Page 133 - Cyberculture and New Media

124 The Implicit Body
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such, it forces us to rethink the materiality of the work and the body, of the
image and perception.
In our experience of digital immersion vision and body themselves
becomes emergent. Digital imaging re-members that perception “takes place
in a rich and evolving field to which bodily modalities of tactility,
proprioception, memory, and duration … make an irreducible and
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constitutive contribution,” and inaugurates “a fundamental shift in the
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‘economy’ of perception from vision to bodily affectivity.” In the words of
Henri Bergson:

[We] have to take into account the fact that our body is not
a mathematical point in space, that its virtual actions are
complicated by, and impregnated with, real actions, or, in
other words, that there is no perception without affection.
Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our
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body which we mix with the image of external bodies …

The body, in short, “has become the crucial mediator between
information and form (image): the supplemental sensorimotor intervention it
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operates coincides with the process through which the image … is created.”
New media artworks, says Hansen, “literally compel us to “see” with our
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bodies.” On the one hand, is the affective and proprioceptive body, on the
other, is an embodied (computer) prosthesis as catalyst. In the “digital
middle,” haptic vision emerges through a cooperative effort. Body and image
mediate one another, and the locus of perception is between and of the two.
Media convergence under digitality, thus, increases rather than
decreases the centrality of the body. Its processual features make interaction
affective; and this affectivity is the condition for the emergence of, rather
than result of, perception because affectivity is not a mode of perception -
perception appeals to structures already constituted – but a relation, an
interval and an incipience.
In his analysis of digital art Hansen correlates affectivity
with a shift from visual space to haptic space, from the body as a locus of
perception to the body as an affective source for haptic space. Here, drawing
on, but radically rethinking, the understanding of the haptic in aesthetic
discourse, he asserts that digital art makes primary the “affective and
introceptive sensory processes that generate a ‘haptic spatiality,’ an internally
grounded image of the body prior to and independent of external geometrical
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space.” This work solicits a haptic mode that requires that we “transform
the haptic from a modality of vision (perception) into a modality of bodily
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sense (affection).” Because these are computer-generated forms that we can
only experience via ‘analogy’ as something felt in our bodies, they situate the
viewer-participant between “the machinic space of the image and the normal