Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

v. As Dinkla notes, Krueger quickly became dissatisfied with the lack of clarity in the human-computer interaction comprising Glowflow: "On account of the indeterminacy of the correlation between visitor action and system reaction, Krueger ultimately came to strip Glowflow of any reactive qualities and to designate it instead as kinetic environmental sculpture"" (69).

vi. As Dinkla points out, Krueger's open environments show that “even programmable spaces can be influenced and structured through human action" (83).

vii. “The body without an image is an accumulation of relative perspectives and the passages between them, an additive space of utter receptivity retaining and combining past movements, in intensity, extracted from their actual terms" (Massumi 2002, 57).

viii. According to Gil,

[I]t is in the body that the codes find their point of convergence and their first point of application: the very one that will allow language, and in particular symbolic language, to translate codes among themselves. This property of the body to be the home or the agent for the translation of signs can be designated by characterizing it as an infralanguage.

As Gil's analysis makes clear, the infralanguage forms a sensibletranscendental or infraempirical basis for sensory exchange as such (of which translation of signs is merely one privileged example). Importantly for our purposes here, the infralanguage also concerns the production of spatiality by the body:

The space of the body is made of plates, exfoliations, surfaces, and volumes that underpin the perception of things. These spaces “contain” the relations of the body to things, insofar as they are integrated in the body itself and insofar as they are translated among themselves. The elaboration of these spaces in the course of the development of an infant's mobility and organic maturity implies their constitution as spaces decodable into other spaces—that is, their constitution thanks to their activity of the decoder-body, or the infralinguistic body, each of which is thus connectable to others, associating, intermingling, and bonding according to the laws of a specific mechanism. (129)

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ix. Head emphasizes how the body actively modifies “the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensations of position or of locality rise into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has gone before” (cited in Gallagher, 227).

x. According to Cole and Paillard:

The term “proprioception" has come to be used, among British physiologists, for those sensory signals that arise from the moving parts of the body, including the head segment and the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear. The visual sense, in contrast, is generally considered as being mainly devoted to exteroception ... Proprioceptive information is necessary for updating the postural body frame (or schema), whereas exteroceptive multimodal information, mainly visual, underpins the central representation and percept of the body image (Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard, “Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects," 247; 254).

See also Brian O'Shaughnessy, "Proprioception and the Body Image," especially 190–191.

xi. Here I am thinking of Renaud Barbaras, who puts much emphasis on Merleau-Ponty's admissions, in the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible, of the dead end or fundamental impasse of his earlier project. See Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomology of Perception, tr. P. Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

xii. According to Gil:

If there is no ideal posture, there is an abstract posture in the same sense [as there is] the abstract figure. 'This abstract posture is not a form (but each concrete posture has one, which can be described in terms of the position of the body before the throw, cardiac rhythm, degree of concentration, and so on), but a "form" of forms, which enables it to move from the one to the other, from one concrete posture to another.... the posture of the body "contains" the point situated at x + k meters. But in this case the bodypoint relation is established via an exfoliation, a leaf/lamina of the space of the body. This is not just any lamina and not just any surface. It is built up progressively with the elimination of contingent and heterogeneous contextual factors. It concentrates its own energy, it is rhythm, because instead of an objective space around a point, only the point exists; instead of aleatory corporeal and psychic elements, the abstract posture implies the reduction of any other thing that relates to anything apart from lining up the point. This exfoliation is a rhythmed space that results from two forms being placed in an energy-based relationship: the body and the space of the point. It is a form of forms and a rhythm of forms. So if the notion of abstract posture is generalized, if all relations that could thus be made between the body and objects are considered, then we have an abstract body.... The infralanguage is the abstract body.... In the same way that an abstract posture allows the passage from one point to another, the abstract body, capable of elaborating abstract rhythms or figures from different contexts, allows the translation of one context into another. (135–136)

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xiii. According to Merleau-Ponty:

[H]abit in general enables us to understand the general synthesis of one's own body.... every habit is both motor and perceptual, because it lies, as we have said, between explicit perception and actual movement, in the basic function which sets boundaries to our field of vision and our field of action. Learning to find one's way among things with a stick, which we gave a little earlier as an example of motor habit, is equally an example of perceptual habit. Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. (1962, 152)

xiv. For an interesting, if somewhat more general, discussion of the artifactuality of“real-time" teletechnologies, see Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television. The problematic of “real-time” is the focus of The Politics of Presencing, the final volume of my trilogy on new media.

