\"The Body in Digital Space\" in YoMIS 2015 (Yearbook of Moving Image Studies.The Moving Image...

$: \"The Body in Digital Space\" in YoMIS 2015 (Yearbook of Moving Image Studies.The Moving Image between Apparatus and Body)$
Yearbook of Moving Image Studies 2015

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Cyborgian Images: The Moving Image between Apparatus and Body

Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse, Norbert M. Schmitz (eds.)

Cyborgian Images


About the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies

The Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) reflects and discusses the acade-mic, intellectual, and artistic dimensions of the moving image with an interna-tional perspective. The publication will be enriched by contributions from disci-plines like media and film studies, image science, (film) philosophy, perception studies, art history, game studies, neuroaesthetics, phenomenology, semiotics and other research areas related to the moving image in general.

YoMIS is a double-blind peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary publication aimed at an international academic readership; and therefore an innovative quality publication with a high level of international expertise. It is supported by an interdisciplinary editorial board and will be published annually as epub and pdf.

YoMIS is a premium publication planned and managed by the founders and administration board of the Research Group Moving Image Science (www.movingimagescience.com).

About this Volume

One of the big myths and metaphors of the postmodern age is the Cyborg, which includes a large amount of different meanings. The Cyborg often expres-ses the transformation and extension of the body and exemplifies a postmodern range of technical determinism and human comprehension. In this perspective the Cyborg is no longer a concept of science fiction, technical apocalypse or cyberpunk, but more a construct that highlights the relation of modern media technologies within our every day culture; as well as the body and mind of spec-tators and users of these media systems.

We are connected with a variety of poly-sensual media systems, and we use its potential for communication, multiplying knowledge, spatial and temporal orientation or aesthetic experience. Therefore we are a kind of Cyborgs, connec-ted to media by complex multimodal interfaces.

This volume monitors and discusses the relation of postmodern humans and media technologies and therefore refers to Cyborgs, interfaces and apparatuses within the perspective of an autonomous image science.


Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse, Norbert M. Schmitz (eds.)

Cyborgian ImagesThe Moving Image between Apparatus and Body

verlagbüchner-


www.buechner-verlag.de

ISBN (PDF) 978-3-941310-65-0ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-941310-66-7

Copyright © 2015 Büchner-Verlag eG, Darmstadt, Germany

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Büchner-Verlag eG, Darmstadt, Germany

Bibliographical Information of the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie (German National Bibliography); detailed bibliographic informati-on is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.


Contents

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... 9 Introduction ................................................................................................ 10 Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse & Norbert M. Schmitz The “Biology of the Apparatus of Perception”: The Evolution-Theoretical Conditions of Illusion Media ................... 16 Norbert M. Schmitz Cyborg Cinema: A Womb with a View .................................................. 48 Phillip McReynolds Cyborgian Contact with Content? The Phenosemiotics of Interactive Media Systems ........................................................................ 67 Lars C. Grabbe The Body in Digital Space ........................................................................ 90 Marco Cesario & Lena Hopsch Digital Synesthesia: The Merge of Perceiving and Conceiving ...... 108 Katharina Gsöllpointner Mirror, Mirror in the Computer Screen: Virtual Bodies and Virtual Worlds as “Becoming” Authentic ........................................... 134 Phylis Johnson Becoming-Cyborg ................................................................................... 164 Gregory Minissale


CONTENTS 8

Game of Thrones – Game of Meanings: Transmedia Construction of Narrative Meaning and the Life of the Moving Image ................ 187 Jacobus Bracker Critical Cyborgs? Hitchcock and the Hermeneutic Spiral ................ 203 Robert Belton Authors ..................................................................................................... 226


The Body in Digital Space Marco Cesario & Lena Hopsch

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the perception of space in the context of digital architecture. Our starting point is the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’ which is the common background to the dialogue between the body and the world and to the bodily intertwining of perception and the perceived world. In this paper we’ll analyze the relations between the body and space and we’ll try to answer this question: if architectural, urban structures are designed for the experience of the body’s motor faculties, does digital design, by modifying space-time categories of the lived-body and brain’s treatment of spatial perceptions, open new paths of experience? In our analysis architecture – as the fundamental science of inhabiting spaces – should be considered the existential and concrete counterpart of our being-in-the-world.

