Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

By correlating transindividual individuation with technics, Simondon crucially expands Merleau-Ponty's conception of intercorporeity as a "commonality” of the body schema, as a “common framework of my world as carnal and of the world of the other” (Nature, 217/225). Indeed, the connection between the body schema and technics—the “technical schematism" as a medium for the mutual convertibility of human and nature—is precisely what conditions Merleau-Ponty's extension of the body schema to the point of its dissolution, to the point where it no longer serves to specify the boundaries of the body's interiority but rather to mark its ontological interpenetration with the flesh of the world.

Fittingly, this extension comes at the end of the final course on Nature, at the moment when the human relation to technics would (perhaps) “naturally” arise:

The corporal schema as incorporation. The corporal schema is that. Finally thus (above all by the vision of the self) a relation of being between:

• My body and the world

• The different aspects of my body; a relation of ejection

• Introjection, a relation of incorporation

It can be extended to the things (clothing and the corporal schema). It can expel a part of the body. It is thus not made of determined parts, but it is a lacunary being (the corporal schema is the hollow on the inside)—includes accentuated, precise regions, and other vague regions. (The hollow and the vague regions are the point of insertion of imaginary bodies.) Sensoriality (above all by vision) intentionally implies incorporation, that is, a functioning of the body as a passage to an outside, by its “orifices." Other consequence: As my image captures my touching, the visual image of the others captures it also: they are also the outside of me. And I am their inside. They alienate me and I incorporate them. I see by the eyes of the other → the world. (278–279)

In this culminating recapitulation of the various elements of our previous excavation of primary tactility (note especially the complex imbrication of vision and touch as the foundation of intercorporeity), Merleau-Ponty affirms the essential technicity of the bodily schema. By doing so, he furnishes a conception of the commonality of being that can embrace what Simondon has shown to be its necessary technical expression.

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It should come as no surprise, given our focus here, that an elective affinity exists between this dissolution of the schema—together with the ensuing concept of“indivision" (279)—and the virtual. What remains to be shown is how Merleau-Ponty's excavation of the transductive écart of primordial tactility serves to expose embodiment at the heart of virtual reality (and thus to confer on the latter its unavoidable status as mixed reality). That I shall do this through examination of a digital artwork should also come as little surprise. Indeed, like many other artworks discussed here, Maurice Benayoun's Worldskin (1997, in collaboration with musician Jean-Baptiste Barrière) offers a performative allegory of the passage from the domain of the image—here in the form of the virtual as the exemplary instance of the technical mediation of specularity in our world today—to the domain that informs it and (on account of our originary technicity) depends on it: namely, the domain of tactility, motility, and embodiment.

Commissioned by Ars Electronica for the CAVE environment (a three-dimensional projection space encompassing three adjacent walls, floor, and ceiling), Worldskin foregrounds the crucial previously discussed distinction between operationality and observation, participation and documentation (see Figure 1.8).xxxvii The environment consists of imagery of recent war zones divided into two modes of interface: a three-dimensional world comprising sky and ground planes and a series of two-dimensional digital "cut and pastes" of mass media images of tanks, aircraft, buildings, and innumerable soldiers and war victims. Participants wear wireless LCD glasses which allow them to perceive and navigate seamlessly in the (passively) immersive projection space.

To interact with the environment, however, participants must make use of three still cameras hanging from the ceiling. When a participant points and shoots one of these cameras, the entire field captured by the pyramid-shaped aperture is transformed into a blank space. This destruction of the image is in turn doubled and reinforced by Barrière's audio: at the moment at which the camera is snapped, the background noises of war give way to a sonic transform in which the sound of the camera clicking is abruptly replaced by sounds of guns being fired. Each exposure is subsequently printed to paper in the form of a blank silhouette, providing the viewer with a material trace of his or her unique intervention into this archive environment.

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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.

That 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:

Armed 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

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This agonistic face-off with photography yields a fundamental reorientation of virtual reality technology that exposes virtual reality—at least as it exists in the world today—as mixed reality, as a dimension or property of the “real" world. Normally understood to be a form of passive immersion, a distancing fascination that insulates “first world” spectator-citizens from the real, as Žižek famously contended in his denunciation of Western reactions to 9/11,28 virtual reality here becomes a technical interface to the world that succeeds because it taps into the transductive coupling of embodiment and technicity constitutive of the human.

The viewer's presence in this environment—her capacity to act within it-accordingly becomes a function of the technical distribution of her embodiment, of her exteriorization into the various effects of his or her intervention within the environment. To the extent that this distribution coincides with the transformation of the image from the superficial representation of the visible (the image of the body of the other) to the material traces or indices of the viewer's kinesthetic movement (the blank spaces and the paper print-outs which uniquely inscribe the viewer's position and orientation toward the images), it constitutes a paradoxical form of“embodied disembodiment." I would suggest that this disembodiment perfectly expresses the contemporary (technically specified) form of the “indivision" invoked by Merleau-Ponty at the end of his exploration of the human body in Nature.

