Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Wann and Rushton's position thus defines an approach to virtual reality at odds with the Gibson-inspired position just discussed. For them, what is crucial is not simulating a visually "realistic" environment in purely visual terms, but rather designing an environment capable of inducing a compelling sensorimotor correlation in the participant. As Held and Durlach point out in their discussion of telepresence, such a position stems from a conviction that the “best general-purpose system known to us (as engineers) is us (as operators)."11 Such a view finds corroboration in no less an authority on artificial reality than artist and engineer Myron Krueger, who (as we have seen) has long held that “the ultimate interface would be the human body and human senses."12

All of these views advance a functional understanding of what makes VEs compelling. According to such an understanding, their purpose is "to augment the sensorimotor system of the human operator" (Held and Durlach, 234). Thus, rather than being defined strictly or even primarily by their “incorporation" of objectively “realistic" elements like perceptual invariants, VEs should be valued for their capacity to stimulate sensorimotor processes responsible for producing effects of“realism" or of presence.ix Held and Durlach make this point explicitly and in terms immediately relevant to design implementation:

The most crucial factor in creating high telepresence is, perhaps, high correlation between (1) the movements of the operator sensed directly via the internal proprioceptive/kinesthetic senses of the operator and (2) the actions of the slave robot sensed via the sensors on the slave robot and the displays in the teleoperator station. (237)

Beyond simply specifying the means to mobilize the human body as the interface, such functional correlation emphasizes the active contribution made by proprioception and internal kinesthetic sense in creating the effect of presence.

In this respect, Held and Durlach introduce a fundamentally different understanding of telepresence than that proposed by the Gibsoninspired position. For the latter, as Hillis explains, the simulation of the hand's presence in the VE via the data glove "allows users to manipulate virtual objects" in a way that draws upon "Gibson's belief that we grab on to our world and make it part of our ‘direct' experience" (15). This virtual extension of our hand stimulates the mapping of the virtual world onto internal human perception-structuring processes. The resulting experience of presence (or telepresence)—"experience of presence in an environment by means of a communications medium"—is, not surprisingly, informational at its core.x,1³ Like the “information pickup" involved in the visual experience of perceptual invariants, the virtual extension of perceptual mapping facilitated by the data glove simply opens the body to the reception of information emanating from a new, virtual environment.xi For Held and Durlach, by contrast, the telepresent hand would be less a hinge for mapping the information from a visually disclosed environment onto internal perception-structuring processes than one element in a necessarily broader sensorimotor coupling of the operator's body with the VE.

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Beyond its consequences for concrete issues of VE design, the contrast of these two fundamentally divergent approaches illustrates the deep connection linking the privileged role of vision with the desire to explain “reality" in terms of information (or, more precisely, informational exchange between system and environment). In both cases, what is left out is the grounding role played by the body and by experiential modalities-tactility, proprioception, internal kinesthesia—proper to it. No less a visionary than Jaron Lanier (who coined the term “virtual reality") has diagnosed this double-barreled reduction as a form of “information disease." Encouraged by technology,

People think of themselves as information entities that aren't real experiencers, and ... gradually lose a sense of validity for everyday experiences ... Technology has been so overwhelmingly successful that it serves for many people as the most creative metaphor for what they are. And so, ... they lose the internal perspective, and tend to substitute an external perspective. With that goes the essentiality of life.¹4

Both of these postulates—the priority of vision and the informational perspective-are contested in another domain of inquiry that will return us to our original question concerning the uniqueness of Char Davies deployment of virtual reality toward the noninstrumental constitution of a body-in-code. In his brilliant exploration of the phenomenology of the different senses, philosopher Hans Jonas underscores the necessary correlation among the senses— particularly between vision and touch— in the generation of perception. Ostensibly intended as a discussion of the "nobility of sight," Jonas's essay (“The Nobility of Sight") actually seeks to dethrone sight, or at least to delimit its specific privilege:

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Sight, in addition to furnishing the analogues for the intellectual upperstructure, has tended to serve as the model of perception in general and thus as the measure of the other senses. But it is in fact a very special sense. It is incomplete by itself; it requires the complement of other senses and functions for its cognitive office; its highest virtues are also its essential insufficiencies.15

In accord with this basic position, Jonas' demonstration pursues two main tasks: 1) to explain how, and at what cost, sight acquires its “nobility"; and 2) to embed sight within a larger sense ecology in which the role of other sensory modalities, and especially touch, is shown to be fundamental.

