---
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: 120
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53?start=120&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=120&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=110&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=130&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=120 | PRINTED_PAGE=107

embodying virtual reality

tactility and self-movement in the work of char davies

VR is a literal enactment of Cartesian ontology, cocooning a person as an isolated subject within a field of sensations and claiming that everything is there, presented to the subject.

Richard Coyne

The possession of a body in space, itself part of the space to be apprehended, and that body capable of self-motion in counterplay with other bodies, is the precondition for a vision of the world.

Hans Jonas

You are floating inside an abstract lattice not unlike the skeletal wireframe models familiar from three-dimensional graphics. You have no visible body at all in the space in front of you, but hear a soundscape of human voices swirling around you as you navigate forward and backward by leaning your body accordingly. Soon the Cartesian gridlines melt away as a forest clearing centering around a great old oak tree appears. Everything in your visual field seems to be constructed of light: branches, trunks, leaves shimmer with a strange luminescence, while in the distance there appears a river of dancing lights. Leaning your body forward, you move toward the boundary of the clearing and pass into another forest zone. You are now enfolded in a play of light and shadow, as leaves phase imperceptibly into darkened blotches and then phase back again, in what seems like a rhythmic perpetuity. Exhaling deeply causes you to sink down through the soil as you follow a stream of tiny lights illuminating the roots of the oak tree.

107

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=121 | PRINTED_PAGE=108

Soon you sink into an underworld of glowing red rocks that form a deep, luminous cavern beneath the earth. Exhaling again, you sink still further, encountering scrolling walls of green alphanumeric characters that (you will later learn) reproduce the 20,000 some lines of code upon which the world you are in is built. Longing for the vivid images above, you take in a deep breath and hold it, waiting to ascend. After passing once again through the clearing, you enter another world of text, encountering quotations from philosophical and literary sources that seem to bear directly on your experience. "By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities," one passage informs you, "one enters into communications with a space that is psychically innovating .. we do not change place, we change our Nature."i

BODIES IN CODE

108

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=122 | PRINTED_PAGE=109

The attention you have been lending to your breathing makes you feel angelic and fleshy: while you float dreamlike, unencumbered by the drag of gravity, your actions are syncopated with your breathing in a way that makes your bodily presence palpable, insistent. Meanwhile, you find yourself floating back down to the clearing, no longer driven to explore, but meditative, content simply to float wherever your bodily leaning and breathing patterns will take you. Now acclimated to the new sensorimotor demands of this interactional domain, you can effortlessly explore the different spaces contained in this world, choosing to follow the river of lights as if swept along by a swarm of fireflies or, alternately, to step into the big oak tree and see its blood-red sap coursing around you or, again, to dive into a pool of shimmering water and let yourself sink into its engulfing embrace.

Yet just at that point when you begin to see the fuzzy pixelated organic forms around you morph into a field of resonant luminosity, you are suddenly thrust outside the world, looking upon what now appears as a gray, bean-shaped blob floating against an empty background. When you realize that you cannot return, you are flooded with a combination of resignation and melancholy which soon gives way to a sense of awe, to a wonder that you have somehow lived the immaterial

If your experience is anything like that of the many thousands of other "immersants," you will feel that you have lived through sonething vastly different from what normal life brings and also quite different from what other forms of "virtual reality" afford or, at least, what you imagined them to afford. Here you have lived in harmony with a virtual lifeworld and have felt the dissolution of the hard boundary of the skin that, in ordinary experience and most certainly in most forms of virtual experience, so insistently prevents fluid interchange with the surrounding space. You have let your visual faculty become subordinate as you gained confidence in maneuvering with body movement and breathing. Perhaps most strikingly, you have let the experience of spatial navigation penetrate into your body via the immediately felt physiological modifications produced by the inhalation and exhalation that triggered your vertical movement as well as the bodily leaning that triggered your horizontal movement.i