xv. Gallagher rightly discerns that, on Merleau-Ponty's account, the body image may in certain cases ultimately be affected by prostheses just as the body schema is: "This distinction [of image and schema in the case of technical extensions of the body] is not absolute, however, and may involve a temporal component. More permanent attachments to the body—such as prosthetic devices—can become incorporated into both the image and the schema of the body affecting our bearing and approach to the world in both conscious projection and movement” (Gallagher and Cole, 372–373). The crucial point here is that the body schema remains the basis for the eventual prosthetic modification of the body image; by first affecting the schema a prosthesis can come to modify the body image.

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xvi. Lingis explicitly identifies the perspective presented by the body image as that of observation:

To assume a posture is to contract a “body image”: as we sit at our desk we have a sense of the visible shape with which we fill out a volume in the room; as we stretch our legs under the table we have a sense of how their position looks. The more our attention is absorbed in our task and our feeling in the orientation and rhythm of our forces, the more determinate is this perception of the sides and outer contours of a thing we form. This image is different from the patches of surfaces we are actually seeing and those we remember. It fills out the outer aspect of our body as it would be seen by someone viewing it from a distance sufficient to see the whole position or movement. (63)

xvii. A transductive relation is one in which the relation is primary in relation to its terms. See Gilbert Simondon, "The Genesis of the Individual."

xviii. He reports that people emerged from the CAVE "sweating, panting and red-faced! They really had to do physical work to interact with the system. People lay on the floor, jumped, kicked and danced. This in itself was proof that we have built a dramatically different type of CAVE experience” (Penny et al.).

xix. To do this issue justice, one would have to consider Bergson's curious and productive conceptualization of the image as an ontological dimension somewhere between the subjectivism of the pure image and matter. For a discussion of the image in Bergson, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, Chapter 1. I discuss the role of affectivity as a bodily contamination of pure perception and the image in New Philosophy for New Media, especially in the Introduction and Chapter 2.

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xx. In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz argues for the continuity between the body schema and the flesh:

The notion of the body schema or postural model of the body outlined by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception anticipates or provides the origins of the concept of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. The body is able to move, to initiate and undertake actions, because the body schema is a series, or rather a field, of possible actions, plans for action, maps of possible movements the body “knows" how to perform. The body schema is also the field in which the subject's cohesion and identity as a subject and its intimate incarnation in and as a particular body take place. The concept of the flesh is developed as an “ultimate notion” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 140), not the union or compound of two substances, but “thinkable by itself," an elementary or foundational term, which "has no name in any philosophy" (139, 147), an “exemplar sensible." While it does not displace perception as the thematic object of investigation, it is a more elementary and prior term, the condition of both seeing and being seen, of touching and being touched, and of their intermingling and possible integration, a commonness in which both subject and object participate, a single “thing” folded back on itself (Grosz 1994, 95).

xxi. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes on to suggest that such “postural impregnation" is necessary to avoid interoceptive solipcism:

My perception of my body would, so to speak, be swallowed up in a cenesthesia if that cenesthesia were strictly individual. On the contrary, however, if we are dealing with a schema, or a system, such a system would be relatively transferable from one sensory domain to the other in the case of my own body, just as it could be transferred to the domain of the other. (118)

This dimension of commonality will become crucial in our analysis later.

xxii. Here is Lacan's definition: "The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic" (Lacan 1977, 4).

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xxiii. Given what we have said earlier about the observational perspective, it is interesting that Merleau-Ponty's explanation specifically addresses the distinction between the child's perception of the other's image and his or her own:

Why does the specular image of one's own body develop later than that of the other body? According to Wallon (whose analysis we are following here), it is because the problem to be solved is much more difficult in the case of one's own body. The child is dealing with two visual experiences of his father [following Wallon's example]: the experience he has from looking at him and that which comes from the mirror. Of his own body, on the other hand, the mirror image is his only complete visual evidence. He can easily look at his feet and his hands but not at his body as a whole. (1964, 129)

Not without relation here is Penny's insistence on the user's capacity to see (parts of) his or her body as he or she experiences the virtual world of Traces; as he points out, this capacity differentiates CAVE environments from HMD VR: "When I first used a CAVE, I was fascinated with the visceral sensation of collisions with virtual objects. I realized that part of the disembodying quality of HMD VR was because when you look down, your body is not there! In a CAVE, you see your body colliding with virtual objects" (Penny).

