# Annotation Summary of mark-b-n-hansen-new-philosophy-for-new-media.pdf. #### Introduction *Highlight [7]:* The sensorimotor dimension of this contemporary body comprises far more than the passive correlate of linkages between images, and indeed, serves to accord the body creative capacities—what Brian Massumi has recently theorized as the potential to broker qualitative difference: “If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation,” notes Massumi, “the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. *Highlight [7]:* In what follows, I shall call this “affectivity”: the capacity of the body to experience itself as “more than itself” and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new. *Highlight [8]:* the process of individuation. *Highlight [8]:* affectivity is precisely that mode of bodily experience which mediates between the individual and the preindividual, the body and its “virtual” milieu: whereas perception appeals to structures already constituted in the interior of the individuated being, affectivity “indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and preindividual reality: it is thus to a certain extent heterogeneous in relation to individualized reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating to the individualized being that it is not a complete and closed set [ensemble] of reality.” 12As the mode of experience in which the embodied being lives its own excess, affectivity introduces the power of creativity into the sensorimotor body. *Highlight [8]:* Beyond simply defending the sensorimotor body, our effort to redeem Bergson’s embodied conception of the center of indetermination will ultimately require us to reverse the entire trajectory of Deleuze’s study, to move not from the body to the frame, but from the frame (back) to the body. *Highlight [11]:* This account of how the body enframes information and creates images comprises the theoretical project at stake in the corpus of new media art that I analyze in this book. To support this account, I shall focus on work by various artists who deploy digital technology in order to pursue this “Bergsonist vocation” of framing the digital image. As I see it, the most significant aesthetic experimentations with new media carry on the legacy of Bergson’s valorization of intelligence over instinct, and specifically, his understanding of technology as a means of expanding the body’s margin of indetermination. *Highlight [11]:* My decision to focus on the visual dimensions of the digital image follows directly from the theoretical ambition motivating this project. *Highlight [14]:* the vast divide separating scientific and aesthetic responses to the computer mediation of vision: whereas researchers aim to optimize a sightless “vision” that overcomes human perceptual limitations, artists invest in the bodily dimensions that inform (human) vision. Following this analysis, the correlation of image and body can be seen to have come full circle from where we began: *Highlight [14]:* involves a configuration of digital information with the affective dimensions of human experience. *Highlight [15]:* this affective experience facilitates a corporeal registering of a deformed spatial regime that comprises something like a human equivalent of the alien “space” of the digital. As a “produced analogy” for the digital itself, this corporeal registering revalues the Deleuzean “any-space-whatever” by underscoring its fundamental attachment to bodily activity: it results from the displacement of visual (perceptually apprehensible) space in favor of a haptic space that is both internal to and produced by the viewer’s affective body. #### 1 - Between Body and Image: On the “Newness” of New Media Art *Highlight [22]:* We could say, to put it in simple terms, that it is the body—the body’s scope of perceptual and affective possibilities—that informs the medial interfaces. *Highlight [23]:* in the age of the post-medium condition *Highlight [32]:* This obsolescence stems from “the most fundamental quality of new media”—their programmability—which, Manovich stresses, “has no historical precedent.” Accordingly, new media can and must be distinguished from old media by their different ontological status, and indeed, their total material fluidity: rather than being anchored to a specific material support, new media are fully manipulable, digital data. As Manovich puts it, “[c]omparing new media to print, photography, or television will never tell us the whole story. For although from one point of view new media is indeed another type of media, from another it is simply a particular type of computer data, something stored in files and databases, retrieved and sorted, run through algorithms and written to the output device. . . . New media may look like media, but this is only the surface.”21 *Highlight [33]:* “cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. In this respect, the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a visual Esperanto.” *Highlight [35]:* “the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of d 34 35 *Highlight [36]:* its material, and computational (i.e., software driven) in its logic.” *Highlight [38]:* there is a sort of elective affinity between the tactile “interfaces” of the precinematic devices and the pornographic image: in both cases, an experience of touch is integral to the efficacy of the visual spectacle. 