Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

preface

Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media forms the middle volume of what I now conceive to be a trilogy devoted to new media as the contemporary phase of human technogenesis (coevolution of the human with technics). This book follows New Philosophy for New Media, in which I make a case for the crucial role of embodied framing in the production of images out of information, and precedes The Politics of Presencing, in which I will position new media as a source for the technical contamination of embodied time consciousness. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media focuses specifically on embodiment, exploring it for itself. In the pages that follow, I thus turn directly to the most developed phenomenology of the body—that of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty—to discover technics where its developer did not see it: namely, as a correlate of the protosensory, infraempirical functioning of tactility that, as Merleau-Ponty's project advances, becomes increasingly fundamental.

My explicit aim is to show how Merleau-Ponty's final ontology of the flesh, with its postulation of a fundamental indifference between body and world, requires a technics—a theory of the originary technicity of the human. Because the human is essentially a being distributed into nonoverlapping sensory interfaces with the world, it is characterized by a certain “gap” or “divide"—by what Merleau-Ponty calls an écart. As I show, the most primordial form of this écart is the transduction between embodiment and specularity, the transduction that informs the emergence of the visual from primordial tactility. This transduction (a relation that is primary with respect to its terms) is an instance (indeed, it is the protoinstance) of the inherence of technics within embodied life. Accordingly, technicity, understood in its broadest sense as a relation to exteriority, as exteriorization, is not and cannot be something merely added on to some “natural” core of embodied life.

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Rather, it must be understood to be a constitutive dimension of embodiment from the start.

As was the case with New Philosophy for New Media, I have benefited from the thought-catalyzing work of a diverse host of contemporary artists whose varied use of digital media has pointed the way toward an introjection of technics into embodiment. For me, new media art has helped to clarify the stakes of thinking technics in relation to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. As an aesthetic mediation of digital technology, it has introduced technical dimensions of embodiment literally unimaginable to this philosopher, and indeed unimaginable to any philosopher writing and thinking in the middle of the twentieth century. Accordingly, in the long first section devoted to the transduction of technics and embodiment, I have endeavored to capture the crucial role played by art in my thinking by devoting a series of concrete analyses to specific artworks. My hope is that these analyses will counterbalance and enliven the more theoretical discussions of embodiment, specularity, intercorporeity, and indivision of the flesh that they punctuate.

In contrast, the focused analyses in Part II are offered as exemplary instances of “bodies in code," a term designating embodiment as it is necessarily distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics. Each of the topics explored here—nonocularcentric virtual environments, racial stereotyping in the context of the digital commons, the architecture of infospace, and the deformation of the contemporary novel by nonliterary media—presents a singular process through which embodiment is actively produced in conjunction with flexible new media artifacts.

My hope is that Bodies in Code will help remind us of the vital and indispensable role played by embodiment in any human experience, even that of “virtual reality” and, more generally, the virtual in the manifold forms in which it appears in our contemporary culture. With the fading of the hype surrounding virtual reality 10 years ago, we are now in a perfect position to analyze the deep correlation between embodiment and virtuality and also to take stock of how much the virtual has been absorbed into everyday life.

I wager here that this changed perspective indicates an acceptance of, or at least a readiness to accept, the inherence of the virtual within human life as an embodied form of the living. Accordingly, as I seek to affirm here, the virtual is by no means limited to contemporary digital technologies (even if it has a certain elective affinity with the digital), but rather stretches back to the proto-origin of the human. Once it is understood in this way, the conjunction of the virtual with the powerful technologies of the digital computer can then be seen to furnish a rich source for experimentation with and expansion of the scope of human embodiment.

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I wish to thank the following journals for permission to reprint material that appeared in earlier versions: Critical Matrix, which published an earlier version of Chapter 2 (Fall 2001); Sub-Stance, which published a shortened, earlier version of Chapter 3 (2004); Configurations, which published an earlier version of Chapter 4 (Spring 2002); and Contemporary Literature, which published an earlier version of Chapter 5 (Winter 2004). I wish to thank the artists for permission to reproduce images of their work and, more importantly, for creating the work in the first place.

I owe thanks to an innumerable number of friends, colleagues, and students, whose insights, criticisms, and comments have shaped my thinking about new media and challenged me to think beyond the point at which my own proclivities would have kept me.

I remain especially grateful to my wonderful family—Wilson, Michael, and Mimi—whose dedication allowed me time to work when I needed it most and whose love kept me motivated to continue.

I dedicate this book to my mother, Dr. Yvonne Hansen, whose speculative instinct clearly informs (epiphylogenetically or otherwise) my own.