In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's understanding supports Freud's suggestion, in The Ego and the Id, that the “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego” and that “the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body" (Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. J. Riviere [New York: Norton, 1960], 16.) Specifically, Merleau-Ponty's explanation for the doubling-rather than identity—of the interoceptive body and the specular body emphasizes the independent existence, and indeed preexistence, of the interoceptive body. It thus stands opposed to readings, like that of Judith Butler, which take Freud's concept of the ego as “the projection of the surface of the body" in the other direction—that is, which render the body an effect of the creation of the body ego. See Butler 1993, Chapter 1.

xxv. See Laplanche, Jean and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis.

xxvi. Merleau-Ponty's discussion of doubling via the magic power or the image foregrounds the corporeal dimension of sensibility:

Childhood is never radically liquidated; we never completely eliminate the corporeal condition that gives us, in the presence of a mirror, the impression of finding in it something of ourselves. This magic belief, which at first gives the specular image the value not of a simple reflection, of an “image” in the proper sense, but rather of a "double" of·oneself—this belief never totally disappears. It re-forms itself in the emotional make-up of the adult. (1964,138)

NOTES

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262

xxvii. It is also for this reason that the visual can be determined as a derivative mode of sensation (as indeed touch can be, in distinction from primary tactility):

Our images are predominantly visual, and this is no accident; it is by means of vision that one can sufficiently dominate and control objects. With the visual experience of the self, there is thus the advent of a new mode of relatedness to self. The visual makes possible a kind of schism between the immediate me and the me that can be seen in the mirror. The sensory functions themselves are thus redefined in proportion to the contribution they can make to the existence of the subject and the structures they can offer for the development of that existence. (1964, 138)

Obviously, this "schism" must not be identified with the primary schism of being, even if it represents its derivative or, to recall Lingis' term, its emanation.

xxviii. See Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith.

xxix. Following the important, indeed ground-breaking concept of Bernard Stiegler (1998, Part I, Chapter 3).

xxx. According to Anzieu,

Tausk showed particularly well that the syndrome of the “influencing machine" could only be understood by distinguishing between these two Egos: the psychical Ego continues to be recognized by the subject as his own, ... whilst the bodily Ego is not recognized by the subject as belonging to itself and the cutaneous and sexual sensations which emanate from it are attributed to the workings of an influencing machine in the service of a devious seducer/persecutor. (40)

xxxi. More generally, Anzieu helps us see why Bick's work, like his own, necessarily entails an analysis of technics. However, Anzieu does not recognize the depth of the technical element and thus is not responsible for the discovery of the essential technicity of the skin.

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Nonetheless, his perspective is explicitly motivated by a concern with contemporary technics. Thus he cites the need for our culture to

set limits ... on the gigantic scale of scientific projects and economic enterprise, on the invasion of the private sphere by the media of mass communication, on the compulsion endlessly to break records at the cost of over-training and drug-taking, on the ambition always to go faster and further and to spend more ... on the need to produce everything of which we are technically capable even when that means creating mechanical, architectural or biological monstrosities ... and the threat posed by technological advances to the integrity of the human body and to spiritual freedom, to the natural reproduction of human beings and to the survival of the species. (6–7)

xxxii. As Anzieu explains, this distinction between a passive and an active protective shield goes back to Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology; more specifically, it corresponds to Freud's distinction between contact barriers and the protective shield. See Anzieu, 71ff. I analyze the technical basis of this Freudian distinction and of its development from the Project to the “dead cortical layer" of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing, Chapter 6.

xxxiii. See Olalquiaga, Celeste. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. 2. I return to Olalquiaga's analysis in Chapter 2.

