Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004
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Hansen, Mark B. N., New Philosophy for New Media, London, The MIT Press, 2004. 333 pages, ISBN 0-262-08321-3, £22.95 (cloth)
Reviewed by
Mark Hansen’s attempt to theorize the correlation of new media and embodiment can be considered a very insightful introduction to new media art, exposing creative practices of several recognized artists working with new technologies to phenomenological examination that is linked to research in neuroscience. Hansen develops a theory of new media embodiment which is an opposing approach to many former studies of new media (art) focusing primarily on interpretation of a disembodying virtuality.
The image in a digital era is no more a cut into the flux of the real. It rather consists of processural realization of information in time where bodily intervention plays the constitutive, productive role of rendering of data. This fundamental reconfiguration of the image goes beyond many “interface” metaphors that have accompanied theories of new media claiming for “interactive access” to information. “In sum, the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience.” (p. 10) This is what Hansen calls the digital image. Following a notion of embodied perception, it is the human body that not only selectively filters images (Henri Bergson) but does create them in a process of enframing the digital information. Even though technical frames often appear to be primary they are rendered here secondary as a matter of principle. New media artists, in short, provide audience with laboratory environments in which “conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images” (11) occurs, be these images visual, auditory or tactile. More significant, however, is a shift from the visual (perception-driven) to the affective registers that is explored in new media art and reflected throughout the whole book. Hansen tries “to tell the story of a fundamental shift in aesthetic experience from a model dominated by the perception of a self-sufficient object to one focused on the intensities of embodied affectivity, (12 - 13)” a phenomenological correlate of neural dynamics. It is affectivity of all human capacities that introduces the power of creativity into the sensorimotor body. Sensorimotor basis of the human body which is accorded a creative role to enframe digital information and generate images “independently of all pre-existent technical frames” (266) is being defended by Hansen especially against Gilles Deleuze who purified cinematic image of any bodily connection.
The book is divided into three parts (From Image to Body / The Affect-Body / Time, Space, and Body) with seven chapters, a concise introduction, and a foreword by Tim Lenoir. The “narrative” is structured to allow for a detailed critique of several cultural theorists and media critics, to interpret new media artistic projects, especially sculptural, video- and interactive installations including virtual reality, and, finally, to promote wherever appropriate a necessary “shift to the post-cinematic problem of framing information in order to create (embodied, processural, and affectively constituted) digital images (270).”
Hansen makes great effort to face cinematic doctrine of a screen introduced by Lev Manovich whose “installation of cinema as the dominant aesthetic medium (or set of conventions) overdetermines––and consequently limits––his understanding of the aesthetic potential of new media (33).” Hansen identifies Manovich’s “obscure theoretical incapacity to see beyond contemporary framings of media” leading to a “picture that constantly threatens to reduce new media to a mere amplification of what came before. (32)” It is useful to pinpoint at least some limitations of the popular The Language of New Media, book by Manovich: It ratifies cinematic immobility as a default condition for human-computer interface in general and at the same time neutralizes its countertradition when including into a cinema definition also those “forms of visual culture that emphasize corporeal movement. (34)” Another aspect that Manovich can hardly advocate, is his conventional constrain of rectangular framing that is assumed to co-define new media. In Hansen`s conception “data can be materialized in an almost limitless array of framings; yet so long as it is tied to the image-frame of the cinema, this polymorphous potential will remain entirely untapped. (35)” To the question, whether appearance of images would one day be more in tune with their underlying computer-based logic, Hansen, contrary to Manovich, for whom there is nothing more efficient as vehicle for cultural communication than cinematographic images, says yes. The book itself is devoted to an analysis of concrete samples of digital images that are irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body, differing radically from those (cinematic) images cutting-off bodily investment within the process of image production, the processural embodiment of information. Finally, the most acute critique concerns Manovich’s “bracketing out the manual and tactile dimensions of the precinematic regime. (39)” This made him miss, according to Hansen, “an entirely different regime of visual experience, one that recurs to and expands the central function played by the body, not in lending reality to a virtual, representational space, but in actually creating the image within itself. (39)”
Hansen concludes his critique identifying a prototype symptom of such limitations at the account of virtual reality. For Manovich there are two separate traditions of representation and simulation. Virtual reality is supposed to abolish the divide between representational and physical space, emptying the latter entirely. Contraray to this Hansen foregrounds the threat “to overlook the physical dimension that is at issue in the body’s experience of space, regardless of whether the space concerned is an actual physical space or a simulated, virtual one. (40)” This distinction of representation and simulation promoted by Manovich, however, cannot withstand even a simple test case of telepresence where virtualized action has real effect in physical space. What precedes Hansen`s own theory of virtual reality that differentiates affectivity categorically from perception and considers body(-brain) as affective source for creation of “virtual” space, is a series of argumentative steps examining “central pairing of body and image. (16)” These are summarized in a schematic table useful as a guide (17): Hansen liberates at the first place body from being either correlate to pulsatile rhythm of work (Rosalind Krauss) or immobilized receptive centre for image (Lev Manovich), following a strategy to introduce image not as guiding principle of aesthetic experience but as mere trigger for independent bodily activity. Image becomes than product of an internal bodily process (bodily framing of information) in which body-brain functions as a mental source for impression of “virtual totality”, a source of affection via a supplementary sensorimotor contact with information. In a transformative way, image (formerly correlate to bodily perception) becomes a correlate to bodily affection which is, moreover, no longer restricted to visual domain.
