{"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":158,"pdf_page":171,"physical_index":171,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"43390e28034ad0fe94b6d6e5e367897af8a6b0adb2b5cd5180dd04261333cf5b"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Piper is perhaps the ideal figure for exploring the confrontation of new media technology and race theory. Not only has his artistic production coevolved with race theory and politics, taking inspiration from it and inspiring it in turn, but also his recent work acquires much of its resonance from its success at holding together the contradictions of racial identity, as well as those of identity. This is why Piper's critical engagement with race and media exemplifies the radical promise of new media. Indeed, his practice is perhaps most distinctive in its success at exposing and capitalizing on the intrinsic duality of technologies of containment and control like surveillance and cyberspace. Without disregarding the primary deployment of these technologies to target minority bodies—and indeed, by thinking their logic through to the limit—Piper attempts to make them available for postidentitarian identification on the basis of the singularity or impropriety common to us all.\n\nPiper's complex project—which combines a gallery installation, a CD-ROM, and a Website and integrates much of his work from the mid 80s onxix—bears vivid witness to the role that technology plays as the facilitator for the politicization of affect, at least or especially when it is a question of race and ethnicity. Put bluntly, new media technology allows for a certain despecification of Piper's critical engagement with racial stereotypes and the paradoxical invisibility of the black (male) body. This despecification, in turn, allows for an opening up and complexification of the mode of address of his work. In an insightful essay on the project, Kobena Mercer pinpoints the operative mechanism for this technically facilitated despecification, arguing that Piper's turn to the digital allows him to treat the body as the focal site for a \"doublevoicing\" of the \"confrontational\" and the \"invitational,\" a site where resistance is always contaminated by identification, where activism is complicated by emotion.xx,10\n\nExtending this analysis, I would suggest that Piper's concrete engagement with technology as a site of dedifferentiation and universality must be understood in the dual mode of confrontation and invitation. The result is a significant complexification: not only is the address to black subjects nuanced in a way that routes self-perception through perception by the other (that is, through the surveillant and/or consumerist gaze),xxi but also the address is opened in an unprecedented way to nonblack, nonminority white subjects. In short, not until Piper deploys the allegedly universal technologies of surveillance and cyberspace can his work truly address a white audience (and thus accomplish his goal, formulated in the early 90s, of liberating address from concerns of identityxii). Accordingly, if Relocating the Remains can be said to culminate Piper's shift to a more nuanced and dialogic deployment of the “cut and mix” aesthetic, this is because it brings to fruition the universalizing of address that was always implicitly at issue in his turn to multimedia technologies.\n\nBODIES IN CODE\n\n158","previous_page":157,"next_page":159}