Page 140 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 131
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in the body of the spectator.” Hansen says that it is literally “the production
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of place within the body.”
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Similar to Hansen’s reading of Skulls, Untitled 5 “invests [in]
proprioception as a fundamentally embodied and nonvisual modality of
experience” that yields a bodily intuition of affective space that itself forms a
“sensually produced resemblance” to “the forces of our digital
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technosphere.”
In its utilization of the DASW, Untitled 5 also mobilizes the time-
image. The organically animated inscriptions that others create, and leave
behind, effect, and are affected by, new participants in the space. In other
words, each new participants’ feedback loop of space, flesh, time and
embodiment co-emerges alongside past and future productions of the DASW.
step inside, a work by Nathaniel Stern (one of the authors of this
chapter), is an immersive space that, like Utterback’s Untitled 5,
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requires the interactions of its participants to emerge. (See Figure 3) The
piece “provokes us to re-think our selves,” both in and as bodies, “as
‘collage[s] in motion,’ and… implies multiplicity and movement as intrinsic
to our being; it asks viewers to explore the noise and stillness attendant on the
performance of self.” Stern describes the work on his web site as follows:

When ‘stepping inside’ the 3 x 3 x 3 meter interaction
space, viewer-participants are immediately confronted with
an amplified and echoed trail of noise. This, they’ll soon
discover, is the sound of each footstep they take, of all the
footwork in the room.

A video camera, opposite them and connected to the step
inside software, reads their bodies, and separates them out
from the background. However, instead of a video mirror,
they see only a profile, and are disallowed a frontal
reflection. This left-hand ‘projection’ fills their 2-D forms
with white noise. The amplitude of the echoed footsteps
controls the video’s opacity. The ‘result’ becomes a
variable wave of embodied noise.