Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Rigid Waves operates a disjunction of self from mirror image or, rather, of mirror image from self, thereby replacing the integrationist operation of mirror identification with the disintegrationist creation of autonomous self-images—images of the self unstuck from the self they image. The mobile spectator is empowered to control the changes the image undergoes, but cannot coincide visually with the image (because movement generates distortion) or touch the image (because proximity causes the image to shatter into pieces).

Situating perception between two perceptual limits (the distance required to see, on the one hand, and the distance required to touch, on the other), Rigid Waves thus liberates the self, as the artists proclaim, in an act of dispossession that leaves motility as compensation for loss of visual mastery. Their anxious query—"How will I ever recognize myself again?"—expresses the structure of transcendence inherent in motility as an existential dimension of human being. Because movement always displaces the self, thus preventing it from coinciding with itself, movement can only provisionally—or, perhaps better, only partially—compensate for the loss of visual identification.

Not surprisingly, the second installation, Liquid Views: The Virtual Mirror of Narcissus (1993), aims to complete this compensation (See Figure 0.3). It does so by coupling motility (specifically, tactile motility) directly with the deformation of the mirror image so that the viewer never loses control over the disintegration of the (self-)image. Thus, if Rigid Waves works to unfasten the self-image from the self (and vice versa), Liquid Views proffers a compensatory interface that reasserts—albeit, on radically different sensory terms—the embodied viewer's control over the body-image correlation. Again, let us allow the artists to describe the work:

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The central theme of Liquid Views is the well in which Narcissus discovers his reflection. He initially sees water as someone else, as another body. Like the small child in the various “mirror stages" described by Lacan, he decides to recognize his fictive body as himself. This installation has the objective of arousing the observer's curiosity and seducing him to undertake actions that bring him into contact with his senses.... Instead of pressing keys and buttons, the observer must experiment with his own sense of touch.... Attracted by the sounds of water and a room of shimmering lights, the visitor approaches the virtual well. Seeing the image of himself he is tempted to touch it. Touching the image with his fingertip, the image in the water breaks up. Drawn by the sensation triggered by touching his own image in the water, the observer immerses himself in the situation. (Fleischmann and Strauss, "Images")

What is striking about the experience of Liquid Views is that the image's scattering, far from ending engagement (as we might expect), in fact catalyzes a transition to another realm—to the realm of the disintegrated image. That is precisely why Fleischmann depicts the installation as an effort to open the access to the self closed up by Narcissus' "drowning in himself": "The central theme is the transition from the upper to the lower world.... The Narcissus of the media age is watching the world through a liquid mirror that questions our normal perception."15 If this means that the “mirror becomes the actor," it acts necessarily in conjunction with the embodied spectator, whose immersion in the situation is enabled by the self-reflexivity characteristic of touch as the most primordial of the senses, as the root of premodal sensation.

The spectator's touch—touch as trigger for the image's scattering—materializes the power of imaging qua dimension of organismic being. Transformed from an external, visual image of the self into an internal correlate of the organism's imaging potentiality, the mirror of Liquid Views thus comprises what Fleischmann and Strauss call an "unsharp interface," an operator of the fusion of realms constitutive of the mixed reality paradigm: "The interface is not interpreted as such. It goes unnoticed and is not consciously perceived. These natural references turn Liquid Views and Rigid Waves into virtual reality." (Fleischmann and Strauss, “Images")

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What makes these two works singular in the present context is the way that they support the opening of virtual reality not as a technical apparatus enabling some prescripted play, but rather as a technically triggered experience of the organism's power of imaging, an experience of imaging as an inherently technical, originary element of the organism's being. Here virtual reality is not built on a virtual reality support, so each work must produce the virtual; and because they can only do so through the interaction they trigger, we can rightly conclude that human experience actualizes the virtual potential of these art works. Accordingly, what these works add to the expression of Hawkinson's Blindspot is the direct incorporation of the concrete technologies supporting mixed reality: together, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate a comprehension on the part of the observer that his or her engagement with virtual reality technology is the contemporary manifestation of what can only be an originary correlation with technics.viii

