Bodies in Code
"Bodies in Code explores 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."
(Source: Publisher website)
[Digital technologies] broaden what we might call the sensory commons—the space that we human beings share by dint of our constitutive embodiment. This is because digital technologies:
- Expand the scope of human bodily (motor) activity; and thereby
- Markedly broaden the domain of the prepersonal, the organism-environment coupling operated by our nonconscious, deep embodiment; and thus
- Create a rich, anonymous "medium" for our own enactive co-belonging or "being-with" one another; which thereby
- Transforms the agency of collective existence … from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation. (20)
