Abstract
This essay examines the Utopian
quest for technological embodiment. Through an examination of
the interactive and embodied work of David Rokeby A Very Nervous
System and Steve Mann's Wearable Computer this essay
posits that the dialectical approach of Rokeby and Mann create
an Utopian balance, that seeks to move beyond the anxiety of new
media and to position our culture to examine the space between
the ultimate dialectics, that of man and the machine.
Sensorium
Caroline Jones in her book Sensorium
positions the concept of the embodiment of the self in technology
as a critical debate over the understanding of 'sensorium', of
which term she used for the title of a curated art exhibition
at MIT. Importantly, Jones writes that the term 'sensorium'...
"connotes ancient (and often theological)
debates about mind and body, word and flesh, human and artificial,
noumenal and phenomenal knowledge." (1) |
For Jones, the term 'sensorium'
becomes an understanding of embodied experience through technology
that defines the human technological experience in stark dialectics.
This impulse to define embodied experience through dialectics,
although problematic, does frame the term and its definition at
precisely a moment in history when it is necessary to achieve
a balance in the understanding of technologically embodied experience.
The dialectic approach, human and artificial, mind and body, belies
a tenuous balance that is utopian in its peace. It is a peace
that tells us the extension of man into and through technology
no longer belies the 1980's polemics of the 'meat machine' as
Jones writes (2). Additionally, the paranoid delusions of the
obsolesce of the human form is no longer the assumed outcome of
embodiment of human form. This important development in human
embodiment in and with technology signals a shift from polarizing
and often hysterical stances and reexamines the relationship of
the body in and with technology. Human obsolesce and the idea
of that our 'meat machines' are no longer a prescient idea thus
have become a hackneyed argument.
Meat Machines
Mark Hansen in his New Philosophy
for New Media examines the idea of human obsolesces and it's champion,
Kittler. Here Hansen writes,
"For Kittler, the digital revolution
marks an endgame in the long-standing war of technology and art;
with digitization, the perceptual-aesthetic dimension of media
becomes mere eyewash, a hangover of a bygone human epoch."(3)
Hansen's reading of Kittler reminds us of the problems inherent
in trading with polemics and theorizing an endgame. The hysteria
of the obsolesce of the human form then becomes an anxiety through
the embodiment of technology. The development of the embodiment
of the human form with and in technology can be traced by two
important artists whose work forms opposing strategies of embodiment
that also effectively exemplify the shift in our understanding
of embodiment from hysteria to utopian peace. First, Steve Mann's
Wearable Computers examine the role of technology on
the body and with the body, while David Rokeby's A Very Nervous
System examines the embodiment of the human form through
the technological system. These two examples create a dialectic
approach to the human and technological embodiment, Mann with
technology on the body, and Rokeby with the body in technology.
However, by taking a seemingly dialectic approach to embodiment
in the visual arts, much like Jones, the complicated peace that
is now prevalent in artistic practice that incorporates technology
through embodiment becomes apparent and the obsolesce of the human
form becomes a non issue in relation to embodiment of the human
in technology.
Cyborg
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Fig. 1: Mann, Steve. Evolution
of Steve Mann's "Wearable Computers" invention.
http://wearcam.org
(accessed November 14, 2009) |
Steve Mann, a tenured professor at the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto is credited
with creating the Wearable Computer beginning wit his
experiments in the 1970's as a teenager (4). Tracing his development
in Wearable Computers addresses not only the technological
progress in wearable computer design, but also the philosophical
implications of embodiment of the human form with technology.
Mann, a self-described cyborg, incorporates
a specific ideology into the embodiment of the Wearable Computer.
The physical manifestations of his 'cyborg' form have become on
a visual level increasingly smaller and thus less invasive to
the body. As can be ascertained from figure one above, in the
1980, the form of the computer attachment is all encompassing.
The technology extends from his body creating an anxious parody
of the human senses, one eye completely encased with a box and
insect like antenna. However, by the late 1990's the extension
through computer augmentation has become discrete, we can no longer
identify explicitly what is machine. This tracing of the apparatus
articulates the dwindling anxiety and hysteria of the obsolesce
of the meat machine for the latest incarnation of Steve Mann reminds
the viewer that in the end it is the privilege of the meat machine
to use the technology and that progress of humans will not to
allow the human form to be visually or metaphoric subsumed by
the machine. Furthermore, for Mann an important element of his
'cyborg" self is the implications of the individual to technology
and technology's ability to subvert systems of viewership. Mann's
term for his apparatus and how it functions, sousveillance, redefines
relationships of viewership, and of the embodiment of the viewer
with technology (5). Sousveillance then is anti- surveillance,
and an ideology of the body extended through technology which
records and thus becomes a part of the technology through the
recording. The technology is not only guided by the body, and
controlled by the body, but it records as the body sees and the
body moves in space. Here the technology is controlled by the
body. It is also through the technological subservience to the
body that the technology has a context embedded into the body.