As several commentators have pointed out, the work just described— Char Davies' Osmose (1995)—is highly atypical for what currently goes under the rubric "virtual reality art."ii Davies' work eschews many of the familiar trappings of computer-based worlds, virtual reality, and game environments, including the primacy normally accorded to detached vision, the use of a joystick or other manipulable navigational tool, the orientation toward a goal, and the hard-edged simulation of a perspectival space. What results is a tactile aesthetics that, as Jennifer Fisher puts it, strives to “deepen the sense of subjective embodiment" by foregrounding the function of bodily modes of experience. “At a time when much VR technology effects a visual dominance and corporeal abstraction, Fisher continues, Davies' solicitation of tactility “both implicates and creates anembodied' spectator."1

EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY

109

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=123 | PRINTED_PAGE=110

Davies' Osmose is, in the words of another commentator, “the first major immersive VR environment toresist' simulation of perspectival space and to attempt to heal the rift between vision and body inherent in conventional virtual reality."² Davies herself is credited, by no less an authority than (VMRL inventor) Mark Pesce, with “redefin[ing] our place in cyberspace and mak[ing] the virtual world seem more human than our own."³ Davies likens her work's difference from more traditional VR environments to the difference between illustration and evocation: "When art evokes," she says, “it's drawing on the experiences of the user. It becomes interactive on a much more subtle level. To me, Osmose looks at immersive space as a place where we can explore what it means to be embodied conscious beings."4

My aim in this chapter is to draw out further what makes Davies' art atypical, if not in fact unique, for work that invests in the concrete technology of virtual reality as a means of constituting (one kind of) bodyin-code. By purposely deploying low resolution in the HMD, Davies work actively counters the conventional VR emphasis on vision: indeed, as we shall see, her work compels the viewer-participant to reconfigure her sensory economy, such that (at the very least) vision becomes thoroughly permeated by tactility and proprioception. In the process, Davies successfully deploys the virtual reality interface toward an end—contemplative engagement—that moves it away from the instrumentalism associated with it (and for good reason, as we have seen) by prescient skeptics like Myron Krueger. Indeed, if Davies thus goes as far as possible, within the VR interface, in rendering irrelevant those elements that make it cumbersome and artificial, that is because she deploys VR toward an end that is thoroughly noninstrumental, meaning that it entirely eschews the interface with the physical world seemingly constitutive of today's mixed reality aesthetic. Yet, if Davies' work nonetheless supports the maxim that all VR is mixed reality, that is because it exposes the underlying constitution of the experience of the virtual in embodiment and, more specifically, in proprioception and tactility.

BODIES IN CODE

110

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=124 | PRINTED_PAGE=111

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.

For 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.

To 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.

EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY

111

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=125 | PRINTED_PAGE=112

In a second section, I shall widen the divide separating a tactile aesthetic from a visual one by returning to the topic of the body image. Specifically, I shall enlist Davies' work in a continuing critique of the reduction of bodily experience—here, paradigmatically, of the body's fluid interface with space——to the body image. Insofar as it opens a nonrepresentational and nonvisual affective and proprioceptive experience of the body, Davies' work once again brings to material fruition research in science and philosophy—in this case, by illustrating concretely how the living body exceeds the boundaries of the skin and encompasses parts of the environment.

For this reason, I argue that Davies' work expands the concept of worldskin" in a way that addresses the complexity of our embodied experience of coupling to the contemporary technosphere. Specifically her work deploys the confusion of self and space constitutive of the condition of “psychasthenia" in a way that counters its contemporary cultural currency as a simulational or image-based "disorder"iv; accordingly, in Osmose, this confusion becomes the catalyst for a reworking of the correlation between bodily and environmental space—a reworking that teaches us how to orient ourselves without needing to see ourselves (or to let the gaze of the other see us) as a point in space. Far from illustrating a confusion of the organism with the representations that surround it, the process triggered by Davies' work spurs a fluid, ongoing, and active interchange with the environment that has the effect of "transcending" the limited (representational) function of the "body schema" (its reduction to the body image). In this way, Davies'work concretely embodies the capacity of technics to facilitate an experience of the “indivision" of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty discovers at the heart of Being and that our previous discussion has now associated with the “originary" technicity (the écart) of primordial tactility.

