Bodies in Code explores theories of human embodiment (with embodiment meaning the active engagement of a bodily being with an environment, as opposed to the body as an objective representation). My research on embodiment encompasses several theoretical registers, including phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis, especially of the skin (Didier Anzieu), and in relation to race (Fanon), and some recent cognitive science focused on the structural coupling between the organism and its environment (Varela). To this research I add an account of the technical dimension of human life that is, once again, made salient by my analyses of exemplary new media artworks and virtual-reality environments. The works of new media artists such as Myron Krueger, Char Davies, Simon Penny, Marcel Benayoun, Diller and Scofidio, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer help me to show how human embodiment has always been virtual, in the sense that it develops in relation to potentialities for imaging and cultural scaffolding that exceed what is actualized in any concrete situation. Being-virtual is part of the biological potentiality that characterizes the human as a form of life and the kind of co-functioning between human cognizers and cognitively sophisticated computational systems we find in contemporary experiences like virtualreality gameplay or virtual surgery represents the latest stage in a co-evolution of human with technology that, as suggested by the contemporaneity of proto-human fossils and primitive flint instruments, stretches back to the origin of the human.

Excerpts (pp. 95–96, 98–99) on R. Lozano-Hemmer's Re:Positioning Fear (1997)

Designed as an intervention into one of Europe's largest military arsenals, the Landeszeughaus in Graz, Austria, the work consists of two components: an archive of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) sessions devoted to the discussion of contemporary fears and a tele-absence installation involving projection of shadows and text on the facade of the Landeszeughaus' inner courtyard. By linking the legibility of the text (the projections of the IRC sessions) with the projection of amplified shadows of participants' bodies, Lozano-Hemmer directly correlates disembodiment with the informational transformation of the spatial environment. In this respect, he literally creates a body-in-code as I have been developing the concept here, and in the process correlates the concept with a certain margin of disembodiment. Because the text only becomes legible against the background of an amplified shadow, the embodied participant's transformation in to shadow forms the enabling condition for the transformation of the physical facade into informational space. . . .

As a contribution to Lozano-Hemmer’s larger project of producing a new collective individuation of embodiment, Re:Positioning Fear takes the first step of disembodying the individual body, thus opening the possibility of a break from the prosthetic model of technics. This is precisely why Lozano-Hemmer insists that "the shadow is not an avatar, an agent, nor an alias of the participant's body", but rather "projected darkness, a play of geometries, a disembodies bodypart". . . .

Virtual architecture makes common cause with the model of technics of prosthetics: because it retains the scale of the individual body, it simply cannot overcome the division between body and world except through the illusion of simulation; in Lozano-Hemmer's vision, this illusion serves to dematerialize the body. By contrast, relational architecture undoes this division and promotes indivision precisely by dematerializing the environment, by transforming it into a co-creation of embodiment and information, of bodily performance extended through information and of information embodied in such extension. What is thereby promoted is a model of technics a medium-for-individuation.

This model of technics foregrounds the complementarity of the two forms of individuation at issue in Simondon's conceptualization and in Lozano-Hemmer's relational works: the individuation of the (human) individual and collective individuation. The latter - specifically, the form that Simondon calls transindividuation - allows us to grasp how a certain disembodiment (understood as the individual's constitutive coupling to the pre-individual) is a dimension of embodiment, as we have been maintaining for some time now. It is from the standpoint of transindividuation - an embodiment that is super-individual and also necessarily technical - that the excess of the individual over itself, the excess of its (pre-individual) potentiality over its (individual) actuality, can be seen to be a constitutive dimension of its embodiment as an individual. In this respect, transindividuation can be said to be the ultimate expression of the primordial écart. In transindividuation, the originary transduction of embodiment and technicity constitutive of the human comes to yield nothing less than a technical embodiment of the indivision of the flesh, a technically embodied commons in which my body acquires its autonomy only through its participation in a larger process of embodiment.

Mark B. N. Hansen
New York, Routledge, 2006

Mark B. N. Hansen (US) is a professor of media studies and cultural theory. He was an associate professor at Princeton University and professor at the University of Chicago, in the departments of English, Visual Art, and the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. Since 2008, he has been Professor of Literature and Information Science and Information Studies at Duke University. He has written three books, Embodying Technesis (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004) and Bodies in Code (Routledge 2006) and is the author of numerous articles on issues in cultural and media theory.