42 *Highlight [38]:* —is precisely their disjoining of the experience of touch in the viewer from the force of the image. In them, touch functions to bring the body to life, to facilitate the body’s experience of itself, and not just (as in cinema proper) to embody the illusion of the image. In these instances, as Williams puts it, touch “is activated by but not aimed at . . . the absent referent. Though quite material and palpable, it is not a matter of feeling the absent object represented but of the spectator-observer feeling his or her own body.” #### 3 - The Automation of Sight and the Bodily Basis of Vision *Highlight [101]:* Rather than demarcating a new deterritorialized regime of perceptiona “generalized condition of visuality”—what the phenomenon of machinic vision foregrounds is the urgency, at this moment in our ongoing technogenesis, for a differentiation of properly human perceptual capacities from the functional processing of information in hybrid human–machine assemblages. *Highlight [101]:* . Such a splitting of perception is simply the necessary consequence of the vast difference between computer and human embodiment: whereas “vision machines” transform the activity of perceiving into a computation of data that is, for all intents and purposes, instantaneous, human perception takes place in a rich and evolving field to which bodily modalities of tactility, proprioception, memory and duration—what I am calling affectivity *Highlight [102]:* new media artists directly engage the bodily dimensions of experience that surface, as it were, in response to the automation of vision. Their work can thus be said to invest the “other side” of the automation of vision—the affective source of bodily experience that is so crucial to reconfiguring human perception in our contemporary media ecology. *Highlight [102]:* Reembodying Perception To contextualize this aesthetic investment of the body, we would be well advised to revisit the work of French media critic Paul Virilio—the theorist of the “vision-machine” *Highlight [102]:* More than any other source, it is Virilio’s critical insight into the basis for automation—the technification of perceptual functions traditionally bound up with the body—that informs the “Bergsonist vocation” of aesthetic experimentations with embodied vision. *Highlight [102]:* Far from being the nostalgic has-been of Johnston’s imagining, Virilio shows himself to be just as attentive to the advantages of technification as he is to its human costs. *Highlight [102]:* On the one hand, it functions as a critique of the disembodying of perception that informs the historical accomplishment of what Virilio has termed the “logistics of perception,” *Highlight [104]:* For in the end, what is at stake in his analysis is neither a resistance to humankind’s fall into technology nor an embrace of a radical, technical posthumanization, but something more like the possibility for a technically catalyzed reconfiguration of human perception itself: a shift from a visioncentered to a body-centered model of perception. *Highlight [104]:* Nowhere is this potential perceptual reconfiguration more clearly at issue than in the incisive analysis accorded the virtual cockpit in Open Sky. Here Virilio pinpoints the fundamental tradeoff of visual automation: embodiment for efficiency. *Highlight [104]:* A high-tech helmet that functions in the place of the instrument panel and its indicator lights, the virtual cockpit combines the superiority of machinic processing with the drive to recode complexly embodied capacities as instrumental visual activities, entirely purified of any bodily dimension: *Highlight [105]:* Expanded Perspective *Highlight [106]:* Rötzer’s analysis thus pinpoints the potential for the machinic paradigm to Chapter *Highlight [106]:* new media art explores the creative potential implicit within the reconceptualizing of (human) perception as an active (and fully embodied) rendering of data. *Highlight [106]:* It is as if the very capacity to simulate sight furnished the impetus for a reconfiguration—indeed, a reinvention—of vision itself. *Highlight [107]:* stimulate artistic practice. By revealing that embodied human beings are more like computer-vision machines than photo-optical cameras, the functional isomorphism between machinic sight and human perception underscores the processural nature of image construction. *Highlight [107]:* it pits human image construction against the analog process of photographic rendering, thus drawing attention to the central role played by embodied (human) framing in the contemporary media environment; at the same time, it underscores the fundamental difference between human and computer processing by deploying the latter as an instrument for the former *Highlight [107]:* aesthetic experimentations with the digital infrastructure of the photograph: that exploring the “image” beyond its technical framing (i.e., as the photographic or cinematic image) necessarily involves some significant engagement with the technical (i.e., with the computer and its constitutive mode of “vision”). *Highlight [109]:* In his recent work on hypersurface architecture, cultural theorist Brian Massumi grasps the far-reaching implications of such an alternative, haptic and pre-hodological mode of perception: *Highlight [110]:* works of these artists literally compel us to “see” with our bodies. In this way, they correlate the radical agenda of “postphotography” with the broader reconfiguration of perception and of the image currently underway in contemporary culture. With their investment of the body as a quasi-autonomous site for processing information, these works give concrete instantiation to the fundamental shift underlying postphotographic practice, *Highlight [110]:* but how frameworks are constructed from which image-worlds can emerge, in open-ended processes.” 33 *Highlight [111]:* of photo-optical perspective. 34It joins together two large-screen video projec- Figure 3.3 tions of the busy Michigan Avenue bridge in downtown Chicago displayed Miroslaw Rogala, Lovers Leap (1995). (a) Two according to a perspective system that Rogala calls “Mind’s-Eye-View.” Two video screens display photographs taken with a fish-eye lens are processed together into a 360˚ “pic- views of a 360°“pictotosphere” that allows exploration along a spectrum ranging from standard lin- sphere”; viewers’ physical movement within the ear perspective (when the angle of viewing tends to coincide with the angle of space triggers movefilming) to a circular perspective (when the two angles stand at 180˚ from one another). Within the space of the installation, the two video screens display views of the same image space from opposite orientations. Caught inside the strange space of the image, the viewer-participant interacts with the image by moving around in the installation or by standing still. Bodily movement engages floor-mounted sensors that trigger shifts in the 360˚ image and that determine whether the shifts are abrupt or gradual, while stasis triggers either an animated sequence of the city corresponding to a given location along the spectrum of the image or a randomly selected video sequence of daily life in Lovers