Schematically put, the privilege of sight stems from its role as the sense, par excellence, of “the simultaneous or the coordinated, and thereby of the extensive" (136). Unlike hearing and touch, which are both proximate senses that build up their manifolds in time, sight presents us with an “instantaneous survey of the whole field of possible encounters" (145). What is more, because of this unique capacity, sight is characterized by two additional factors that inform its alleged “nobility”: the “neutralization of the causality of sense-affection” and “distance in the spatial and mental senses" (136). In sum, then, sight achieves its nobility" because of its detachment from the domain of affective causality and sensory proximity.xii

This detachment accounts for a certain gain—namely, the concept of objectivity—“of the thing as it is in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me," and with it, the "whole idea of theoria and theoretical truth." Yet it also involves a necessary loss: “the elimination of the causal connection from the visual account" (147). Despite the pretensions of sight to autonomy, this elimination introduces a certain insufficiency that requires supplementation from other sensory registers. In a way that effectively suppresses the “very feature which makes these higher developments (i.e., the concept of objectivity and theory) possible," this elimination fundamentally saps visual objects of any “force-experience' that could account for their interconnection with one another and with the observer:

The pure form-presentation which vision affords does not betray its causal genesis, and it suppresses with it every causal aspect in its objects because their self-containedness vis-à-vis the observer becomes at the same time a mutual self-containedness among themselves. No force-experience, no character of impulse and transitive causality, enter into the nature of image, and thus any edifice of concepts built on that evidence must show the gap in the interconnection of objects which Hume noted (147, emphasis added).

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When he criticizes Hume and Kant for, effectively, "forgetting the body" (28), Jonas forcefully underscores the fact that this limitation of sight is not some voluntary whim, but rather a constitutive dimension of sight as a sensory modality: “The character generally suppressed [in accounts of perception] is force which, being not adatum' but an actum, cannot be seen,’ i.e., objectified, but only experienced from within when exerted or suffered" (31). The mistake of Hume and Kant (and the many philosophers and nonphilosophers alike who follow their lead) is to maintain belief in an objective autonomy of sight unsupported by the “lowlier" sensory modalities.

In this respect, Jonas's analysis helps clarify why the position of Gibson-inspired VR researchers is philosophically untenable: because it neglects the integral nature of sense, any purely visual account of perception must necessarily fail. Correlatively, his account elucidates the underlying logic informing the alternate approach pursued by researchers like Wann, Rushton, Held, and Durlach, and deployed concretely by Char Davies. For all of these individuals, the force-experience involved in tactility and proprioception furnishes the “reality-generating” element of perception. This is precisely Jonas' point when, contrasting it with touch, he declares sight to be the “least realistic" of the senses:

Reality is primarily evidenced in resistance which is an ingredient in touch-experience. For physical contact is more than geometrical contiguity: it involves impact. In other words, touch is the sense, and the only sense, in which the perception of quality is normally blended with the experience of force, which being reciprocal does not let the subject be passive; thus touch is the sense in which the original encounter with reality as reality takes place. Touch brings the reality of its object within the experience of sense in virtue of that by which it exceeds mere sense, viz., the force-component in its original makeup. The percipient on his part can magnify this component by his voluntary counteraction against the affecting object. For this reason touch is the true test of reality. (147–148)

On this version of the priority of double sensation, success in generating compelling virtual experience is gained not by simulating visual images but by stimulating tactile, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic sensations.

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Because of its epochē of external force, virtual reality forms something of a laboratory to test the reality-conferring function performed by tactility. Perception of a VE (here no different in kind from perception of a “real” environment, only purified of its material basis) is less an affair of informational pickup than one of channeling external through internal reality: “external reality is disclosed in the same act and as one with the disclosure of my own reality—which occurs in self-action: in feeling my own reality by some sort of effort I make, I feel the reality of the world" (148, emphasis added).

