{"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":90,"pdf_page":103,"physical_index":103,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"776f40575e538012e65442c81ed94552b07116b3407dd895e5dd81c6f7c38f69"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"In Worldskin, two divergent contemporary image technologies instantiating two longstanding aesthetic traditions—photography and virtual reality—are pitted against one another. The express intention is to catalyze a jump from the superficial level of the image as a neutralizing “capture” of the world to a deeper level where it forms a trigger for the viewer's active engagement with his or her agency in the world. In this way, as I propose to demonstrate here, Worldskin advances a plea of sorts for a model of technics that would affirm, express, and indeed condition the dissolution of the body-world separation in our world today.\n\nThat this model crucially involves a critique of the ontology of observation as it is technically instantiated in photography—and that such a critique is undeniably a political project—becomes clear when we read Benayoun's description of the work:\n\nArmed with cameras, we make our way through a ... landscape ... scarred by war-demolished buildings, armed men, tanks and artillery, piles of rubble, the wounded and the maimed.... Like so many tourists, we [visit the land of war] with camera in hand. Each of us can take pictures, capture a moment of this world that is wrestling with death. The image thus recorded exists no longer.... We take pictures. First by our aggression, then feeling the pleasure of sharing, we rip the skin off the body of the world. 'The skin becomes a trophy, and our fame grows with the disappearance of the world.... Taking pictures expropriates the intimacy of ... pain while, at the same time, bearing witness to it. This has to do with the status of the image in our process of getting a grasp on this world. The rawest and most brutal realities are reduced to an emotional superficiality in our perception. Acquisition, evaluation and understanding of the world constitute a process of capturing it. Capturing means making something one's own; and once it is in one's possession, that thing can no longer be taken by another.... The picture neutralizes the content. Media bring everything onto one and the same level. Physical memory-paper, for example, is the door that remains open to a certain kind of forgetting. We interpose the lens (“objectif\" in French) between ourselves and the world. We protect ourselves from the responsibility of acting. One \"takes\" the picture, and the world \"proffers\" itself as a theatrical event.... The world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone is involved in its disappearance. The collective unveiling becomes a personal pleasure, the object of fetishistic satisfaction. We keep to ourselves what we have seen (or rather, the traces of what we have seen). To possess a printed vestige, to possess the image inherent in this is the paradox of the virtual, which is better suited to the glorification of the ephemeral.27\n\nBODIES IN CODE\n\n90","previous_page":89,"next_page":91}