Page 137 - Cyberculture and New Media

128 The Implicit Body
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Figure 1. Body Movies (2000). Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Interactive
installation and relational architecture, dimensions variable. Image
courtesy of the artist.

Body Movies enables a subject to experience the “present as a
thickness comprised of protentions and retentions,” and a past not lived by
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themselves. Here, time is always a reserve, shot through with unanticipated
lines of action, potentialities. This time is always outside the image, in the
interval, and we “must … allow the now of perception to be contaminated
with affection; we must identify that threshold with which perception of the
flux of an object affects itself and thus generates a supplementary perception,
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a perception of the flux itself, time consciousness.”
Lozano-Hemmer encourages an engagement with the “alien
memories” present in his work, a “focus on the new temporal relationships
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that emerge from the artificial situation … [of] ‘relationship-specific’ art.”
It “ensures our openness to the preindividual, the preperceptual, the new, and
with it, the very future-directedness of the constitutively incomplete
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present.” Like Leibniz’s incompossible worlds, there “are innumerable
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variations of the future virtually present in the moment we now inhabit.”
This is not memory content (politics of memory), but rather a
mediation of the between of perception and content: it both exceeds and
forms the preconditions of perception. Massumi says that in a space such as
Lozano-Hemmer’s “energetic impulses… take place in every level of the
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body… [through] proprioceptive receptors in our muscles and our joints.”
Action is performed and felt “in the flesh,” and we have the “conversion of