Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

by Hansen; Mark B. N.

• ISBN13: 9780415970167
• ISBN10: 0415970164
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-09-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Bodies in Codeexplores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings. Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Table of Contents

Introduction : from the image to the power of imaging : virtual reality and the "originary" specularity of embodiment	p. 1
All reality is mixed reality	p. 1
The power of imaging and the privilege of the operational	p. 6
Virtual reality as embodied power of imaging	p. 14
Bodies in code, or how primordial tactility introjects technics into human life	p. 25
"Make use of what nature has given us!"	p. 25
Body schema as potentiality	p. 38
Technics and the dissolution of the body image	p. 43
Specularity beyond the mirror-image	p. 53
All exteriorizations are exteriorizations of the skin	p. 59
Primordial tactility	p. 67
Seeing through the hand	p. 71
Worldskin	p. 82
The tele-absent body	p. 94
Embodying virtual reality : tactility and self-movement in the work of Char Davies	p. 107
The primacy of self-movement in conferring reality on perception	p. 113
Beyond the body-image : embodying psychasthenia	p. 126
Digitizing the racialized body, or the politics of common impropriety	p. 139
Beyond symbolic interpellation : understanding digital performativity	p. 142
Beyond visibility : the generalization of passing	p. 145
"Corporeal malediction" and the "racial-epidermal schema"	p. 147
From Negrophobia to Negrophilia	p. 156
Mobilizing affectivity beyond the image	p. 163
Forging the affection-body	p. 168
Wearable space	p. 175
Encountering the blur	p. 178
The architectural body	p. 183
The "interiority" of architecture	p. 191
Internal resonance	p. 197
A new organicism	p. 199
Wearing the blur	p. 210
The digital topography of House of leaves	p. 221
The digital	p. 229
Media	p. 232
Body	p. 238
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