This article is an extended version of a paper presented at ISEA International symposium on Electronic Art – Digital Media, Space and Architecture, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey 2011.

Keywords

body, flesh, chiasm, praktognosia, kinesthesia


THE BODY IN D IGITAL SPACE 91

1. The Body and the World: Flesh and Reversibility

In Merleau-Ponty’s view the ‘flesh’ represents the continuity between a perceiving body and the perceived world. The flesh is the common element, the concrete emblem of a general manner of being including the subject and its environment; its meaningful expression is the chiasm’ – the so-called reversibility – which is an imminent coinci-dence between the seeing and the visible, the touching and touched, the self and other selves (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 130–56). The body can touch and be touched, it can at the same time be the subject and the object of perception. Let us explore the idea of flesh further. The flesh represents the flesh of the world but also the flesh of the body which is self-sensing. The consciousness of our being-in-the-world take roots in this very original sort of primordial sensitivity for which we are included in a general self-sensing matter of the world. From this point of view there’s an inner harmony between the external and the internal world and there's no categorical division between object and subject. When my right hand touches my left hand says Merleau-Ponty, “the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, ibid). But what is flesh? In his last unachieved masterpiece, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty defines the flesh not a matter or a substance but an element in the sense we speak of water, air, earth or fire; it is a sort of incarnate principle of being, including space, time and existence, a midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea. (Mer-leau-Ponty 2004, 130–55)

The flesh is a common world on the basis of a fundamental exchange of the perceptible, between the world and the body. In other words, I draw my sense of the world, to which I give a sense by perceiving it. So the sensible is directly connected to intelligible. All ideas are given to us in the carnal experience. There is no idea without the body, without the sensitive. To perceive, it is exactly to make present something by means of the body. The notion of flesh bursts the idea of subjectivity, because it brings to light the recipro-city and the interlacing of the body and the world. The Flesh indi-cates at first the relation between the subject and the world, the


MARCO CESARIO & LENA HOPSCH 92

interiority expressing itself or the exteriority interiorizing. The flesh is not my flesh or someone else’s flesh,

… it’s the name for a relation of proximity and of breaking up … The flesh is most certainly not a subject, and although our grammar puts it in a subject position, the flesh challenges the grammar by which it is made available to us in language …, the flesh is that which is always coming apart and then back upon itself, but that for which no coincidence with itself is possible (Carman and Hansen 2004, 196)

In this shared environment, we combine multiple viewpoints to ar-rive at a collaborative and co-authoritative understanding of things and social constructs, reaching consensus that is respectful of dif-ference. The reversibility is a reciprocal relation not limited to the senses – to touching or seeing – but also to perception in general. Merleau-Ponty points out how we cannot be separated from the world since the world was there before us, it is given us. We are interconnected with the world that surrounds us, being familiar with it, something Merleau-Ponty names as ‘flesh’ suspending the dicho-tomy between subject (the I) and object (the world). In his essay Eye and Mind Merleau-Ponty quotes French artist Valéry: ‘The artist takes his body with him’. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm describes how to enter the realm of relations, with oneself, with others, as well as with matter. The architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how the architect internalizes a building in his body pointing to how the architect feels, in his muscles and joints, how the paths of the conceptualized building is given back to the observer and he quotes the sculptor Henry Moore: “he (the sculptor) thinks … of the solid shape as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand … mentally identifies … with its center of gravity, its mass, its weigh.” We live in a mutual relation with things, e.g. when my feet touch the ground while walking, the ground touches my feet at the same time. The world shows itself to our consciousness if we open up ourselves to it. Meaning and affordances become essential in our encounter with space (Hopsch, McCann, and Cesario 2013, 2014).