xxxiv. According to Anzieu,

The specific instinctual cathexis of the muscular apparatus and therefore of the second skin is provided by aggressiveness (whilst the first tactile Skin Ego is cathected by the attachment, clinging or self-preservation drives): attack is an effective means of defense; it means taking the initiative, preserving oneself by keeping the danger at arm's length. (195)

xxxv. Per Brian Massumi's recipe for creating experimental nonvisual hypersurfaces. See Massumi, 2002, 191-192.

xxxvi. The installation, Couchot explains,

establishes between the image-body and the spectator a sort of tactile and visual dialogue, without any other language than that of the body.... the spectator is not invited to retrieve [retrouver] the presence of the body of the artist.... On the contrary, she is invited to give life to this body in animating it with her own body. (50)

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xxxvii. Barbaras goes even further in instituting the philosophical perspective that views the world and the body as ontology and phenomenologization, respectively. The endpoint of this analysis, at least where the body is concerned, is the dissolution of all body boundaries in favor of a generalized sensibility "that is without assignable subject”:

The self-relation that characterizes sensibility is accomplished only as self-difference, an exteriority in the form of a divergence between touching and touched hands. In truth, neither of the two hands is strictly speaking sensing or sensed; nowhere can one isolate a moment of pure consciousness or a moment of pure passivity. One must instead speak of an axis of equivalence—the possibility of changing roles—which is dismembered by what it joins together. Corporeity corresponds to the moment of difference; consciousness corresponds to the moment of reversibility, which is only the other side of the preceding moment.

The ultimate consequence of this understanding is to institute the écart as the operator of a sensory continuum and correspondence that remains distinct, however, from a sensus communis (because different senses disclose different worlds):

This relationship can be generalized, as we have seen, to the other senses. Every sensation, vision or touch, is in accordance with every other through this possibility of reversion. Such is the sense of the flesh: a unity that is realized only as possibility of passage, equivalence without principle between singular sensibilities. Now, to the degree that this carnal unity merges with the articulation of its differences, it cannot be understood as a closed unity—it also differs from itself. (245)

xxxviii. The description that follows owes much to the “Interval Trip Report" of Ars Electronica jury chairman (and influential media artist) Michael Naimark and it corresponds to the version of the work as it was originally presented. The report can be found on Naimark's Website: http://www.naimark.net/writing/trips/ars98trip. html, accessed 7/26/05.

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CHAPTER 2

i. This passage is from Gaston Bacheland, The Poetics of Space.

ii. My description of this work borrows liberally from descriptions by Davis and Wettheim. See Eric Davis, "Osmose," and Margaret Wettheim, “Out of this World."

iii. It does, however, have an especially high profile for a virtual reality artwork, having been (together with Davies' later environment, Ephemère) experienced by a total of 35,000 individuals as of the last exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, in 2004. Davies has also informed me that both works, destined to run on Silicon Graphics machines, were reengineered to run on a PC. Email to the author, 9/20/05.

iv. Psychasthenia can be schematically defined as a disturbance in the relation between the self and the surrounding environment. See Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.

v. As far as is possible, I try in what follows to refrain from evaluating Gibson's substantive claim regarding perceptual invariants, reserving my commentary to how Gibson's work has been appropriated by VR researchers.

vi. Rheingold mentions the influence of Gibson on two central pioneers of VR: Scott Fisher and Michael McGreevy. See Rheingold, Virtual Reality, 143–144.

vii. Though this correlation is especially explicit in Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), where it forms the very topic of investigation, his early work, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), and his final work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), include extensive discussions of locomotion and haptic processes. See especially Chapter 13 of the latter work. Page numbers will be cited in the text.

viii. See Hillis, 125: "Texture gradients are seen as a way to overcome the vast storage and computational difficulties in modeling geometric form in VEs..." In this regard, Hillis mentions the ongoing research project of the Department of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill, aptly entitled "Virtual Backdrops: Replacing Geometry with Textures.' 33

ix. In a related body of research, work on telepresence has linked the richness of tele-embodiment to success at getting technology “to support the body's role in face-to-face interaction." Thus, teleembodiment functions neither via visual simulation nor through illusion, but by the functional duplication of the body's capacities in a variant environment. As John Canny and Eric Paulos note, “.. we can best interact with others at a distance by recreating the affordances of our physical body with telepresence." See Canny and Paulos, "Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence: Reconstructing the Body for Online Interaction," 292.

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