Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics

Postscript: emerging tendencies in embodied information aesthetics

postscript emerging tendencies in embodied information aesthetics In an extraordinary new media work, Loops, the collaborative team of Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar, Merce Cunningham and Marc Downie created an abstract motion portrait of the dancer drawn from a changing database of information captured through motion sensors placed on Cunningham’s hands.1 As he performs a series of varying loop gestures, Cunningham’s artistry—embedded in his fingers’ joints and muscles—is translated into a set of mutable information coordinates and stored in a database. Recalling Moholy-Nagy’s black-and-white cinematic studies in light and movement, the trails of quixotic points and lines comprising this portrait transcribe the relationship between staccato and fluid rhythm that animates the agile separation of the dancer’s physical limbs. In an interview, Kaiser and Eshkar discuss the 178 potential of new visualization technologies for the continual manipulation and tweaking of data into patterned flows.2 These processes allow the production of an entirely different kind of portrait an image of the self or body no longer based upon appearance but instead expressed through motion and across time. And yet, in this instance, the artists themselves remain unaware of the broader implications of such modes of aesthetic production . Kaiser reinscribes such forms of visualization in terms that have plagued and stultified new media art: he refers to this kind of portrait as “disembodied.” But from the point of view of the audience, in whom abstraction can indeed produce sensate responses (as was likewise the case with various strands of modernist abstraction), the informatic portrait could not be more embodied. The internal discreteness and connectivity of the dancer’s muscular-skeletal system, trained and refined through years of choreographic experience and experiment, is traditionally presented as a total and externalized form in the spectacle of dance. But in Loops we gain visual access to the intensive deformations and twists of contracted and protracted bodily movements that animate the energy of dance. The fact that these now appear to us in a visually pared-down form—as monochromatic lines unfolding and transforming through time—foregrounds the temporal and topological propensities of information visualization. What we are “seeing,” then, is a doubling and amplification by data of intensive bodily activity. It may well be that we can no longer call these kind of images portraiture, based as this tradition has been on the face as the seat of self-expression and identity. Perhaps the database portrait gives us a different interface between human action—dancing—and computer processes that include motion capture, database storage and dynamic recall. This interface no longer relies upon facialization but upon an intensively folding embodiment into the informatic world. We could welcome portraits such as these that open corporeality up, extending it toward the flows and temporality of information’s incorporeal spacetime. The challenge for new media art and theory in both making and thinking with digital technologies is to move beyond the twin premises of disembodiment and extension in space that continue to qualify both information and corporeality. The informatic visualizations or sonic renderings of bodies we see in a work like Loops, and increasingly in scientific and medical renderings of the body, transpose fixed forms of corporeal experience . But this transposition does not simply turn material experience into dematerialized data; rather, it challenges the categories and perceptual habits we have historically acquired for thinking about and “imaging” both postscript 179 the corporeal and the abstract. In their interview about the making of Loops, Kaiser and Eshkar refer to both the body work carried out by Cunningham and the digital work by programmer Downie of producing the visual database as “performances.” This hints at the level of aesthetic, sensory engagement—rather than disembodied manipulation—that is required to work data into a graphic, cultural artefact, even if it is acknowledged solely at the stage of artistic production. Equally, watching Loops asks us to change how we think about bodies. Like all technologies associated with our sensorium, it requires us to undertake a labor of perception .3 Informatic bodies no longer summon the immediate presence of corporeal existence, which can be affirmed through habitual codes and conventions of visual representation. They disclose a body’s potential for becoming different, for transmutation. Information does not simply represent a body or corporeal experience; it renders the emergent properties and capacities of bodies as mutable states that...