Mark Hansen

PREFACE

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Introduction

From the Image to the Power of Imaging: Virtual Reality and the "Originary" Specularity of Embodiment

1. ALL REALITY IS MIXED REALITY

According to a recent article in The New York Times, the (near) future of television will witness a triumphant conquest of virtual reality, a realm of experience that, with its cumbersome gear and prohibitive costs, we have grown accustomed to considering as distinct from normal perceptual reality.¹ Though we “see the world in three dimensions," the article notes, “throughout most of history, we've only been able to depict it in two." While this Achilles heel of representationalism has long inspired experiments involving perceptual trickery—and indeed might be credited as inspiration for an entire tradition in Western art—only in the past half century has scientific and artistic attention focused on the total simulation of perceptual reality, on the projection of images in three dimensions. The fruit of this attention, however, has recently undergone a minor revolution, as the article explains:

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Until recently no one had come up with a better solution to this problem than goofy eyewear. When Rover sent back images from Mars, NASA scientists studied them wearing much the same glasses that audiences in 50s movie palaces donned to watch "It Came from Outer Space." Within the realms of industry, that's been changing, as what's known as stereoscopic imaging has become a big business involving everyone from drug researchers doing molecular mapping to car designers building next year's SUV.... the ever-evolving high-tech revolution is finally moving 3-D entertainment to the next stage.

Stereoscopic imaging, the article goes on to explain, generates “natural three dimension" using a principle called “multiplexing." Multiplexing does for three-dimensional perception what cinema and video did for two-dimensional perception: by delivering 300 images per second (30 images a second from ten different angles), it adds a stereoscopic or depth dimension to the illusion of motion generated by its technological precursors. With the ever increasing speed of home entertainment devices, delivery of three-dimensional content has now become practicable, even if its realization seems to loom fairly far out on the horizon.

What is particularly interesting about this story—at least for my purposes here-is its congruity with the more specific technical paradigm emerging from recent virtual reality research and art experimentation: the paradigm (to borrow a term from artists Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss) of “mixed reality." Having tired of the clichés of disembodied transcendence as well as the glacial pace of progress in headmounted-display and other interface technology, today's artists and engineers envision a fluid interpenetration of realms. Central in this reimagining of VR as a mixed reality stage is a certain specification of the virtual. No longer a wholly distinct, if largely amorphous realm with rules all its own, the virtual now denotes a “space full of information' that can be “activated, revealed, reorganized and recombined, added to and transformed as the user navigates ... real space."2

What comes to the fore in this reimagining is the central role played by the body in the interface to the virtual. With the convergence of physical and virtual spaces informing today's corporate and entertainment environments, researchers and artists have come to recognize that motor activity—not representationalist verisimilitude—holds the key to fluid and functional crossings between virtual and physical realms. In what amounts to a position statement for the mixed reality movement as a whole, Fleischmann and Strauss speak of "turning the theory on its head that man is losing his body to technology”; as they see it, “the interactive media are supporting the multisensory mechanisms of the body and are thus extending man's space for play and action" (cited in Grau, 219).

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To be sure, this recognition of the primacy of embodied motor activity simply ratifies on a vastly broader scale the position of early VR pioneers like Myron Krueger and of cutting-edge perception researchers like Paul Bach y Rita, who insist on the poverty of our ocularcentric metaphysical tradition and its representationalist aesthetics.i From the standpoint opened up by these and like-minded artists and engineers, what is truly novel and promising about contemporary consumer electronics is not the possibility they open for creating ever more immersive illusory spaces, but rather the expanded scope they accord embodied human agency.

The massive increases in processing speeds ushering in today's microcomputing revolution thus serve less to revitalize the dream of perfect simulation than to underwrite a more expansive and fluid functional interpenetration of physical and virtual spaces. Although today's venture capitalist is inclined to reference the “evolution [of humanity] toward ever more sophisticated representations of reality,"i for a media artist like Myron Krueger, the development of three-dimensional simulations puts us in touch with our most primitive perceptual capacities: “... the human interface is evolving toward more natural information. Threedimensional space is more, not less, intuitive than two-dimensional space.... Three-dimensional space is what we evolved to understand. It is more primitive, not more advanced [than two-dimensional space]."3

Thus, although Krueger and today's venture capitalist admittedly share a desire for a more natural interface, their respective understandings of how such a desire might be realized could not be more distinct. For the latter, “natural three dimension" denotes a more immersive, data-rich visual simulation. In contrast, for Krueger, “natural information" means information produced through an extension of our natural—that is, embodied, perceptuomotor—interface with the world.

By capturing the difference between the industrial and the aesthetic interest in advances in contemporary media technology, this distinction perfectly expresses the defining principle of mixed reality as a second generation in virtual reality research: its eschewal of representationalism and embrace of a functionalist perspective rooted in perceptuomotor activity. For this reason, today's mixed reality movement has marked affinities with what Krueger has long designated as “artificial reality"

INTRODUCTION

(as opposed to the HMD paradigm synonymous, for him, with the term "virtual reality"). Indeed, as I shall argue in Chapter 1, Krueger stands as a kind of father figure for the entire mixed reality paradigm.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that Krueger has recently described this terminological difference in terms highly reminiscent of the latter's challenge to earlier conceptions of virtual reality: "Whereas the HMD folks thought that 3D scenery was the essence of reality, I felt that the degree of physical involvement was the measure of immersion."iii,4 On Krueger's account, one of the crucial components of physical involvement was lack of bodily encumbrance and, in a testament to the prescience of his thinking, the mixed reality environments now ubiquitous in our world do require a nonencumbered interface.iv The theoretical underpinnings of Krueger's alternate vision of “artificial reality" have found their practical fruition in today's mixed reality environments, and the “first generation" model of VR as a disembodied hyperspace free of all material constraints simply no longer has any purchase in our world.