That such embodied disembodiment (or disembodied embodiment) instances the process of informational framing explored at length in New Philosophy for New Media fully attests to its role as an actualization, in and for the technical epoch of digital immateriality, of the originary indivision of the flesh (primary tactility). Worldskin calls on the viewer to coproduce images from information in conjunction with a digital environment, and its CAVE infrastructure inverts the relation of vision and touch so that, as Anne-Marie Duguet puts it, “the look does not 'touch' the image so much as the image touches the entire body" (210). However, precisely because it deploys this inversion as the vehicle for the viewer's disembodiment, Worldskin perfectly expresses (in the act of performatively exposing) the contemporary (technical) dissolution of the divide between interiority and exteriorization, the flesh of my body and the flesh of the world.

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Through its particular specification of the process of informational framing, the work thus produces the experience of embodied disembodiment, meaning that it actively dissolves (in order to reconstitute anew) the differentiation according to which embodiment and disembodiment have been set into opposition in our culture and in Western thinking more generally. To be yet more precise, Worldskin catalyzes a double transformation in the economy linking embodiment and disembodiment. On the one hand, the technical extension of vision (and of memory) carried out by photography is repurposed as a functional element of the viewer's embodied agency within the digital environment: the viewer literally acts through the camera, which is equally to say that the camera alone allows his or her embodiment to matter here. On the other hand, the viewer's embodied movement within the environment—the actual kinesthetic activity——is exteriorized (or distributed) in the technical traces created by his or her intervention into the image space. To the extent that these traces (the modifications of the images as well as the paper print-outs) inscribe the singular movement of the viewer, they literally comprise “embodied disembodiments," material extensions of the viewer's embodied agency that, while remaining correlated with the latter, nonetheless function autonomously from it.

The aesthetic impact of this double transformation is perfectly emblematized by the work's redeployment of photography as a vehicle for the viewer's direct engagement in the (present) moment of interaction (or intervention) with the environment. As Anne-Marie Duguet has astutely pointed out, Worldskin playfully—though altogether seriously— asks its viewers to “photograph the virtual" (211). Because photography-the indexical medium par excellence—simply has no purchase in the domain of the virtual, what hangs in the balance is the status of what Roland Barthes long ago called the “photographic referent," the photograph's material inscription of the "that has been" [ça a été], the unique convergence of the real and the past. Worldskin in effect stages a dissolution of this function and, with it, a critique of photography's role as storage medium, as the exemplary form of what Bernard Stiegler has called "tertiary memory" (the memory of that which has not been lived by present consciousness but yet conditions its temporalization). More specifically, Worldskin aligns the storage function of photography (and of tertiary memory more generally) with the insulated, distanced stance of the first-world image consumer. When it compels viewers to destroy the tertiary image-here invested specifically as the material support for this self-protective stance—Worldskin accordingly suspends photography's storage function. In the process, it redirects attention from the content of the image to its capacity to trigger embodied activity that paradoxically yields disembodiment as its material trace.

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If photography provides a source of the preindividual and of the generic commons, as Stiegler has suggested,29 it is not because it forms an archive of discrete memories whose adoption by individual consciousness necessarily informs the latter's temporalization (and the possibility for collective temporalization). On the contrary, the deployment of photography in Worldskin makes clear that it is the process of exteriorization which forms the source of the preindividual. That is why, again, the ensuing disembodiment is not so much opposed to embodiment as it is to its strict complement; bluntly put, disembodiment is the condition of possibility for embodied human life to sustain its (life-sustaining) contact with the preindividual.

Rather than offering an opportunity for the adoption of archived tertiary memories, Worldskin thus facilitates a self-reflexive experience of one's embodied agency in the world. To the extent that it exteriorizes embodied agency (thereby disembodying it), the work manages to separate it from the viewer's ongoing, constitutive, autopoietic embodiment and thus allows it to be fed back into the latter via a recursive coupling that comprises the contemporary correlation—the new economy as it were—between embodiment and disembodiment.

To the extent that we increasingly act in informational environments and in conjunction with informational agents, Worldskin thereby exposes nothing less than the general condition for embodied agency in our world today. With the ubiquitous infiltration of digital technologies into daily life, embodied agency becomes conditioned (necessarily so) by a certain (technical) disembodiment. Embodied disembodiment (or disembodied embodiment) accordingly forms a strict complement to the ontology of mixed reality conditioning all real experience. Just as all virtual reality is mixed reality, so too is all embodied life constitutively disembodied. Understood in this context, virtuality thus forms the basis for the convergence of the living and information underway everywhere today.