The stress on "effort" in this last line is significant insofar as it introduces the fundamental role played by voluntary self-movement in the ecology of perception. Although Jonas does lend a certain privilege to touch over sight (though certainly not to the point of suggesting a simple elimination of sight in favor of touch), this privilege stems not so much from touch as a specific sense as it does from its implicit conjunction with movement.xiii Put another way, Jonas' sense ecology involves a certain elevation of touch from a mere sense modality into a crossmodal synthesizing function. The commonplace account of perception as a conjunction of sight and touch is incomplete, Jonas remarks, “so long as touch’ in this combination is taken as just another sense, only qualitatively different from sight, hearing, and smell." However, if we include in our understanding of touch the “fact of its being an activity involving motion," we add the complement of action to its “receptivity, thus elevating it, as it were, into a “spatial organizer” of the different sense species, “the synthesizer of the several senses toward one common objectivity” (153). The “reality-conferring” effect of touch—of what we might better call tactility—stems from this elevated function; specifically, it results from the “toucher's” newfound capacity to give form to perceptual experience:

The tactile situation moves to a higher level when the sentient body itself becomes the voluntary agent of that movement which is required for the acquisition of this serial sequence of impression. Then touch passes over from suffering to acting: its progress comes under the control of the percipient, and it may be continued and varied with a view to fuller information. Thus mere touch-impression changes into the act of feeling. There is a basic difference between simply having a tactile encounter and feeling another body. ... The motor element introduces an essentially new quality into the picture: its active employment discloses spatial characteristics in the touch-object which were no inherent part of the elementary tactile qualities. Through the kinesthetic accompaniment of voluntary motion the whole perception is raised to a higher order: the touch qualities become arranged in a spatial scheme, they fall into the pattern of surface, and become elements of form. (139–141)

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Jonas' account of the spatializing power of the sensory body not only resonates with our previous exploration of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the phenomenal body, but also emphasizes the crucial shift from the empirical deployment of touch to its infraempirical basis in primordial tactility (what we earlier called infratactility). Once again, it is the incipient split between embodiment and technicity that creates the internal distance generative of double sensation.

Jonas' emphasis on the shift to self-movement within the process of sensation also resonates with the position of Held and Durlach discussed previously; indeed, it might be said to find empirical verification in Held's earlier experimentation with active and passive perception in kittens.xiv Once again, Jonas’ theory furnishes a philosophical explanation for the crucial role of voluntary action in the development of normal sensorimotor coordination; such action, his analysis suggests, gives a spatial form to otherwise disparate perceptual data, thus making them consonant with a body's feeling of the reality of the world. Because of its account of the spatializing power, Jonas' work proves valuable for understanding how VEs function. Eschewing the purely theoretical understanding of perceptual situations that forms the starting point for most virtual reality projects, his account emphasizes how felt exper:ence emerges from an internal action of the body, a self-movement of sensation that precedes, at least logically, the division of the separate senses.

Jonas brings home the extent of this difference by contrasting embodied perception with an imaginary case of a “winged seed sailing on the wind” that would perceive “a kaleidoscopic change with a definite but meaningless pattern" (155).\* What is lacking in this imaginary case is the recursive correlation between self-moving animal and environment central to embodied perception. Insofar as the animal changes its place by an exchange of mechanical action with the resisting medium," the two evolve in tandem; moreover, the "muscular effort required means that the relative motion is more than a shift of mutual geometrical position: through an interplay of force the geometrical becomes a dynamical situation" (155). Embodied perception here occurs through a mapping of space into the body, through a conversion of an external, geometrical space into an internal, dynamic space. That is why proprioception "becomes a guide for the organism in the successive construction of spatial distance and direction out of the phases of the motion it actually performs" (155)

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On Jonas' account, then, VEs generate an effect of presence or "reality” because they correlate a “virtual” perceptual stimulus with a “real” motor response (although one directed inward, toward the dynamics of proprioceptive space). The priority Jonas thereby lends to proprioceptively guided self-movement serves to correlate Henri Bergson's defense of affection with the tactile basis of vision. According to Bergson,

