Page 142 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 133
______________________________________________________________
By cutting a performer off from his or her mirror image, as well as
the external reactions of the audience, the work tempts us to leave behind
reflection and self-consciousness and, rather, occupy a place of play and
99
intimacy.
A major difference between step inside and the aforementioned
works is its literalized performance space. Participants “step inside,” and
attempt to perform body and space, while external viewers see only their
projected images. There’s a literal wall placed between performance (active
participant) and perception (passive viewer). Hansen’s DASW becomes a
doubled gesture of affect and experience that is equally shared, but not
equally produced, between the two.
Affect, says Massumi, is irreducibly bodily and autonimic, but it is
not pre-social, pre-reflexive or unconscious: It is “asocial … it includes social
elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of
functioning and combines them according to a different logic [because] the
trace of past actions, including a trace of their contexts, are conserved in the
100
brain and the flesh, but out of mind and body.” step inside catalyzes a
dissolution of those boundaries characteristic of the body as bearer of the
looking agent, creating for the participant an experience of the temporary
suspension of the differentiation between bodily interiority and spatial
exteriority. As the visual (representational) boundaries between body and
world dissolve in favour of an affective contact, what is brought to the fore is
an energetic connection of the body with, and in, the world. At stake, are “the
body and art as cooperative sites of potential resistance, counterinvestments
101
in the automation of meaning, begging us to ‘look again’.”
Here, elements from the social and the affective body are accented
together, to make explicit the implicit, and versa vice. The “body” is an
incipience and a tendency with regards to expression and action: it is not yet
accomplished. Interactive art becomes an interface between explicit and
102
implicit orders.
The implicit bundles “potential functions, [it is] an infolding or
contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those
potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time -
extension as actualization; actualization as expression … Implicit form … is
103
… relationality autonomized as a dimension of the real.”
While this rethinking of embodiment (in particular in relation to
vision and touch) and technology certainly moves us far beyond the old
“Cartesian trick” of which Stone speaks, it tends to leave intact one of the
most intractable aspects of the bodiliness of humanism; namely, an essential
materiality that comes before (whether it be culture or language or ideology).
In other words, the “body” of new media as explored by Hansen (and others)
does not go far enough towards thinking a thinking body that Massumi says
is both an infolding of potential interactions and an unfolding as actualization.