By wearing computer recording devices and extended technology,
Mann in essence has subverted the system of surveillance and by
extension the relationship of the body to technology. No longer
is the anxiety inherent in the external technological system of
surveillance system, the Closed Circuit Television System, so
ubiquitous in our society, the pinnacle of watching and of disembodiment.
Instead, through Wearable Computers the outside external
surveillance has become meshed with the human form and embodied
in the body, and thus has become a site of control of technology
for and with the human form. In effect, the body and the technology
merge into a slippery third space that depends upon one another
for physical and philosophical context. By this I mean that wearable
technology extends the boundaries of the technological into the
human form, and the human form into the technological creating
a co- dependency that questions the boundaries of each, the complicacy
of each to the other and our relationships to technology. By positioning
the body and technology in an interdependent relationship, Mann's
Wearable Computer questions the implications of the eventual
obsolesce of the human form, as well as the philosophical implications
of how technology is mediated by the body. Mann's model of the
technologically extended human embraces a utopian ideal, the body
becomes a mode of hope within technology though not only the tracings
of progress, but also the apparatus' ability to redefine relationships
of surveillance in favor of the individual over the system. Mann's
work also exemplifies the issue inherent in the idea of embodied
experience.
Human as Media
For Carolyn Jones the aesthetics
of the embodied experience have become the prescient issue in
embodiment and technology within the visual arts. And as such,
the questions of embodied experience, and its relationship to
art, has become one of critical assessment of both the mediated
technology employed and its aesthetic implications. This change
can be mapped through embodied experience that questions the relationship
of the body and machine or if you will, the sensorium of that
experience. The aesthetic implications of technology and the work
of art contextualize the questions inherent in how technology
is mediated through the body.
The embodiment of the human form
in relation to technology is prescient to understanding of the
mediation of extended work of art. McLuhan famously tells us that
the body is extended by technology and that mediation occurs in
the extended media, but for Mark Hansen in his New Philosophy
for New Media, the body is the location of mediation. Hansen draws
on the philosophy of embodiment posited by Henri Bergson in the
text Matter and Memory. Hansen tells us that rather than understanding
the perception of the image as an "aggregate of images that
comprises the universe as a whole," Bergson’s solution
is... "to reconfigure perception as a dimunition or subtraction
from the universe of image."(6). In a sense, we are not extending
the body, as McLuhan would have us understand, but rather we are
using the body as a filtering device, the body then becomes a
place of mediation and a media. By subtracting the information,
filtering it through the body we are in effect using the body
as an extension of the media process. For Hansen, our bodies function
as media. The idea of our body as a media system is dependent
upon an understanding of haptic vision. For Hansen, haptic vision
is what occupies an other space, one where:
... what is "seen" is movement
extracted from its actual terms. This is an impossible "vision,"
a seeing with the body...(7) |
Thus, haptic vision is central to how the body has come to be
a mediation technology. Haptic vision in a sense allows the body
to merge senses and see through feeling and this ideology then
questions not only how the body functions when embodied in technology,
but also problematizes the dialectical approach to understanding
embodiment. If the very senses in which we experience and the
forms that that sensory experience take are no longer isolated
within individual sense, then the body becomes a site of mediation
because sensory input is commingled and cannot be separated outside
the body for mediation. The idea of understanding embodiment thus
merits a reformulation of the idea of embodiment itself. Additionally,
haptic vision with its converging of senses, the seeing with the
body, repositions the body in relation to technology. And it is
in Rokeby's A Very Nervous System that one sees this
repositioning of the body and mediation through the disembodiment
of the human form in relation to the technology.
Disembodiment
David Rokeby started A Very Nervous System in 1982 and
has created 3 versions of the piece in the ensuing years.8 Rokeby
describes his groundbreaking work as;
A computer observes physical gestures
through a video camera and translates them into an improvised
music directly related to the qualities of the movements
themselves. This occurs entirely in real-time (9). |
Here, the artistic strategy inverts the paradigm that Mann uses.
Rokeby's real time interactive work puts the body into the technology
rather than putting the technology onto the body. This strategy
effectively creates a sense of disembodiment for the human form,
as there is no physical contact with the technology, no tactile
presence of the 'extended' human form. Rather, the viewer/performer
is seemingly disembodied from the technology and can only orchestrate
the technology's function through an abstracted spatial movement.
