--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Bodies in code interfaces with digital media" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "0415970164" library_document_id: "4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53" source_sha256: "c7dd782315f0582c703a8695595091b9a2eede19efc8ae2390ddcfd3c4e4b70c" pdf_physical_page_count: 348 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 110 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53?start=110&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=110&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=100&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=120&limit=10" --- # Bodies in code interfaces with digital media > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=110 | PRINTED_PAGE=97 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. BODIES IN CODE 97 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=111 | PRINTED_PAGE=98 As a contribution to Lozano-Hemmer's larger project of producing a new collective individuation of embodiment, Re:Positioning Fear takes the first step of disembodying the individual body, thus opening the possibility for a break from the prosthetic model of technics. This is precisely why Lozano-Hemmer insists that “the shadow is not an avatar, an agent, nor an alias of the participant's body” but rather “projected darkness, a play of geometries, a disembodied bodypart." As a negation of the body's static positivity, the shadow does not so much act in its stead as open its potential to be otherwise, thereby transforming it into "a site of telematic activity." This material transformation of the body is what, for Lozano-Hemmer, serves to differentiate relational architecture in general from its virtual counterpart: Virtual buildings are data constructs that strive for realism, asking the participant to "suspend disbelief" and “play along" with the environment; relational buildings, on the other hand, are real buildings pretending to be something other than themselves, masquerading as that which they might become, asking participants to "suspend faith" and probe, interact and experiment with the false construct. Virtual architecture tends to miniaturize buildings to the participant's scale, for example through VR peripherals such as HMDs or CAVEs, while relational architecture amplifies the participant to the building's scale, or emphasizes the relationship between urban and personal scale. In this sense, virtual architecture dematerializes the body, while relational architecture dematerializes the environment. (“Relational Architecture") On this understanding, virtual architecture makes common cause with the model of technics as prosthetics: because it retains the scale of the individual body, it simply cannot overcome the division between body and world except through the illusion of simulation; in Lozano-Hemmer's vision, this illusion serves to dematerialize the body. By contrast, relational architecture undoes this division and promotes “indivision" precisely by dematerializing the environment, by transforming it into a cocreation of embodiment and information, of bodily performance extended through information and of information embodied in such extension. What is thereby promoted is a model of technics as medium-for-individuation. BODIES IN CODE 98 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=112 | PRINTED_PAGE=99 This model of technics foregrounds the complementarity of the two forms of individuation at issue in Simondon's conceptualization and in Lozano-Hemmer's relational works: the individuation of the (human) individual and collective individuation. The latter—specifically, the form that Simondon calls "transindividuation"—allows us to grasp how a certain disembodiment (understood as the individual's constitutive coupling to the preindividual) is a dimension of embodiment, as we have been maintaining for some time now. (In Simondon's parlance, transindividuation would be said to resolve the paradox of the human individual as a form of embodiment that is constitutively disembodied.) It is from the standpoint of transindividuation—an embodiment that is super-individual and also necessarily technical—that the excess of the individual over itself, the excess of its (preindividual) potentiality over its (individual) actuality, can be seen to be a constitutive dimension of its embodiment as an individual. In this respect, transindividuation can be said to be the ultimate expression of the primordial écart. In transindividuation, the originary transduction of embodiment and technicity constitutive of the human comes to yield nothing less than a technical embodiment of the indivision of the flesh, a technically embodied commons in which my body acquires its autonomy only through its participation in a larger process of embodiment. The model of technics as medium-for-individuation thus forms the strict correlate of a view of the human that refuses to divorce technicity from embodiment and that therefore embraces disembodiment as a dimension of embodiment and as a potential for its extension beyond the body. If this model invests the écart constitutive of the human as the operator of human-machine interchange, it thereby gains a vastly expanded space of embodiment capable of encompassing technical extensions of the (human) body no less than concrete materializations of informational potentiality. In this respect, my effort to introduce technics into (indeed, at the very core of) Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh differs fundamentally from Gail Weiss' superficially similar attempt to position the écart as a “space of disincorporation that makes incorporation possible” (120). Insofar as it retains the separability of the body as body, Weiss' conception of technics is fundamentally a prosthetic one, on which technics befall the human from the outside and function merely to extend the scope of its proper embodiment. As what makes the disincorporation of this body possible, the écart opens a spaçe of noncoincidence outside the body (between the body and its outside) rather than an originary noncoincidence (the transduction of embodiment and technicity) within the body That is why, on her account, the écart is the condition that allows "for human beings to interface' with machines, ... to become one with our familiar, mass-produced or even one-of-a-kind' prostheses (e.g., glasses, clothes, artificial limbs, moussed-up hair, cars, watches, etc.)" (120). For Weiss, in sum, the écart names the condition for a prosthetic extension of the already individuated human being; from our Simondon-inspired perspective, by contrast, the écart expresses the originary technicity of the human, the condition that has now, with today's digital technologies, made real the co-individuation of technics and embodiment in the form of technically facilitated transindividuation. BODIES IN CODE 99 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=113 | PRINTED_PAGE=100 Taking up the accomplishment of Re:Positioning