Commenting on an earlier work, Fleischmann and Strauss describe the transition from (external) image to (internal) imaging power, from the observational to the operational perspective, that informs such a comprehension. This transition renders their mixed reality works allegories of mixed reality as the minimal condition of phenomenalization:

While the observer is only the onlooker, this "looking" is a kind of movement. It embodies "active observation." From a certain moment when the observer becomes immersed in the action, his “passive onlooking" is replaced by “active observation." The observer discovers that he—and not the artist—is the one creating the situation. When the situation changes and the observer becomes a player, he suddenly begins to identify himself with the situation. Observation becomes more than merely consumption.¹⁶

By catalyzing a coincidence of observational and operational perspectives, virtual reality artwork, as Fleischmann and Strauss describe it, perfectly captures the transformation at issue in the recuperation of imaging as a fundamental, existential power. When observation ceases to be consumption, imaging takes its proper place within the organism's primordial operation as a general condition of phenomenalization.

Contrasted with Hawkinson's Blindspot, therefore, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views expand the agency of the operational perspective because they directly incorporate the concrete technologies supporting mixed reality. More precisely, by placing the organism into relation with the image as a dimension of its operation and by supporting the disiunction between embodiment and imaging (i.e., the otherness and the disintegrating function of the image), Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and to expand the scope of its bodily agency.

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What is then singular about these two works as exemplars of digital art and as mediators for digital culture is their use of the concrete technology of virtual reality to stage a disconnection of the (fundamentally motile) body schema from the (fundamentally visual) body image. In the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views, the viewer is technically enabled to utilize the excess of the body schema over the body image to increase his agency as an embodied being.

Such technical mediation of the body schema (of the scope of bodyenvironment coupling) comprises what I propose to call a “body-incode." By this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics. As I shall argue in this study, it is precisely through the vehicle of bodies-in-code that our contemporary technoculture, driven by digital technologies, comes to constitute a distinct concrete phase in our contemporary technogenesis (our originary yet historico-technically differentiated coevolution with technics).

Indeed, if we take the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views as exemplary of this phase, we can immediately comprehend how digital technologies, as the contemporary expression of the originary technical mediation of the human, broaden what we might call the sensory commons—the space that we human beings share by dint of our constitutive embodiment. This is because digital technologies:

1. Expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity; and thereby

1. Markedly broaden the domain of the prepersonal, the organism-environment coupling operated by our nonconscious, deep embodiment; and thus

1. Create a rich, anonymous "medium" for our enactive cobelonging or "being-with" one another; which thereby

1. Transforms the agency of collective existence (of individual and collective individuation, to use French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon's terminology) from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation.

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To think of the body as a body-in-code, then, is simultaneously to think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with. As we will see, this is largely responsible for the promise of the digital, understood not as some autonomous moment in the history of technology but rather, first and foremost, as a stage in the ongoing technogenesis of the human.

To conceptualize this particular stage of our technogenesis—and the particular technical expansion of prepersonal bodily function that digital technologies facilitate—we will need to draw extensively on philosophical and psychological exploration of the "body schema" and the skin as a generalized sense organ. We will also need to develop a fundamentally or “essentially" technical phenomenology of the body, one that takes as its primary task the elucidation of the originary technical basis of embodied experience. Part I of my study is devoted to this task. Not surprisingly, it progresses through and attempts to update the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist most committed to the ontological dimension of (human) embodiment.

The discussion begins with two crucial and interrelated concepts of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception—namely, the absolute priority of the phenomenal body (largely akin to the operational perspective of the organism) and the primary role accorded bodily motility (i.e., the body schema) in the constitution of a systemic coupling between organism and environment. The argument ultimately aims to conceptualize a technics on the basis of (and adequate to) the chiasmic correlation of being and world that forms the heart of Merleau-Ponty's final unfinished project, as documented particularly in The Visible and the Invisible and Nature. In contrast to the clearly delineated (and still subordinate or secondary) dimension of technics associated with Merleau-Ponty's exploration of motor intentionality in the Phenomenology (a dimension famously telescoped in the example of the blindman's stick), such a technics must be capable of supporting—of being—the medium of human individual and collective individuation.

