Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

Author

Mark B. N. Hansen, American media theorist. At the time of writing he taught at Princeton University; he is now James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. His related works include New Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2004) and Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (2015).

Publication Details

Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN 978-0-415-97015-0 (paperback), 978-0-415-97016-7 (hardback).

Description

Hansen's argument is a corrective aimed at a specific habit in 1990s cyberculture theory: the assumption that virtual reality is a place you go, and that going there means leaving the body behind. He argues the reverse. Virtuality is not a domain separate from the physical; it is a capacity of embodiment itself, and digital media work only because the body is already virtual — already capable of projecting, anticipating and inhabiting spaces it is not physically in.

The book draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the neurophenomenology of Francisco Varela, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and it tests these against a corpus of new-media artworks rather than against commercial products. Works by Char Davies, Myron Krueger, Jeffrey Shaw and others serve as the evidence: installations in which the participant's own proprioception, balance and motor intention are the interface.

Key Ideas

• The primacy of the body schema. What lets a person feel they are "moving" in a virtual environment is not the fidelity of the graphics but the body's pre-reflective sense of its own posture and capacity for movement. Hansen calls this the "primordial" or "mixed reality" condition.
• Mixed reality as the general case. Rather than treating physical and virtual as two realms with a boundary, Hansen treats all experience as mixed reality; VR is a limiting case, not a separate world.
• Affectivity and proprioception over vision. The dominant strand of cyberculture theory was ocularcentric — cyberspace as a landscape to be looked at. Hansen shifts the account to the non-visual senses that actually do the work of orientation.
• Technesis. Technology does not simply represent the body; it participates in constituting what the body can do, which means new interfaces literally expand the range of possible embodiment.

Criticism

Reviewers have found the theoretical apparatus dense and the choice of gallery installations over everyday devices limiting: the argument is made on works designed precisely to foreground embodiment, which is a friendly test. Whether the same account explains the phone in a pocket or the mouse on a desk is left largely to the reader.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Bodies in Code is the strongest available rebuttal to the disembodiment thesis that ran through early writing on cyberspace, and it supplies the theoretical basis for design arguments that would later become mainstream — that interfaces should recruit the body's existing competences rather than demand new abstract ones. It pairs directly with N. Katherine Hayles's insistence that information never was bodiless.

Related Reading

• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• Immersive technology
• The Pleasure of the Interface
• Simulation and Augmentation: Issues of Wearable Computers