Fear (the disembodying of the individual body), Lozano-Hemmer's Body Movies—Relational Architecture 6 (2001) constitutes the artist's attempt to produce a transindividuation through technical disembodiment and subsequent reembodiment on a transformed scale and via an informational circuit (see Figure 1.10). Like the earlier work, Body Movies uses a tele-absence interface—namely, the projection of shadows cast by participants' bodies—to which it adds some new elements. These include the capacity for simultaneous, collective, indeed collaborative, participation; a role for body images; and a more direct assault on the culture industry and its domination via the circulation of mass illusion. The work, which played from August 31 to September 23, 2001, in the Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam, consisted of the projection of over one thousand prerecorded portraits (captured in Rotterdam, Madrid, Mexico, and Montréal) onto the façade of the Pathé Cinema building. Powerful xenon lights placed at floor level totally washed the images out except when they were blocked by passersby whose bodies cast shadows of variable size (from 2 to 22 m high, depending on how proximate they were to the light sources) onto the façade, thereby rendering visible the otherwise hidden images. The locations of the shadows were continuously monitored in real time by a camera-based tracking system and, each time the shadows matched all the portraits in a given scene, the computer automatically updated the scene with a new set of portraits. In his description of the work, Lozano-Hemmer stresses the way in which Body Movies encourages participants to embody the massive portraits (by superposing their shadows on them) only to frustrate this attempt by immediately replacing the images once they are so embodied. Linking this paradoxical structure to his effort to "introducealien memory' as an urban catalyst," Lozano-Hemmer unequivocally characterizes the interactional space of the installation as a space in which the body “does not belong"—that is, as a space that cannot be inhabited by means of the body image, of the body as an image, and of the image as the medium of the commonality between bodies, intercorporeity.³4 More clearly than in Re:Positioning Fear, the disembodiment of the body is carried out via a performative critique of the superficiality of the body image. Still, as was the case in the earlier work, what remains instrumental in the interface is the role of the shadow as a negation of the body's positivity, as a disembodied anti-image of the body, which can achieve agency within the informationally energized space of the installation solely because and insofar as it disembodies the individuated body. BODIES IN CODE 100 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=114 | PRINTED_PAGE=101 In contrast to Re:Positioning Fear, however, this disembodiment is here deployed in the service of a broader aesthetic aim—that of creating the possibility for a form of communion rooted in a technically facilitated kinesthetic space, a technically generated space of intercorporeity that embodies the indivision ensuing from the dissolution of the corporeal schema. To this end, Body Movies expressly solicits collective participation and, through it, the emergence of unpredictable behaviors. As Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer describe it, Body Movies invited people on the square, up to 50 of them at a time, “to embody different representational narratives," thereby allowing them to create “a collective experience that nonetheless allowed discrete individual participation (Adriaansens and Brower)." BODIES IN CODE 101 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=115 | PRINTED_PAGE=102 What this invitation facilitated can be gauged from the documentation video on Lozano-Hemmer's Website (http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/video/bodymovies.html), which features various games involving disparity of scale and, interestingly enough, wholly unrelated to the prepackaged images highlighted by the various shadows at play. This hints at the work's success at guiding participants away from simple mimetic identification with the body image and toward creative play with their disembodied shadows in this new space of indivision. An experience is thereby facilitated that is entirely unprecedented; in the words of one Dutch participant, there is a possibility for “a strange kind of communication with people you've never met," one where “you're all together but you're also separate" (interview from the video cited earlier). Creating the possibility for such communion—for a truly impersonal communication or, better (following Walter Benjamin), for the "communicability" that underlies and facilitates communication—is the ultimate aim, and the ultimate accomplishment, of Lozano-Hemmer's relational aesthetic. What is truly inspiring about his work is the way that it facilitates communion: namely, through the use of the most advanced configuration of technics and embodiment imaginable, one in which technics is treated as an originary dimension of embodiment and embodiment is understood to be a creation of bodily performance of and through information. "Computers can communicate very efficiently; but they can't engage in communion," notes Candian theater director Robert Lapage. Explaining his own preference for catalyzing “collective experiences rather than using individual interfaces for solitary participation," Lozano-Hemmer reaffirms Lepage's affirmation of communion. For Lozano-Hemmer, what is crucial “is people meeting and sharing an experience," people coming together," and indeed, “coming together in the flesh." If the contemporary phase of our (human) technogenesis makes such physical communion increasingly difficult, it simultaneously opens more radical possibilities for communion. As Lozano-Hemmer's work perfectly illustrates, such possibilities stem from our investment in technics as a means for overcoming the atomic isolation of the body. They give us a chance to live the “indivision"” of body, its immanence to the flesh of the world. BODIES IN CODE 102 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=116 | PRINTED_PAGE=103 In sum: By glimpsing and helping us to glimpse what such living might be, Lozano-Hemmer's relational works make good the promise, contained" in the primordial écart, for a form of life—transindividuation—that exploits the originary indifferentiation of embodiment and technicity to the point at which human technogenesis parts company with the organic (human) body. It does so, however, without losing its constitutive concern for the human as a form of the living. BODIES IN CODE 103 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=117 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=118 | PRINTED_PAGE=105 locating the virtual in contemporary culture PART 105 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=119 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=120&limit=10)