2. The Body and the Space: About Motility

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty, unveiling the primordial spatiality of the lived body and its original intentionality, discloses the fundamental relations between the body and space. At a first sight, the body’s spatiality is external and the body is seen as an external object. In this perspective the spatiality of the body is a ‘spatiality of position’, related to an external, objective or intelligible space. The body is a mere object topographically located in a determinate position, occupying a portion of the objective space. In 1933 the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger in his article The Space Problem in Psychopathology explained the role of identification and orientation of the body in space through mental illness (Biswanger 1933). The spaces of our natural world are subdivided into the oriented human space and the homogeneous space of science, the tuned space. The subjective experience of an ‘attuned’ space contrasts the scientist’s oriented space characterized by the vertical and horizontal axis influenced by gravity (Spiegelberg 1972, 222). According to Binswanger space and time are constantly and sub-jectively assumed by the body. Space resides inside the subject and the consciousness is itself spatial. There’s not one space and time but as many spaces and times as there are subjects.

Instead of a ‘spatiality of position’, the perceptual experience of our lived body discloses a ‘spatiality of situation’, the situation of the body in face of its daily exploring tasks. Bodily space and external space form a system, the first being the background against which the objects as ‘goals’ of our actions ‘come to light’ and disclose them-selves. Thanks to action and movement our body “is brought into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1958, 117). When we analyze the body in movement we can fully understand how it inhabits the space because movement is not strictly submitted to space and time, it assumes them constantly through a here-and-now synthesis. Body Image and Body Schema play an important role in the mediation of a psychological architectural experience. From a cognitive perspective the Body Image consists of our self-awareness such as of our posture in space. The Body Schema is used when interacting with the en-vironment (Gallagher and Cole 1955: 131–34). Human ability to



rhythmisize is another cognitive structure that is needed for interpretation and for e. g., orientation in space. The notion of a gestalt or spatial figure as the patterns of stairs plays an important role in our consciousness of spatiality and the way we perceive space with all senses. Within Gestalt psychology it is discussed how the perception of a gestalt is brought together by a perceptual field. A gestalt is more than the sum of its parts, like our body. The awareness of a Body Schema that operates at a level “below self-referential intentionality” a preconscious, sub-personal process is a cognitive perspective that supports the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty. He claims that we do not perceive a neutral octagonal space, but inhabit spaces of meaning (Pérez-Gomez, 1983). The body in motion is needed as a tool to be a part of this chain of events (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 117). The architect’s conscious dramaturgy with its goal fulfillment lays out a foundation that can trigger the beholder’s experience as in the ancient drama. Our claim is that the architect uses his/her own bodily self-awareness, Body Image and Body Schema, to be able to form a psychological experience that can set the spectator at peace in the meeting with the architectonical space. By this way the space itself provides a frame to encapsulate and give shape to a tumbling ocean of feelings within the beholder. Therefore the experience, expression and understanding of Body Image and Body Schema in a phenol-menological and cognitive context could be said to be key concepts for the creation of a responsive architecture, an architecture placing the body in spatiotemporal space (Hopsch and Cesario 2013). It is also interesting to explain the way Merleau-Ponty uses the term “body image.” In fact he uses this term to explain a global bodily experience. If my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body image is finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 115). The body image is therefore a concept that cannot be understood within the context of an objective space – or an ‘attuned space’ according to Biswanger’s definition – and it is no longer the mere result of associations established during ex-



perience, but a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 117).

3. The Body’s Posture: Praktognosia

Figure 1: Praktognose (photo by the author, 2012).

Our primary link to the world takes root in the space through an embodied consciousness which is motile/spatial. While moving in space, the body is able to incorporate direct spatial relations and make dynamic and constantly-in-motion synthesis. According to the German psychiatrist and phenomenologist Erwin Straus, the human posture is a primary source of sensory awareness (Straus 2000). Man’s upright position has an inner time consciousness of the world and the geometrical structure of reality becomes secondary to one’s sense of time as duration in the world. (Beshai 2000, 2). Models of posture are consequentially projected onto changing spatial situations by the human body, whose position in space is constantly updated in order to interact with the environment. The communication between the body and the world takes place through a praktognosia (figure 1), a practical and direct knowledge of the world. The body’s posture is predictive because it assumes multiple or possible tasks and acts in an



oriented-space connected with an historical time. The theorist Arthur Schmarsow in his The Essence of Architectural Creation, in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, points to how we first must start with our posture in space, the vertical direction of our body in relation to the horizontal plan that we stand on. One can also relate all the horizontal directions of one’s body to the horizontality and verticality of the room itself. This constitutes what Schmarsow calls the human intuition of space. This can also be discussed in terms of cognitive structures as the Body Image, our awareness of our own body. To walk across the main hall or ascending the staircase, as an illuminating example, activates the Body Schema, one of our very daily practices of interacting with, and understanding, space through our sensory-motor skills. What Merleau-Ponty discusses as our “belonging to space.”