Leap, Jamaica. The installation thus combines elements of chance and viewer control: indeed, the viewer-participant’s mounting sense of control through movement might be said to be undercut by the random jump cuts to virtual scenes of other places. *Highlight [112]:* one becomes aware that one’s movements or actions are changing the view but won’t realize how. This means that the viewer is not really in control, but simply aware of his or her complicity. . . . As the viewer’s awareness of the control mechanisms grows, so does the viewer’s power.” *Highlight [112]:* we might furthermore add, what performs the selecting is not the viewer’s rational faculties, but her bodily affectivity, which henceforth becomes the link between her mental experience and the space of the image. *Highlight [112]:* In this sense, Rogala’s installation might be said to recast the experience of perspective not as a static grasping of an image, but as an interactive construction of what Timothy Druckrey calls an “event-image.” *Highlight [112]:* n the work, the digitized image becomes “the point of entry into an experience based on the ability to render curvilinear perspective as process.” 37 *Highlight [113]:* comes an “immersive geometry” in which perspective loses its fixity and becomes multiple. The result is a kind of play with perspective in which the viewer’s gestures and movement trigger changes in the image and thereby reconstruct the image as a haptic space. *Highlight [113]:* “movement through perspective is a mental construct; one that mirrors other jumps and disjunctive associations within the thought process.” *Highlight [113]:* it is the brain which functions to “link” (though not to “unite”) the physical locality in which the viewer-participant finds herself with the virtual dimension. *Highlight [113]:* The goal” of the installation, Morse concludes, “is to externalize an internal image in the mind, allowing the viewer to stand outside and perceive it.” *Highlight [113]:* Not only does Lovers Leap thus suggest a new relation to the photographic image—since, as Druckrey puts it, “the usefulness of the single image can no longer serve as a record of an event”—but it foregrounds the shift from an optical to a haptic mode of perception rooted in bodily affectivity as the necessary consequence of such a shift in the image’s ontology and function.40 *Highlight [113]:* What one discovers in this work is that each part of the image explored yields a new image in turn, in a seemingly infinite, and continuously shifting, process of embedding *Highlight [113]:* a perfect illustration of Deleuze’s claim that any part of the digital image can become the link to the next image but also foregrounds the bodily activity of the viewer as the filtering agent: what it presents is a truly inexhaustible virtual image surface that can be actualized in an infinite number of ways through the viewer’s selective activity. *Highlight [114]:* The result is a thorough transformation of the Cartesian coordinate system, a replacement of the straight vectors of the x, y, and z axes with “curved lines that loop back on themselves.” 42 *Highlight [115]:* Yet The Forest does not present a “posthuman point of view,” as Morse dimensional drawing fed claims; nor does it restore the conventions of Euclidean vision within a non- through virtual camera Euclidean image space. *Highlight [117]:* this juxtaposition of competing visual traditions concretely exploits the contrast between the photographic image as a static (analog) inscription of a moment in time and as a flexible data set. *Highlight [117]:* In Place: A User’s Manual, Shaw deploys the panorama interface in its traditional 116 117 *Highlight [118]:* form—as a photographic image—precisely in order to defeat its illusionist aim. By giving the viewer control over the projection, the frame, and the space it depicts, and by foregrounding the reversibility of the screen (which allows the panorama to be seen from the outside), Shaw opens the photographic space of illusion to various forms of manipulation—all involving bodily movement—that serve to counteract its illusionistic effects. #### 4 - Affect as Interface: Confronting the “Digital Facial Image” *Highlight [142]:* For this reason, the affection produced in the viewer-participant correlates directly with the apperception of the sheer impermeability of the digital image: although “a new liason is created for each interactive observer,” one description reminds us, “the image offered will always go back to the starting point. Its expression stays untouched, inexperienced. . . . Only the impression of one’s own reflection in the electronic mirror, and its temporary revival through a mimic sequence, stand in the way of the insurmountable technical logic.”36 *Highlight [145]:* by materializing the virtual elements of the object or work in a form that opens them to interaction with the user-participant, new media artworks detach these elements from the work as a static object (“structure” or “Idea”) and resituate them within the interactional process through which the user-participant becomes dynamically coupled with the work. They thereby become catalysts for the user-participant’s own virtualization: *Highlight [145]:* The promise of digital aesthetics is its enhanced zone of ‘interactivity’ through which the users’ entry into the circuit of artistic presentation simulates or projects their own virtualizations, fantasies, and memories in consort with the artwork.” *Highlight [145]:* With his understanding of cinema as a machine for producing subjectivities, Félix Guattari brings this embodied conception of the virtual to bear on Deleuze’s analysis of the cinema. *Highlight [145]:* We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation. *Highlight [146]:* the virtual dimension at issue in new media art is precisely the virtual that gets actualized (“in a thousand ways,” as Lévy says) through the experience of the artwork as a process, and that, in being actualized, taps into the potential of embodied affectivity. *Highlight [146]:* they catalyze the production of new affects—or better, new affective relations 48 #### 5 - What’s Virtual about VR? “Reality” as Body-Brain Achievement *Highlight [187]:* Surveying the Body: Virtual Interface with Topology and Biofeedback