Page 131 - Cyberculture and New Media

122 The Implicit Body
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“co-joining” of work and participant. The participant, in other words, is
central to the final “materialisation of the work” (and the work, we will
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argue, is central to the materialisation of the participant). While all art is to
a lesser or greater extent “interactive,” interactive work requires more than
the work of the imagination because it is, as Pierre Levy states, created by the
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body and, in part, experienced as a kind of learning “with the body itself.”
While new media has, for the most part, “displayed a tendency to
take interaction literally as ‘doing’ something,” interaction may also, with its
combination “of attention and distraction, intention and passivity - woven
through with the reciprocities of sensation, affectivity and conscious
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reflection,” be an incipient locus of action. As such, it may be a space in
which an implicit body emerges alongside an unfinished art work; a space in
which embodiment is performed but not necessarily as the result of conscious
(or explicit) actions.

Paul Ricoeur reminds us that inter-action is not only a
doing and a making, but also a receiving and enduring. It
speaks to not only the ability to effect, but the ability to be
affected. As a site of emergence - like Adorno’s
configurations - inter-action may ‘unfold the space between
subjects and objects’ such that subjects and objects are
implicated in the space of unfolding. Here interaction
encompasses a taking place that inaugurates rather than
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enacts an a priori script.

David Rokeby is a Canadian-based artist whose installations use
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custom-made “artificial perception systems” that directly engage with the
body, by provoking unusual performances in their participants. His Very
Nervous System (1986-1990) was perhaps one of the first and most important
artworks to place emphasis on the performed and decentralized space of an
interactive work. The piece’s current incarnation - it’s gone through several
generations - uses “video cameras, image processors, computers, synthesizers
and a sound system to create a space in which the movements of one’s body
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create sound and/or music.” In his artist statement, Rokeby describes his
thinking behind the creation of the work:

I created the work for many reasons, but perhaps the most
pervasive … was a simple impulse towards contrariness …
Because the computer is purely logical, the language of
interaction should strive to be intuitive. Because the
computer removes you from your body, the body should be
strongly engaged. Because the computer’s activity takes
place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits, the