of the other(s) ... even though in a virtual environment these are immaterial.\" As a laboratory for testing the capacity of embodiment to generate reality, Davies' work thus restores virtuality as a dimension of embodied life, as a technicity within the living rather than a (mere) technical artifact that affects life from the outside.\n\nFor this reason, Davies' Osmose furnishes an exemplary instance of one kind of “body-in-code\": an experience of embodiment that is specifically engineered to breathe life into the immaterial. As she puts it, her environments are designed to foreground the kinesthetic and proprioceptive dimensions of bodily self-movement “in order to enable a fuller (more real) experience of the virtual realm, doing so in such a way that they temporarily deautomate habitual perception and facilitate a 'seeing freshly.\" Osmose creates a body-in-code by harnessing embodied life in the service of conferring reality on the immaterial.\n\nTo explore Char Davies' work as a catalyst for the constitution of (one kind of) body-in-code, I shall undertake two relatively autonomous explorations, each of which will make a claim for the centrality of tactility in perception generally and for its specific function within the virtual reality interface. In a first section, I shall build up to an examination of how Davies' work deploys the role of tactility and proprioception in a way that effectively counters the overemphasis on vision on the part of scientists and artists working in virtual reality. Of particular interest will be the resonance between this deployment and philosophical and especially scientific work that supports our preceding claims concerning the emergence of vision from touch. This resonance will serve to underwrite a neo-Bergsonist claim that virtual reality realizes an aesthetic function insofar as it couples new immaterial domains of perception with the “reality\"-conferring experience of touch (or what Bergson calls affection\").⁵ In this way, Davies' work simply makes explicit something that forms a crucial dimension in every successful VR simulation: the role played by proprioception and tactility in generating what seems to be an exclusively visual—that is, virtual—simulation.\n\nEMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY\n\n111","previous_page":110,"next_page":112}