{"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":126,"pdf_page":139,"physical_index":139,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"75f47dec40da8320babf54fb56d65aa3028d20136b9c88d9ddd07912820ee02c"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"2. BEYOND THE BODY-IMAGE: EMBODYING PSYCHASTHENIA\n\nIn her 1992 book Megalopolis, Celeste Olalquiaga correlates experience in our contemporary technosphere with the psychological and ethological condition of psychasthenia:\n\nDefined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body is confused with represented space. Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond. It does so by camouflaging itself into the milieu.... Psychasthenia helps describe contemporary experience and account for its uneasiness. Urban culture resembles this mimetic condition when it enables a ubiquitous feeling of being in all places while not really being anywhere. Architectural transparency, for example, transforms shopping malls into a continuous window display where the homogeneity of store windows, stairs, elevators, and water fountains causes a perceptual loss, and shoppers are left wandering around in a maze.... Dislocated by this ongoing trompe l’oeil, the body seeks concreteness in the consumption of food and goods, saturating its senses to the maximum.¹7\n\nWith certain adjustments, this account of psychasthenia as a mimetic condition for contemporary perception could perfectly well describe the experience of virtual reality, which also, as we have seen, functions via a dissolution of boundaries between self and environment. Davies has likened the intended experience of her environments to the condition of psychasthenia, noting that she has “deliberately sought to facilitate [the] intermingling, [the] dissolution, of the hard boundaries of the skin ... through the use of semitransparency, by allowing the immersant to effectively see-through, and even more importantly, self-move-through the surfaces of various visual elements\" (email). To the extent that this experience is engineered to effect a \"dissolution of boundaries, the confusion between inside and out, self and space,\" we can say that Davies’ aim is (at least in part) to generate psychasthenia.\n\nIt is crucial, however, that we not overlook the marked differences between Davies' phenomenological embrace of psychasthenia and Olalquiaga's depiction of it as an image-based pathology. Olalquiaga views psychasthenia as the disempowering (because disembodying) result of our contemporary technosphere; Davies seeks to catalyze an experience of psychasthenia as a means to disrupt the Cartesian worldview and to reestablish the embodied basis of all perception, vision included. To appreciate how such a catalysis lies at the heart of Davies work, we must dissociate psychasthenia from the narrow representationalist understanding of it that Olalquiaga and, following in her wake, Elizabeth Grosz, endorse. Indeed, insofar as it provides an alternative to Olalquiaga's reductive conception of psychasthenia as an image-based condition, Davies' work serves to question the basis of efforts by feminist theorists like Grosz and (as we have seen) Gail Weiss to route the correlation of embodiment and technics through the image. As we shall see, it does so in the interest of another, vastly different feminist engagement with virtual reality.\n\nBODIES IN CODE\n\n126","previous_page":125,"next_page":127}