The intention of the body creates a space-time structure of here-and-now. The multiplicity of point of ‘heres’ constituted by the movement can be considered as a ‘chain’ of experiences in which each situation and perspective one and no more of them is presented in an objective way (Thompson, 1992). Mathematically the movement – decomposed ad libitum – would open a plethora of spatial situations. The first access to the world is made through the movement of the body in space. This is the reason why we should consider the body’s praktognosia not as a particular case of knowledge but as the original access to the world and the objects themselves. Body Image and Body Schema has its roots within psychology and cognition. It is a term used both in embodiment theory and in phenomenology. The philosopher Mark Johnson operationalized the body (image) schema within the realms of language and art pointing to the important role of the Body Schema in human abstract conceptualization. The body is not merely somehow involved in conceptualization but is shaping its very nature according to Lakoff and Johnson. The decisive role of the sensory-motor system for human understanding and perception of space is earlier stated by Merleau-Ponty. How we perceive spatiality and interpret space is the common denominator for both the cognitive and phenomenological perspective. In the movement the ‘lived body’ becomes a medium to access to certain space-time situations which



look ‘familiar’ to us, in the sense that the world and the objects surrounding the perceiving body are immediately understood and experienced without any need of representing or objectifying them. They are simply included in the vision and in the movement as a whole within the body. The communication between my body and the world takes place through a ‘praktognosia’, a practical and direct knowledge of the world by which any reference to the world can be possible.

4. Kinesthesia, the Sixth Sense

According to the French neurologist and phenomenologist Alain Berthoz beyond the five traditional senses – touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell – we should consider the sense of movement – kinesthesia – a ‘sixth sense’ (Bethoz 2000, 2). The body has a double immediate perception while moving: self-orientation (the perception of where we are located in a determined space with respect to certain landmarks in the environment) and object-orientation (the perception where specific objects are located with respect to each other). The body’s ability to interact with the environment depends on the interaction between the two. From the external world we receive inputs recorded by our external sensory organs (exteroceptors): eyes, nose, and ears. At the same time we receive inputs from the internal sensory systems (interoceptors). A particular internal sensory system is proprioception, which is composed of receptors and nerves in our bodies monitoring constantly the positions of our muscles and joints. It is a complex system allowing the body to keep its own balance and prepare fluid and coordinate movements such as in dance per-formances. From this point of view, we should consider the body as the ‘original consciousness’ and any intentionality as ‘motor in-tentionality’. In all the segments of its movement in space the body is able to incorporate immediately spatial relations according to a par-ticular situation and to produce a new ‘response’ when the situation has changed.



This bodily synthesis is dynamic and constantly-in-movement. We can then argue that the motor-intentionality is the body’s reply to the object’s demands. The ordinary space relations are suspended because new forms of spatiality are cut out through the body’s move-ment. The body is also the starting point of expressive movements such as dance performances which reveal an inborn creative activity of the human receptivity (Barbaras 2003). In dance performances the primary actions, necessary for the conservation of life, move from a literal to a figurative meaning. According to Erwin Straus, dance expresses the intersection of listening and movement because it’s an immediate reaction to the music. Prior to any learning process, dance expresses the original unity of music and movement. All ordinary space relations are suspended while new forms of spatiality are cut out through body’s movement. (Pouillade 2007). The dancer, while dancing, experiences an enlarged time because his internal-time consciousness is modified by the ‘arc’ of body’s movement. Con-sciousness seems to extend beyond the present moment to incur-porate the past and the future in a phenomenon that Husserl called ‘retention’. Retention is the mode in which the past is present to consciousness (Thomson 1992). Dancer’s space-time experience can be modified by his own movement, but a dancing body can also modify spectator’s inner-time consciousness. Body’s language in the space is universal. The ‘arc’ of body’s movement describes a space-time situation in which the spectator is suddenly involved (by simply watching the performance). The effort and the plastic appearance of a body in a determined spatial situation is integrated in the spectator’s bodily schema. From a scenographic point of view, the choreo-grapher can create a polyhedral space with different focal points in order to change geometric relationships such as orthogonality or perpendicularity. The idea is to catch spectator’s eye not only in one precise point (the central scene). As we said about modern archi-tecture, there’s no longer a central point of view for the spectator whose eye can be caught by a marginal scene in a corner of the stage who’s not necessary central in the performance. During the performance, anybody can experience a different point of view. Dance and space can play a crucial role in constructing subjectivity by transforming body’s language into a phenomenological experience.



