Page 128 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 119
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computer. Here the disembodied, but still human, eye of the Renaissance is
replaced with that of a lens or digital sensor. This “radical disembodiment of
perception” imagines an eye and brain that act only as “conception qua
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subtraction” in the selection and reflection of images and information.
Along with scholars such as Jonathan Crary, Hansen calls, therefore,
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for a “reconstruction of the technical history of vision,” one which puts the
body, as whole, back into sight: a “shift from an optical to a haptic mode of
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perception.” He advocates a Bergsonist reconfiguration of seeing which “is
always mixed with affection and memory, [and the] bodily faculties that
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mark the positive contribution of the body to the process of perception.” In
this reconfiguration the “viewer is always already in the image, necessarily
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and inevitably positioned within a field of interacting images,” and
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“perception… [is] itself a part of matter as a whole.”
In the posthuman perceptual regime brought about by technology,
Hansen goes on to argue, “the selection of information is no longer
performed exclusively or even primarily by the human component (the body-
brain as the center of indetermination),” however, he contends, “machinic
vision must be differentiated from the automation of vision… [and] the
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human must be resituated in the space of this very difference …” Whereas
“automation seeks to replace human vision tout court, machinic vision simply
expands the range of perception well beyond the organic-physiological
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constraints of human embodiment.” Like Virilio’s “vision machines,”
Hansen contends that new media art, far from retracting from the body,
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actually invests in “alternative … bodily underpinnings of human vision.”
While it is certainly true that “compared to the analogical arts -
which are always instantiated in a fixed, Euclidean space - the digital arts
seem abstract, ephemeral, without substance,” this sense of “becoming
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immaterial” is contingent on two misrecognitions, David Rodowick asserts.
Firstly, a misrecognition of the “question of materiality [and embodiment] in
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relation to technology” and, secondly, a misrecognition in which the
unravelling of “spatial coherence” is read as a “desubstantialization” (one in
which the openness to time is also erased - because these works are not, as
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Mitchell argues, “finished”).
Interactive body art can, and may, make us think again about these
misrecognitions, and challenges us to explore anew the relation of body and
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technology without returning to the crisis narrative of disembodiment. This
paper follows those new media scholars who have, in recent years, revisited
the ideas of occularcentrism and disembodiment in relation to technology to
argue its inverse. That is, to argue that, “electronic digitality, far from
eviscerating the real and occluding the body, invests in bodily affectivity. As
such, it has the capacity to go beyond the aesthetic perception of the object”
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and engender a “non-representational experience.” Technologies affect