Following from this defining principle of mixed reality are several important corollaries that serve to differentiate it from earlier conceptions of virtual reality and predecessor technologies. First, the mixed reality paradigm radically reconfigures a trait that has characterized virtual reality from its proto-origin as the representationalist fantasy par excellence: namely, a desire for complete convergence with natural perception. This trait serves to distinguish it from all discrete image media, including cinema, which, as underscored by Gilles Deleuze's correction of Bergson's criticism of the “cinematic illusion," function by breaking with natural perception.

Such a break (at least on Deleuze's reading) grants cinema the capacity to present the world from a nonhuman perspective and thus opens a properly autonomous machinism; by contrast, the functional homology linking virtual reality technologies with natural perception supports a prosthetics that functions to expand the scope of natural perception, to tap the technics at its core. In its fantasy form, though certainly not in reality, virtual reality works—or rather would work—like an externalization of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's analogy for consciousness: if consciousness can be likened to a “movie-in-the-brain" with no external spectator, then virtual reality would comprise something like a movieoutside-the-brain, again, importantly, with no external spectator.⁵

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The mixed reality paradigm differs most saliently from this fantasy in its deployment of the functional homology between virtual reality technologies and perception: rather than conceiving the virtual as a total technical simulacrum and as the opening of a fully immersive, self-contained fantasy world, the mixed reality paradigm treats it as simply one more realm among others that can be accessed through embodied perception or enaction (Varela). In this way, emphasis falls less on the content of the virtual than on the means of access to it, less on what is perceived in the world than on how it comes to be perceived in the first place.

Bluntly put, the new mixed reality paradigm foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world. For today's researchers and artists, virtual reality serves to highlight the body's function as, to quote phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an “immediately given invariant," a “primary access to the world," the “vehicle of being in the world." The body forms an ultimate background, an absolute here, in relation to which all perceptual experience must be oriented. That is why virtual reality comprises something of a reality test for the body; as philosopher Alain Millon points out, it “puts into place constraining apparatuses that allow us to better understand the limits and the weakness [but also the powers] of the body."7

A further corollary of the functionalist perspective of mixed reality follows closely upon this focus on the ontological or constituting function of embodiment: the role of self-movement as the bodily—or better, the tactile—face of perception. Insofar as it yields a doubling of perception, this tactile dimension serves to confer a bodily—that is, sensory—reality on external perceptual experience (whether it is “physical" or “virtual"). It generates a felt correlate of perception that is part of the functionalist understanding of embodied agency. Together, these two corollaries—the primacy of the body as ontological access to the world and the role of tactility in the actualization of such access—effect a passage from the axiom that has been my focus thus far (all virtual reality is mixed reality) to the more general axiom that all reality is mixed reality.

In one sense, this passage simply recognizes what, with Brian Massumi, we can consider to be the priority (or the “superiority") of the analog—especially, though by no means exclusively, where digital technologies are in play.' “Always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought," sensation

INTRODUCTION

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is the being of the analog. This is the analog in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain. Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in. Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity of transformation. (135)

Understood in this sense, the analog creates reality out of the fusion or mixing of realms, out of transformation; not surprisingly, the body forms its primary agent: “If sensation is the analog processing by body-matter of ongoing transformative forces, then foremost among them are forces of appearing as such: of coming into being, registering as becoming. The body, sensor of change, is a transducer of the virtual" (135).

Situated against the backdrop of this understanding, the sensory integration of or interface with a concrete virtual domain (distinct from the virtual as a source of potential) would form one (particularly illustrative) instantiation of a more general sensory pattern: transformative integration of the force of the outside, of the virtual. That is why Massumi's conception of the analog conditions of virtual reality experience perfectly anticipates the contemporary shift to the mixed reality paradigm:

The sight-confining helmets of early virtual reality systems have given way to immersive and interactive environments capable of addressing other-than-visual senses, and looping sense modalities more flexibly and multiply into each other, packing more sensation into the digitally assisted field of experience—and with it, more potentialization. (142)

Because experience as such is “analog processed," there can be no difference in kind demarcating virtual reality (in its narrow, technicist sense) from the rest of experience; again, all reality is mixed reality.

1. THE POWER OF IMAGING AND THE PRIVILEGEOF THE OPERATIONAL

Let us now take a step backward to recognize the larger cultural transition in which the shift to mixed reality is embedded. The period from the early 90s until today has witnessed a veritable cascade of interest in the topic of the body, one that reached its apogée with the triumph of the cultural constructivist paradigm. It might be useful to align this triumph with a moment in the development of what (following the importation of poststructuralism into the English-speaking world) came to be called, simply, "theory." Such a moment occurred—as Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's 1995 polemical attack on neo-Foucauldian constructivism highlights— when theory became synonymous with antiessentialist constructivism.

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