The dancer, for instance, can experience an enlarged time because his internal-time consciousness is modified by the ‘arc’ of the body’s movement (Straus 2000). Sensory receptors contribute to the sense of movement. We can definitely argue that the body has a kinesthetic consciousness of the world because the origins of human knowledge reside in the body’s movement and action.

5. The Body and Architecture

We cannot escape the context of architecture because we are surrounded by its texture. Life takes place in its open and closed structures, also the open spaces are measured by the mind geometrically. Architecture is definitely the concrete expression of our being-in-the-world. With the proliferation of world-cities like London, New York, Mexico City or Hong Kong, even if we’re in the countryside, our distance from the city cannot be measured in spatial terms but in temporal distance – time to get to the nearest city and access its multiple services, supermarkets, banks, shopping centers, city halls or wireless network points. We are merely urban beings and we bring our urban nature everywhere, even in the forest. Today the city is the fulcrum of our social, political, and biological life. Every space, even the barest, has an architectural configuration such as space of living, of reflection and interpretation experienced by our body in space. When travelling in the metro or sitting on a terrace, we are immersed in an architectural context where perspectives can change according to the subject’s position and point of view. When sitting in an airplane, we are not simply flying in the air’ but we are situated inside a moving structure bringing us from one structure (the departure hub) to another (the arrival hub). This form of spatiality is not a spatiality of position but a spatiality of situation, that is to say the situation of the body performing a task. We are surrounded by architecture and constantly included in an architectural context. The architectural environment opens determined spatial experiences and enlarges consciousness by exploiting the multiple possibilities of the body’s kinesthesia. The architectural context seems to show a ‘motile



essence’ in which the user is immediately absorbed. The ‘sense’ of architecture is to open a whole perceptive experience to the body’s kinesthesia. The hall of a building, its stairs seem to be conceived to experience the body’s motor faculties. Not only distance, length and depth is experienced by the body but also a ‘general sense’ of move-ment arising from the whole building. If we have a look at some con-temporary buildings it seems that there’s a slow, hidden and general movement of the whole structure and that all the elements of the building create a sense of direction, of a moving structure.

The architectural elements we face in the intelligible space, which appear in front of us, emerge from the flat screen of the vision to their dimensionality and multiple perspective because they awaken an echo in our own body and because the body ‘recognizes’ them. The body has in fact an immediate knowledge of the environment in which it’s involved (Merleau-Ponty defines the intertwining between body and the world as chiasm). By movement the body can practice its motor abilities and ‘open’ paths inside the ‘intelligible space’ by choosing the direction to get to a determined point. What’s the essence of this ‘opening’ space? According to Merleau-Ponty, space does not exist by itself, but in relation to the subject and to the conscience’s phenomenal field. From this point of view, body does not move because there’s an empty space. The body is inside the space just as the heart is inside the body. It keeps the ‘vision’ of visible things alive and creates with it a system. This concept is what Merleau-Ponty calls, in The Visible and the Invisible, the ‘flesh’ which is the bodily continuity with perceived world, the bodily intertwining of perception and the perceived world (Carman 2008, 75).