For Hansen, virtual reality “has the tendency to reterritorialize the body onto the face, or more exactly, to facialize access to datascapes with the result that, rather than being channelled through the body, these datascapes are (or appear to be) mediated by pure perception (vision unencumbered by anything bodily). (In this sense, VR helps demonstrate that the facializing logic we correlated with the human–computer interface draws its force less from specific technical limitations than from the longstanding ideological correlation of knowledge with vision.) This tendency places a fundamental constraint on the creative potential of the VR interface that, not insignificantly, coincides with a constraint endemic to Bergson`s theory of perception: in both cases, the tendency to privilege vision has the effect of restricting what can be perceived (and thus what can be presented as perceivable virtual world) to what can be apprehended visually. (162)” However, it is through advanced experiments with virtual reality datascapes, that the framing function ascribed to human embodiment reaches its creative potential. Datascapes “that are markedly different from the geometric space of “ordinary” perception and that, consequently, cannot be apprehended through perspectival vision, (163)” can only be “intuited through absolute survey, a nondimensional grasping of a perceptual field as an integral whole or absolute surface. (Raymond Ruyer)” Aesthetic experimentation with VR interfaces can be interpreted as a dynamic coupling of body and image, or, more precisely, as a “production of space in the body, a bodily spacing. (163)” Because vision “does not suffice to survey the absolute volume of the body, (178)” some of the cutting-edge “VR artworks might be said to retool the human capacity for absolute survey (whose biological roots ensure its concrete correlation with the capacity to intuit geometric space as sensory extension) for operation in relation to new, digitally generated topological surfaces. And, because they capitalize on its organismic basis in order to do so, they might be understood as catalyzing the embodiment of the absolute survey in a kind of adaptation to the sensory demands posed by digital environments. (178)” Works of Diane Gromala (Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, 1993), Michael Scroggins and Stewart Dickson (Topological Slide, 1994) or Teresa Wennberg (The Parallel Dimension, 1998, Brainsongs (Welcome to My Brain), 2000) express the concrete connection on which the most fruitful aesthetic experimentation with VR is based: “the connection linking warped surfaces with the intuition of the body as absolute volume. (180)” Moreover, body-brain achievement (i.e. simulation), that could define virtual reality in general, has been explored in a radical fashion by creative practices using biofeedback loops of artists such as Pavel Smetana (The Room of Desires, 1996) or Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow (Einstein’s Brain (Errant Eye), 1997-present). They exemplify much of what has already been said about affective states functioning as triggers for the production (sequencing, generating or modifying) images in real time. These artistic experiments stimulate spacing or the self-intuition of the body as an absolute volume (process constitutive of the flux of time, precondition of time itself) while contributing to the construction of affective or haptic space. Hansen sums it up: “As a subsequent reembodying of the sensorimotor as absolute volume, spacing forms the basis for a very different neuroaesthetics than Deleuze`s cinema of the brain. Indeed, what aesthetic experimentation with VR ultimately demonstrate is the capacity of new media art to accord the body new functionalities––including the extension of its capacity for self-intuition or spacing–– precisely by putting it into sensorimotor correlation with new environments, or more accurately, with unprecedented configuration of information. In this way, the body is transformed into a nondimensional, intensive site for a feedback loop with information, where, as we have seen, the output of the body and the output of information are locked into an ongoing recursive coupling. […] It is, accordingly, the body’s affective autopoietic dimension––its capacity for absolute spacing––that accounts for the neurocultural function of new media art. (194 - 195)”
The correlation of affectivity with a shift from visual space to haptic space and the final step linking bodily capacity to create space with a temporal basis of affectivity brings Hansen to conclusions that contemporary new media art deals with digital images that are either absolute survey of bodily generated space, affective analogy of the warped space of the computer, or purely “subjective” images that can only be felt, being far from perceptually apprehensible objects. Visually impenetrable digital images, heterogeneous to the form of embodied human experience, catalyze affective regimes such as proprioception that receive “autonomy from and priority over perception. (206)” Such post-visual topologies are as inhuman as offering viewers to bodily apprehend “how radically alien the formal field of the computer is from the perspective of the phenomenal modes of embodied spatial experience. (206)” Hansen explores these topologies when he interprets works of Robert Lazzarini and Craig Kulpakjian and demonstrates how artists such as Douglas Gordon and Bill Viola open experience to the subperceptual inscription of temporal shifts, to the machine time.
Rather than founding “new philosophy” in general, Hansen makes an attempt to root the theory of aesthetic experience of new media art in the body itself, in its operation of continuous bodily spacing. It is not clear, however, why such affective responses should only be particular to new media art, of which he “filtered” just a limited spectrum of creative practices. The digital manipulation of space and time is indeed a revolutionary moment for philosophy (of art). Hansen should therefore make his pilot observations on the nature of embodied experience of new media (art) more precise in terms of philosophical aesthetics.