BODIES IN CODE

112

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=126 | PRINTED_PAGE=113

1. THE PRIMACY OF SELF-MOVEMENT IN CONFERRING REALITY ON PERCEPTION

The rhetoric associated with virtual reality clearly conveys its privileging of the visual register of perception. More than a mere bias of a popular culture that constantly barrages us with the promise of perfect simulation and the lure of disembodied existence, this privileging informs the research aims of scientists interested in virtual reality technology."The screen is the window through which one sees a virtual world," says VR pioneer Ivan Sutherland."The challenge is to make that world look real."6 Researcher Frank Biocca concurs, noting that "the long-term developmental goal of the technology is nothing short of an attempt ... to fool eye and mind into seeing ... worlds that are not and never can be." Our aim, Biocca continues, is to transform “[a]n array of light on a visual display [into] a lush landscape in the mind of the viewer."7

This privilege accorded the visual has so thoroughly seeped into the practical design of virtual environments (VEs) by scientists, artists, and game designers that it might be said to dictate a kind of de facto standard: hard-edged objects and shapes, distinct spatial demarcations (e.g. into rooms or subworlds), vivid, surreal image quality, and perhaps most centrally, the deployment of a familiar infrastructural Cartesian grid. Conjure up your mental image of virtual reality. What does it present if not some version of this visually optimized, sanitized space? Having by now been streamed and restreamed through all available cultural channels (movies being, perhaps, the most effective one), this standard picture has become so ubiquitous that most of us would not even think of questioning it.

However, rather than stemming from some necessity inherent in the technological interface or even in the makeup of our perceptual apparatus, this visual bias is, in fact, a complex artifact related to the motivating desires and scientific backgrounds of VR developers (largely male engineers) and, more generally, to the pervasive ocularcentrism of Western culture. In a recent study of space, identity, and embodiment in virtual reality, Ken Hillis has criticized the ocularcentrism characteristic of VR research by exposing the false promise of a multisensory interface with informational worlds. As he sees it, this rhetoric masks an underlying investment in the function of vision:

EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY

113

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=127 | PRINTED_PAGE=114

Suggestions that VR's real promise is a corroboration among the senses fail to consider the disjuncture between subordination and corroboration. Subordination to the visual really points to the coordination (and domination) by the visual of our other bodily faculties and senses. VR privileges sight, and other senses play a subordinate role to it. (Hillis, xxii, emphasis added)

To a great extent this claim is borne out by the fact that all branches of VR research currently employ some kind of HMD as a means of empowering vision.

Hillis traces this overvaluation of the visual on the part of VR researchers to the seminal influence of the work of perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson. Throughout his career, Gibson sought to theorize the way we directly perceive aspects of the world by picking up information from what he calls the ambient light.8 As Jeremy Campbell explains:

Gibson held that all the information needed for perception ... is present in the structure of the light as it is reflected from objects and events in space. The objects and events give the light its specific organization as it reaches the eye. An observer is immersed, drenched in this information, and the perceptual system of the brain is attuned to pick up certain aspects of it, either by means of innate neural circuits or by the fine discrimination which comes with experience.9

As Hillis sees it, this notion of direct perception, together with the correlative notion that there are perceptual invariants immediately observable in the visual field, explains Gibson's impact among the VR research community.' Researchers saw in Gibson's work a mechanism for transferring perceptual experience characteristic of "real-world" perception to new, artificial environments: if real-world perceptual experience was grounded in biologically innate capacities to see perceptual invariants in the ambient light, all that would be necessary to carry perception into artificial environments would be to reproduce such perceptual invariants in the virtual domain.vi

One important facet of the complex influence of Gibson's work on VR research concerns Gibson's early theory of "texture-gradient mapping" which, Hillis suggests, furnished a model for the mapping of perceptual invariance" onto virtual environments (Hillis, 15; see also 125). According to Gibson, we directly perceive distance insofar as we detect the differences in texture gradient of objects located at different distances from us. Thus, we recognize the distance of an object from its texture relative to other objects within our visual field: the finer the texture is, the closer it is to us; the denser the texture is, the more distant it is. The important point here is that texture gradient does not define a cue that our brains employ in processing what we have seen, but is a spatial property of the environment itself. Once again, Campbell explains why:

BODIES IN CODE

114

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=128 | PRINTED_PAGE=115

For Gibson, invariants in the structure of light reaching the eye correspond to the stable features of the real world: the surfaces and edges of objects, ... the texture of the ground that grows more dense with distance. In spite of the fact that the image of an object on the retina may shrink in size as it recedes, the image is invariant with respect to the texture of its surroundings. (205)

No less than the privileging of hard-edged surfaces and objects, the liberal deployment of textural surfaces in VEs testifies to the effort to capitalize on Gibson's theory; indeed, both cases betray the same underlying logic: that building such visual invariants into artificial environments will function to attract the attention of our evolutionarily-attuned brains.

In his criticism of this strategy, Hillis accuses VR researchers of, in effect, misapplying Gibson's theory. Although innate perceptual invariants like texture gradients function, within Gibson's theory, as enabling constraints on how we perceive the environment, carried over into VEs they become the mechanism for an unhindered and limitless potential for visual interface with any environment imaginable (and, no doubt, many not yet imaginable). It is as if the simple presence of icons or representations of perceptual invariants (hard edges, texture gradients) within an environment were enough to transform it into a world not simply visually apprehensible to us, but rather one in which we can feel at home. What such logic ignores is the deep correlation of our visual system with other, nonvisual perceptual systems—a correlation that is, incidentally, foregrounded at each stage of Gibson's career.vii

If perceptual invariants do in fact exist and if they serve to inform us about the world, they do so only in conjunction with the panoply of perceptual processes constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. This means that the appropriation of Gibson does not pay sufficient heed to the evolutionary basis of his theory. Thus, although VR technology might well “permit users to see like birds" (or like anything whatsoever), a VE constructed on the basis of perceptual invariants “may confuse users precisely because they have not been hardwired' by evolution to fly like birds" (130). In sum: whereas Gibson's theory of perception (including the role played by perceptual invariants) is a holist one that encompasses (and is constrained by) the range of perceptual processes constitutive of our evolutionarily robust embodied being, its deployment in VE design is piecemeal and premised on an unthematized, and I think, wholly implausible, hope that vision can by itself reconstitute the richness of human perceptual function.

EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY

115

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=129 | PRINTED_PAGE=116

Another way to make this same objection is to focus somewhat differently on the concrete material difficulties involved in creating successful—that is, compelling—virtual environments. As Wann and Rushton point out, the limitless potential of the imagination to construct rich virtual environments is contravened by the reality of storage and computational limitations. The Gibson-inspired researchers believe they can “solve" these difficulties through texture-gradient mapping; by building in “objective" elements that simply transcribe perceptually invariant elements of the “real" world into VEs, they think they can mobilize, through visual stimulation alone, the perceptual modalities for which we have been evolutionarily hardwired.viii

In their interpretation of the storage and computational limitations necessarily encountered in designing VEs, Wann and Rushton outline a very different position. For them, the existence of such limitations immediately introduces a wedge or gap between “real-world" perception and perception in virtual environments that bears directly on the misapplication of Gibson just discussed. For these researchers, the presupposition that perception (including visual perception) involves the full panoply of perceptual systems—the presupposition informing Gibson's theory—simply cannot be carried over to perception in VEs. As a consequence, whereas perception in “natural settings” can be said to be “veridical" (i.e., indicative of properties of the environment), the principle informing the creation of virtual environments is, of necessity deception." Wann and Rushton explain:

It is technically impossible to present an observer with a VE that has coherence across the perceptual domains (e.g., for vision and vestibular stimulation) ... [Consequently,] the emphasis has to be on presenting visual displays that are salient enough to induce the required percept and to establish what other sensory conditions may be necessary to maintain that illusion.10

What Wann and Rushton foreground here is the necessity, in creating compelling VEs, to rely on the embodied subject's response to the stimuli presented as what generates the effect of "reality." Some degree of corroboration among different sensory registers is always involved in perception; however, within VEs, this corroboration plays an especially important function insofar as it constitutes the primary vehicle for overcoming effects of storage and computational limitations— effects that threaten to compromise the desired sense of immersion.

BODIES IN CODE

116

下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53.md?start=130&limit=10)