The theoretical argument of Part I gives way in Part II to a logic of singular exemplarity. In the four chapters of this section, theoretical analysis will be made immanent to sustained exploration of notable instances of digital culture—singular instances in which a "body-incode" functions to open the digital as a medium of prepersonal commonality. In line with our effort to restore virtuality as an originary technical element of human being and to expose mixed reality as its contemporary phenomenological dimension, these four chapters will implicitly narrate a progression backwards from the most artificial (and narrow) conception of virtual reality to the most natural (and broad) conception.

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Thus these chapters will move from the brilliantly unconventional virtual environments of artist Char Davies (Chapter 2) to the imaginary reality of fiction as exemplified in Mark Danielewski's recent novel, House of Leaves (Chapter 5). The Internet as the medium for contemporary community (Chapter 3) and architectural space as a predigital and originary mixed reality (Chapter 4) will instance two intermediary points along the continuum connecting these poles. Singly and as well as a whole, these Chapters will “exfoliate" crucial aspects of the essentially analog basis of the virtual that necessarily installs it, to recall Massumi's argument, as the vehicle for any (concrete) technical contribution (including that of the so-called digital) to our ongoing and constitutive technogenesis.

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toward a technics of the flesh

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bodies in code, or how primordial tactility introjects technics into human life

Artificial realities are based on the premise that the perceptual intelligence that all men share is more powerful than the symbol manipulation skills that are the province of the few.

Myron Krueger¹

1. “MAKE USE OF WHAT NATURE HAS GIVEN US!"

If Myron Krueger deserves to be heralded as the pioneer of interactive media art, this has more to do with the aesthetic qualities of his interactive platform than its undeniable technical contribution. From the beginning, Krueger's interest concerned the enactive potentialities afforded by the new media and not their representational or simulational capacities He recalled this commitment in a recent interview:

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In 1970, I considered HMDs (head mounted displays) and rejected them because I thought whatever benefit they provided in visual immersion was offset by the encumbering paraphernalia which I felt would distance participants from the world they were supposed to feel immersed in. When I pondered what the ultimate experience would feel like, I decided that it should be indistinguishable from real experience. It would not be separated from reality by a process of suiting up, wearing gear, and being tethered to a computer by unseen wires.... Rather than limiting your participation to a single handheld 3D pointing device, your image would appear in the world and every action of your body could be responded to instantaneously. 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.²

In an artistic (and engineering) career wagered on this commitment, Krueger has quite literally sketched out an alternative trajectory to that followed by mainstream virtual reality research, art practice, and cultural ideology. Rather than investing in the simulational power of the image and the ocularcentric paradigm of immersion, Krueger has staked everything on the constructive power of (human) embodiment. For him, virtual reality technologies are important, indeed momentous not because they lend new, stronger material support for the image (whether it is conceptualized in the frame or the panorama traditions), but precisely because they extend the body's power to construct space and world.

In this deployment, technologies work to expand the body's motile, tactile, and visual interface with the environment; to do so, they call upon—and ultimately, refunctionalize-the body's role as an "invariant," a fundamental access onto the world, what psychologists and phenomenologists have called the “body schema." In this way, digital technologies lend support to a phenomenological account of embodiment and expose the technical element that has always inhabited and mediated our embodied coupling with the world. Indeed, as we shall see, they add a technohistorical basis to the claims of those contemporary researchers who not only align the body schema with proprioception but also propose this latter as a sixth (and more fundamental or somehow originary) sense.

This subordination of technics to embodied enaction motivates (and licenses) me to position Krueger as the precursor—and first practitioner—of second-generation virtual (or mixed) reality. Together with the more interesting digital artists of today (indeed, in many cases, as a direct inspiration to them), Krueger views and deploys the virtual less as an alternate, body-transcending space than as a new, computerenhanced (if not in some important sense, computer-facilitated) domain of affordances for extending our evolutionarily accomplished interface with the world. Understood against this background, Krueger's renegade act of renaming can be seen to mount an aesthetic, indeed properly philosophical, challenge to the mainstream. As Krueger explains, the term “artificial reality" more aptly captures how "virtual reality" functioned, not simply or primarily as a technical platform, but rather as a "metaphor for what was happening throughout our society" (Turner).

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