Rokeby uses video to identify in real time the performer's physical
movements that is then manipulated through the video, the computer's
eye, into a complicated system of technology to create a distorted
form of music. The effect for the viewer watching a performance
of this work is quite startling. The movements of the performer,
depending on the performer, can have an aesthetic value in and
of themselves. However, it is the relationship of the performer
to the technology that affirms the disembodiment of this piece.
The performer in space is not connected to the computer, there
are not puppet strings or technological appendices, and rather
the performer moves in an isolated space, disembodied from the
computer. Rokeby says of this piece that:
Because the computer is purely logical,
the language of interaction should strive to be intuitive.
Because the computer removes you from your body, the body
should be strongly engaged. Because the computer's activity
takes place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits,
the encounter with the computer should take place in human-scaled
physical space. Because the computer is objective and disinterested,
the experience should be intimate (10). |
Thus, Rokeby's own understanding of the piece positions the work
as a Utopian model that examines the idea of embodiment within
the technologically extended work of art. He accomplishes this
through the strategy of bringing the human back into the computer
both spatially through the human scaled physical space and metaphorically
in the mimicry of intimacy. Rokeby's strategies of placing the
body into a position of that challenges the notions of embodiment,
that includes the extension body into the technology and the mediation
of our senses through the body. Instead A Very Nervous System
through its use of the disembodied body positioned in an interplay
with technology as well as its use of the body as catalyst for
that technology verifies Hansen's idea of the site of the body
as the mediation rather than the technology being the mediator.
Interestingly, although the strategy that Rokeby employs for A
Very Nervous System, that is the body activating the technology
while being disembodied, is diametrically opposed to Steve Man's
Wearable Computers where the computer is embedded on
the body and the body functions through embodiment, both pieces
speak of a utopian ideal of the relation of the body to technology.
Michael Foucault defines Utopia in his
short essay, Utopian Body as, ...a place outside all places
bit it is a place where I will have a body without a body
that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy,
colossal in its power, infinite in duration. Untethered,
invisible, protected-always transfigured. It may well be
that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the
hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal
body.(11) |
For Foucault, the utopian body is not only perfect in its form
but it is incorporeal, a body without a body. It is a body that
cannot exist in the biological realm for the biological real is
always present, always meat. It is in effect in the hearts of
men, as Foucault would put it to dream of a transfigured Utopia
of the body that exists in the space of embodiment and disembodiment.
Man alone in his corporeal form cannot be infinite in duration.
However, as Steve Mann has shown the strategies of the Wearable
Computer through its recording capacities, the body remains
indefinitely as ones and zeros. While the nature of disembodiment
of Rokeby's A Very Nervous System and its interactivity
creates a transfiguring nature to the body, it is not a coincidence
that Foucault's utopian model, a body without a body is positioned
as a dialectic. Nor is it that Steve Mann and David Rokeby works
have opposing strategies that examine the binaries of embodiment
and disembodiment. By positioning the extremes the utopian quest
in the technologically extended work of art finds a balance that
allows the audience to enter. It is in this peace, the Utopian
balance, that space of the 'sensorium' can move past the anxiety
of new media to embrace the technologically extended work of art
and our culture can begin to examine the space between the ultimate
dialectics, that of man and the machine.
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NOTES
(1) Jones, Caroline. Introduction to Sensorium: Embodied Experience,
Technology and Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. p.2
(2) ibid. p. 5
(3) Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2006. p.71
(4) Mann, Steve. http://wearcam.org
(accessed December 5, 2008)
(5) Mann, Steve. http://wearcam.org
(accessed December 5, 2008)
(6) Hansen, ibid., p.4
(7) Hansen, ibid., p.228
(8) Media Art Net, David Rokeby. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/very-nervous-system/
(Accessed December 5, 2008)
(9) Rokeby, David. A Very Nervous System, 1991 http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html
(Accessed December 5, 2008)
(10) Rokeby, David. Video of A Very Nervous System, 1991 http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html
(Accessed December 5, 2008)
(11) Foucault, Michael. "Utopian Body". Sensorium: Embodied
Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2006. p.229
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foucault, Michael. "Utopian Body". Sensorium: Embodied
Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2006
Jones, Caroline. Introduction to Sensorium: Embodied Experience,
Technology and Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006
Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2006
Rokeby, David. Video of A Very Nervous System, 1991 http:// homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html
(Accessed December 5, 2008)
Mann, Steve. http://wearcam.org
(accessed December 5, 2008)
Media Art Net, David Rokeby. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/very-nervous-system
(Accessed December 5, 2008)
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