Page 150 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 141
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latter argues that convergence will lead to a disappearance of flesh and
objects, the former finds embodiment accented.
11
MBN Hansen, ‘Seeing with the Body: The Digital Image in
Postphotography,’ Diacritics, Volume 31, No 4, 2001, p. 57.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid, p. 63.
15
Ibid, p. 57.
16
Ibid, p. 58. The turn from the optical to the haptical can be seen in a
number of recent works that address in particular film and video, for
example, in Jean Arnaud’s analysis of filmmaker Michael Snow’s work
(‘Touching to See,’ October, Issue 114, Fall 2005, pp. 5-16) and Laura
Marks’ Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2006). Marks explores the affective and
embodied experience of new media objects as well as film and video. Like
Hansen, she uses the work of Deleuze (and, thus, Bergson) to rethink the
perceptual event. Interestingly, she extends the haptic-optical synaesthetic
strategy to the sense of smell and to the erotic (in her meditation on the
screen as skin). For Marks too, the notion of digital culture as immaterial and
transcendent requires critique, and she extends many of her explorations of
the haptic and material into the realm of code. She argues that alongside its
embodiment vis-à-vis the viewer-participant, digital media embody a
materiality at the level of code, as well as on social and global levels.
17
Ibid, p. 57.
18
Ibid, p. 58.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid, p. 59.
21
DN Rodowick, Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy after the New Media,
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2001, p. 212.
22
Ibid, p. 213.
23
Ibid, p. 212.
24
Bearing in mind of course the caveat that even theorists such as Derrida,
Bourdieu, and Baudrillard, are all engaged, asserts Hansen in New
Philosophy for New Media, in a common pattern of reduction - what he calls
technesis, “in which a stated interest in embracing technological materiality is
compromised in order to safeguard the integrity and autonomy of thought and
representation” (p. XIX).
25
N Ridgway, ‘In Excess of the Already Constituted: Interaction as
Performance’ in D Riha (ed), New Media and Technological Cultures,
Rodopi Press, Oxford, Forthcoming 2008.