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3. Virtuality: actualizing bodies, abstracting selves
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My body wasn’t in the computer world I could see around me, but one of my hands had accompanied my point of view onto the vast electronic plain that seemed to surround me, replacing the crowded laboratory I had left behind where my body groped and probed. — HOWARD RHEINGOLD 1 Beyond the relations of actualized forces, virtual ecology will not simply attempt to preserve the endangered species of cultural life but equally to engender conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and never felt. — FELIX GUATTARI 2 3virtuality actualizing bodies, abstracting selves Virtuality, Reality and Digitality Catherine Richards’s 1993 installation The Virtual Body is seductively named, having appeared at a particular time in the history of new media arts and entertainment and being deceptively simple in its realization (figure 11). If the culture of information and its aesthetics were dominated by any two tendencies during the late 1980s to mid-1990s, they were virtuality and interactivity. The virtual, more than any other quality or dimension associated with digital technologies, has promised to leave the body and its “meat” behind, as minds, data and wires join together in an ecstatic fusion across the infinite matrix of cyberspace. But Richards ’s installation asks us to focus upon the body in relation to the virtual just as the rhetorical hype about the body’s disappearance 86 through cyber-apotheosis was reaching a climax. But what kind of body might this be if, as she specifically directs us in the work’s title, it is now inseparable from that very condition that is everywhere disassembling it—the virtual? The Virtual Body is not what one expects to find, given that slick, real-time, three-dimensional immersive environments are what first come to mind in association with virtual reality (VR) technologies. Initially realized for the Antwerp ’93 Festival, the installation sits in a nineteenth-century rococo-style room in Belgium’s Centrum Voor Beeldcultuur , literally translated as the “center for picture culture.”3 A heavy crafted wooden and glass box with a viewfinder positioned centrally on top and a steel-ringed hole on one of its sides is mounted waist-high on a polished wooden plinth. As Richards comments, the piece is not an overt reference to technology, at least not new media technologies, and it lures the viewer visually into a world of optical instruments that might now be found in a museum with its “alluring, warm, fine materials, reminiscent of the column stereoscopes of the mid-nineteenth century.”4 The cabinet on top of the plinth is in fact a miniaturized representation of the room in which the work is installed. It uses glass and a video projection up virtuality 87 figure 11. Installation shot of The Virtual Body (1993) by Catherine Richards. Photograph by Herman Van Aerschat. Courtesy of the artist. [44.222.104.49] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:13 GMT) through the “floor” of the little room to create the illusion—popular from the baroque right through to the late rococo periods—of a room within a room. The contemporary viewer can both peer into the room through a viewfinder on top of the cabinet and place her hand inside its space from the cabinet’s side. Although not immediately obvious to the participant, this dislocation between looking at one’s hand and experiencing one’s hand in receding motion is similar to the designs of the early 1970s and 1980s for single-person interaction in VR environments. This is further enacted in Richards’s piece by the triggering of a moving image due to the insertion of the participant ’s hand into the miniature room: The floor pattern on the monitor begins to scroll. In a few moments the spectator begins to sense a body illusion: a displacement of the body, an illusion of motion. One’s hand appears to be infinitely traveling away from the body. Then the arm begins to take the body with it. It is as if miniature space is folded into infinite space, as if stillness is folded into motion. The body loses all references: inside/outside, giant/miniature, spectator/object, part/whole.5 What is fascinating about the sense of virtuality evoked in Richard’s work is that, despite the strange displacement produced between having an arm that feels attached to one’s body and looking at/experiencing an arm simultaneously departing from the rest...