Such an understanding lies at the heart of Benayoun's endeavor in Worldskin, as can be discerned from his extended discussion of the constitutive impurity of virtuality:

When we come to understand that virtuality is, at the origins, a property of the "real" world, we should admit that the exchange between fiction and reality would be balanced only if the dynamic and symbolic properties of the virtual representation become part of the physical world. This explained that, having been a matter of experiment, in search of specific properties that would only belong to the medium, VR and VE are becoming, like the art of using them, more and more impure. This impurity might characterize the mature stage of the medium, and the merging of the virtual and the physical world is probably the extension of the human trend of converting the objective environment into an informational system.30

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That this conversion informs both the integration of virtuality into the “real" world and the disembodying exteriorization of human embodiment only confirms the urgency of rethinking embodied agency in the age of digital immateriality. Because contemporary technics facilitate a dissolution of the body-world distinction (an “indivision") that is fundamentally informational in its (im)materiality and because human embodied activity is, in some way, the agent of this dissolution, we can no longer constrain embodiment to the body, can no longer contain it within the (organic) skin. We must—as Benayoun's title suggests— extend it into a “worldskin." As a concept for the contemporary technically facilitated indivision of the flesh, worldskin perfectly captures the complementarity between informational environment and disembodied embodiment that—as a technically specific actualization of the transduction of primordial tactility—ensures the “essential" embodiment of the former no less than the “essential” technicity of the latter.

1. THE TELE-ABSENT BODY

No contemporary media artist has been more directly concerned with this complementarity between informational environment and disembodied embodiment than Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In a series of performance installations collectively titled “relational architecture," Lozano-Hemmer has variously deployed information technology to energize urban space. Defined as “the technological actualization of buildings and public spaces with alien memory,"relational architecture aims to transform “the master narratives of a specific building by adding and subtracting audiovisual elements to affect it, effect it and re-contextualize it."31

Accordingly, Lozano-Hemmer's relational architecture installations deploy media interventions into existing architectural space precisely as a means of triggering embodied reactions (reactions which, as we shall see, tap into the disembodiment constitutive of embodiment). When these reactions subsequently enter into resonance with the media transformations triggering them, they establish feedback loops in which embodiment and information mutually catalyze one another's ongoing evolution, rendering it a coevolution that perfectly expresses the contemporary stage of the technogenesis of the human.

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Explaining that the “real motivation behind relational architecture is the modification of existing behavior," Lozano-Hemmer stresses the creativity of this recursivity: Relational artworks, he maintains, "create a situation where the building, the urban context and the participants relate in new, alien' ways." A relational work can be considered successful, he explains, if its intervention “actively modifies the point of dynamic equilibrium between the public's actions and the building's reactions, and vice versa," thereby generating “chaotic ... or emergent behaviors."32

Functioning together in this way, embodiment and information generate temporary transformations of built urban space that are simultaneously collective individuations of embodied human actors. By taking “indivision" to its ultimate point—the point where embodiment and information, functioning transductively, operate to “dematerialize" the environment—Lozano-Hemmer's project forcefully demonstrates that embodiment today can only be conceived as collective individuation, as an individuation that requires a certain disembodiment of embodied individuals. The reason for this is simple: Because human embodiment no longer coincides with the boundaries of the human body, a disembodiment of the body forms the condition of possibility for a collective (re)embodiment through technics. The human today is embodied in and through technics.

Just such a realignment of the basis of embodiment is at issue—in a fully performative manner—in Lozano-Hemmer's Re:Positioning Fear— Relational Architecture 3 (1997; see Figure 1.9). Designed as an intervention into one of Europe's largest military arsenals, the Landeszeughaus in Graz, Austria, the work consists of two components: an archive of "Internet relay chat" (IRC) sessions devoted to the discussion of contemporary fears and a“tele-absence" installation involving projection of shadows and text on the facade of the Landeszeughaus' inner courtyard.

By linking the legibility of the text (the projection of the IRC sessions) with the projection of amplified shadows of participants' bodies, Lozano-Hemmer directly correlates disembodiment with the informational transformation of the spatial environment. In this respect, he literally creates a “body-in-code," as I have been developing the concept here, and in the process correlates the concept with a certain margin of disembodiment. Because the text only becomes legible against the background of an amplified shadow, the embodied participant's transformation into shadow forms the enabling condition for the transformation of the physical façade into informational space. This latter in turn becomes the stimulus for continued participant interaction via the shadow interface, and an evolving feedback loop is established.

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By calling this a "tele-absence" interface, Lozano-Hemmer foregrounds the complex imbrication of disembodiment and information that will ultimately yield a higher order (collective) form of (technically supported) embodiment:

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