Page 126 - Cyberculture and New Media

The Implicit Body

Nicole Ridgway and Nathaniel Stern

Abstract
This essay follows scholars who have revisited the crisis narrative of
disembodiment in relation to technology to argue instead that electronic
digitality, far from eviscerating the real and occluding the body, invests in
bodily affectivity. As such, we argue, it has the capacity to engender a non-
representational experience that mixes affection, memory and perception in
the emergence of bodiliness. It is our contention that those interactive works
that fall within the broad rubric of “body art,” albeit with a new twist,
perform a doubled gesture: they both force us to rethink the extant
relationship in the in-between of body and technology, and invite us to
experiment with the of of the relation of body and technology.
If “explicit body” performance explicated bodies in social relation to
unfold layers of signification, then “implicit body” art allows us to
experience the enfolding field out of which bodies come to sense, but as
something unaccomplished, as the limit and expression of meaning.
Here interaction encompasses a taking place that inaugurates rather
than enacts an a priori script. While new media has displayed a tendency to
take interaction literally as “doing” something, this approach argues that
interaction is incipient action, in which an implicit body emerges alongside
an unfinished art work; and being bodily materializes in the in-between of
interaction.

Key Words: embodiment, disembodiment, digital/interactive art,
affect, perception, vision, touch, emergence

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Lev Manovich contends, while contesting the validity of the
nomenclature, that “interactive art” is a “laboratory” in which the compelling
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questions of our age are being examined. Despite the problematic overtones
of empiricism here, his implied assertion that it is in the place of new media
art that new media (broadly understood) are being investigated is an
interesting one. So too is the turn by a number of recent philosophers (Dag
Petersson, Mark BN Hansen, and Brian Massumi, amongst others) to
discussions of digital interactive art to interrogate our cherished, critical
categories of understanding the world in general, and the body, in particular.
Following and developing this turn, it is our contention that those interactive
works that fall within the broad rubric of “body art,” albeit with a new twist,
perform a doubled gesture: they both force us to rethink the extant