Page 132 - Cyberculture and New Media

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encounter with the computer should take place in human-
scaled physical space. Because the computer is objective
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and disinterested, the experience should be intimate.

The work is amongst the first “interactive body” works where work
and participants co-create each other’s materiality. Participants look like they
are dancing to a strange sonic composition, but are actually creating it in a
real-time, response-driven environment, which uses a feedback loop in order
to guarantee a non-repeatable experience. Rokeby turns the body into an
improvisational jazz instrument that births both an experience of a non-lived
and/or virtual embodiment as well as unique aural creations. It is through
their interaction that “the ‘spectator’ is more than a participant, [in that they
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become] both participant in and creator of the simulation.”
Near the birth-time of video installation, Margaret Morse argued for
kinaesthetic insights with regard to such work, and looked at how it is tied to
the action (or inaction) of the viewer; she argued for the space between, the
element of surprise, and thought as to how these works mediate a mediated
culture: as interweaving the corporeal and conceptual. Morse argued that
such work “allows the visitor rather than the artist to perform the piece,” a
participant “is the piece as its experiential subject, not by identification, but
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in body.” Morse pushed a “vocabulary for kinesthetic ‘insights’ for learning
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at the level of the body ego and its orientation in space.”
More recently, digital artist and scholar Ken Feingold has argued for
the importance of touch, vision, and an affective body moving through space
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as integral to participation in, and “materialisation of the work.” These
interactive works are then emergent, rather than extant pieces of art. “This is
methexis in operation and not representation … meaning is produced as an
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embodied, situated, event.” The work takes on its own momentum, its own
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rhythm and intensity” and through its “radical material performativity” it
produces techné as poeisis in Heidegger’s sense of starting something on its
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way.
Both Hansen and Massumi would juxtapose this observation with
conceptual art to say, further, that this work does not involve the visualisation
of an abstract idea, but the experiential and embodied enactment of a work.
Here they would warn us to be weary of the logic of representational claims
made on behalf of the image, and call for a new vocabulary of forms, rather
than the transfer of old visual habits into a new mode.
Rokeby’s work stretches the perceptions of the “natural” body.
Playing with synaesthesia the work reworks both image and vision. It enables
our experience of new forms of embodied human perception through our
coupling with the computer. Here the computer is not a technical extension
beyond body-brain, it is an augmentation for vision and a catalyst for bodily
affection that allows the participant to touch the non-lived and the virtual. As