The necessity of affection follows from the very existence of perception. Perception, understood as we understand it, measures our possible action upon things, and thereby, inversely, the possible action of things upon us. ... our perception of an object distinct from our body, separated from our body by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action. But the more distance decreases between this object and our body, ... the more does virtual action tend to pass into real action. Suppose the distance reduced to zero, that is to say that the object to be perceived coincides with our body, that is to say again, that our body is the object to be perceived. Then it is no longer virtual action, but real action, that this specialized perception will express, and this is exactly what affection is. Our sensations are, then, to our perceptions that which the real action of our body is to its possible, or virtual, action. (Bergson, 57)

What Jonas's analysis adds to this account is an explicit privileging of the tactile. Whereas Bergson deploys the irreducibility of affection as a means to differentiate virtual and real action (vision and touch), Jonas shows that every perceptual experience (vision included) must lead back to an action of the body on itself (self-movement). On his account, infratactilitythe body's action on itself—makes the virtual actual. With its forceful emphasis on the tactile basis for all perceptual experience, Jonas' work (here in full resonance with the later Merleau-Ponty) thus clarifies how the reality-generating potential (or virtuality) of embodied self-movement can be lent to the most schematic artificial environments.

We can now specify precisely what constitutes the uniqueness of Char Davies' deployment of virtual reality technology to create a bodyin-code. Osmose and her more recent Ephémère are designed expressly to catalyze a shift, as well as to compel self-reflexive recognition of the shift, from a predominately visual sensory interface to a predominately bodily or affective interface.xvi The characteristics we earlier singled out in differentiating her work from most other artistic and scientific engagements with VR technology can now be seen to reflect a deeper, properly philosophical dimension of her project. Thus, the diaphanous surfaces, the solicitation of bodily motion and breathing, and the nongoal-oriented nature of the environments do not just form the elements of an alternative approach to three-dimensional design. More centrally, they testify to a more fundamental shift in perceptual sensibility away from the entire Cartesian worldview so central to the development of three-dimensional computer graphics.

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Davies characterizes this philosophical dimension as an experience of “being” rather than of “doing"xvii and correlates it with her well-documented immersion in scuba diving, the proximate inspiration for the breathing and motion interface as well as the diaphanous, shimmering surfaces. Yet, despite the Heideggerian rhetoric of withdrawal, the origin of Davies' quest to escape Cartesianism can be found, not insignificantly, in a more mundane, if not exactly everyday, personal experience: her early experimentation with her own extreme myopic vision as a source or catalyst for artistic creativity. She recounts,

In this unmediated, unfocused mode of perception, I discovered an alternative (non-Cartesian) spatiality whereby “objects" had disappeared; where all semblance of solidity, surface, edges and distinctions between things—i.e., the usual perceptual cues by which we visually objectify the world—had dissolved. These were replaced by a sense of enveloping space in which there were no sharply defined objects in empty space, but rather an ambiguous intermingling of varying luminosities and hues, a totally enveloping and sensuous spatiality. (Davies and O'Donaghue, 1)

Davies' virtual environments might be understood as efforts to bring this private experience and, most centrally, its creative or catalytic dimension-namely, the eclipse of visual mastery of external space—into the public domain. In this respect, Osmose and Ephémère constitute environments that manifestly do not aim to simulate "realworld" perception (as Gibson-inspired VEs do), but rather to utilize the virtual domain as a medium for sharing what must be considered a liminal form of experience. The statement Davies furnishes to accompany the exhibition of both works at the SFMOMA show, 01010101, makes this difference altogether patent: "I imagine virtual space as a philosophical yet participatory medium, a visual/aural spatiotemporal arena wherein mental models or abstract constructs can be given virtual embodiment in three dimensions and then be kinesthetically explored by others through full body immersion and interaction, even while such constructs retain their immateriality."16

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Moreover, because the environments involve the direct placement of the “immersant" into an atypical, indeed anti-“realistic," environment, the role of tactility or self-movement as the “reality"-generating sense becomes especially pronounced. Here, the primacy that Jonas lends touch as a sense-synthesizer helps explain why maneuvering through Osmose using bodily movements and breathing seems, in the words of one immersant, “so uncannily real" (Wettheim, 2). Indeed, whatever effect of presence the installations produce must stem not from a withdrawal from the activity of movement and the contact with “force-experience," as Davies' occasional Heideggerian rhetoric might suggest, but rather from a heightening of self-movement and of the proprioceptive and internal kinesthetic senses of the “immersant," a restoration of the primitive anchoring of sense in protosensory tactility. Again, Davies statement serves to clarify her intentions:

My interest lies in going beyond VR's conventions of photorealism and joystick interfaces which situate the user as a probing hand (with gun) and disembodied eye among passive hard-edged objects in empty space. By working with the participant's breath as primary interface (enabling them to "float"), and using semitransparency as a means of evoking cognitive ambiguity, I have sought to reaffirm the role of the subjectively lived body within the virtual realm and deeply engage the participant's sensory imagination. (Davies, Artist's Statement)

In sum, rather than being about the realist simulation of an external environment, Davies' works are about experiential possibilities that explicitly foreground the kinesthetic and proprioceptive dimensions of bodily self-movement, the way in which self-movement or infratactility serves to confer (sensory) reality on perceptual experience. "It is my hope that the paradoxical qualities of bodily immersion in virtual space might lead to an experience of being-inthe-world freshly," concludes Davies (2001). In the succinct phrasing of Mark Pesce: "What you encounter in Osmose is yourself" (Pesce, cited in Davis, "Osmose," 4).

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1. BEYOND THE BODY-IMAGE: EMBODYING PSYCHASTHENIA

In her 1992 book Megalopolis, Celeste Olalquiaga correlates experience in our contemporary technosphere with the psychological and ethological condition of psychasthenia:

Defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body is confused with represented space. Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond. It does so by camouflaging itself into the milieu.... Psychasthenia helps describe contemporary experience and account for its uneasiness. Urban culture resembles this mimetic condition when it enables a ubiquitous feeling of being in all places while not really being anywhere. Architectural transparency, for example, transforms shopping malls into a continuous window display where the homogeneity of store windows, stairs, elevators, and water fountains causes a perceptual loss, and shoppers are left wandering around in a maze.... Dislocated by this ongoing trompe l’oeil, the body seeks concreteness in the consumption of food and goods, saturating its senses to the maximum.¹7

With certain adjustments, this account of psychasthenia as a mimetic condition for contemporary perception could perfectly well describe the experience of virtual reality, which also, as we have seen, functions via a dissolution of boundaries between self and environment. Davies has likened the intended experience of her environments to the condition of psychasthenia, noting that she has “deliberately sought to facilitate [the] intermingling, [the] dissolution, of the hard boundaries of the skin ... through the use of semitransparency, by allowing the immersant to effectively see-through, and even more importantly, self-move-through the surfaces of various visual elements" (email). To the extent that this experience is engineered to effect a "dissolution of boundaries, the confusion between inside and out, self and space," we can say that Davies’ aim is (at least in part) to generate psychasthenia.

It is crucial, however, that we not overlook the marked differences between Davies' phenomenological embrace of psychasthenia and Olalquiaga's depiction of it as an image-based pathology. Olalquiaga views psychasthenia as the disempowering (because disembodying) result of our contemporary technosphere; Davies seeks to catalyze an experience of psychasthenia as a means to disrupt the Cartesian worldview and to reestablish the embodied basis of all perception, vision included. To appreciate how such a catalysis lies at the heart of Davies work, we must dissociate psychasthenia from the narrow representationalist understanding of it that Olalquiaga and, following in her wake, Elizabeth Grosz, endorse. Indeed, insofar as it provides an alternative to Olalquiaga's reductive conception of psychasthenia as an image-based condition, Davies' work serves to question the basis of efforts by feminist theorists like Grosz and (as we have seen) Gail Weiss to route the correlation of embodiment and technics through the image. As we shall see, it does so in the interest of another, vastly different feminist engagement with virtual reality.

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