In a complex building my body becomes part of a wider inter-connecting system involving me and the architectural elements com-posing the structure. That’s because in architectural design the buil-ding is conceived as from a mental representation of the body in space, as from the exploring sense of awareness. While drawing, mind reproduces in scale the kinesthetic properties of a body moving in space. Mental reasoning about spatial environments is strictly linked with spatio-analogical representation criteria. In the architects drawing process his, mind tends to create and explore task-sensitive representations to achieve specified spatial situations for the human



body. The idea of space in architecture should be connected with the idea of a ‘practiced space’, in the sense of how this space is experienced beyond the geometric perspective including other sensorial experiences. The experience of a railway station by night for example: the wheels of an incoming train, far voices from few passengers moving towards the exit, the low, orange light of night lampposts. Or the experience of a park at dawn: birds, the faint, cold light settling on the buildings and the sound of the wind in the trees. Those visible and audio traces can alter the experience of lived spaces. The experience of space to be fully understood by the body should be total and include all the aspects of the senses. Changing the relationships in a sequence of rooms, for example, produces impor-tant transformations of the properties of space and in general has an impact on how intelligible people perceive them. There’s a strict re-lationship between the geometrical properties of space and how we tend to recognize it.

6. The Body in Digital Space

The perception of architectural spaces is nowadays connected with the rise of technology and virtual reality produced by digital design. In the case of computer-aided architectural design – in which the architect can manipulate visual representations – architectural spaces gain a new reality by supporting the creation of new architectural objects. In this process, the constituting elements of a building become technical networks of communicating nodes. Digital design becomes not only a way to create new objects but also a support for communicative and intersubjective platforms which could be con-sidered means of mediation between people (Hovestadt 2007). Every part of the model is individually defined and can be created without referring to other parts of the model. In a computer model in which the architect presents a building, we can easily use a specific coordi-nate of the building, a determined point, a node or an architectural object, to develop news plans or physical models and create a whole building from it. During the design process every aspect of the model



can be modified. This is the reason why we often have the perception that the whole structure is constantly in movement.

By the developments of computer technologies such as computer aided design (CAD), virtual environments (VE) and virtual reality (VR), architects have an endless number of possibilities of representation. Designing in a digital environment allows the archi-tect to shape and re-shape the design continuously with less effort. But, as pointed out by Alicia Imperiale, the interest of architects is shifting from ‘Derridean deconstruction’ to ‘Deleuzian focus on smooth space, serial and dynamic process’ (Imperiale 2000). By the use of different mathematical calculations the architect strives to-wards a surprising, innovative element in the design process.

Imperiale points out that nowadays in contemporary architecture, the interest is no longer focused on designing spaces but entirely on the surface. In the new digital architecture the space as a proper object of architecture is mainly neglected. Often, the interior of a building is simply the concave part of the convex exterior surface, its internal opposite. Space becomes the residual part of the ‘skin’ or the ‘mass’ of the objects. Space is not ‘designed’ specifically and doesn’t seem to have properties or a specific architectural nature but it be-comes a derivative space, ‘what remains’ between different masses of the architectural objects juxtaposed. If computer programs can aid and even contribute to the design of an object what about the design of space and what impact on the body in digitally designed spaces?

In the virtual context of digital architecture the body oriented space is modified and the original movement is replaced by an exploring virtual body projected by the mind inside a non-Euclidean and non-orthogonal context. The most perceivable information is mainly visual rather than auditory or tactile. Virtual environments surely provide benefits on all phases of architectural design process and digital 3D models – being similar to physical models but without its tactile qualities – improve the perception of designs and the whole spatial perception of a building. The example of virtual reality (VR) – where a computer graphically simulate and make us interact with the real – is crucial. From this point of view, philosophy should reflect seriously upon the new relationship existing between embodiment, cognition and new technologies and tackle with no fear the ticklish



question of the effects of new technologies (and their use by the media) on our perception of reality. Audience’s perception of an event can be shaped, framed and mediated by mass media through a real mise-en-scène. This mise-en-scène focuses often on a singular frame isolated from its context. The result of this operation is the distortion of its original meaning. As underlined by Robert Sylwester (How Mass Media Affect our Perception of Reality, 2001), this well-pre-pared mise-en-scène is constructed for the purpose of exploring areas of strong emotional arousal to help shape our knowledge and opin-ions and produce rapid/impulsive and not delayed/reflective de-cisions.

This question has been tackled, from a different point of view, by semiologist Umberto Eco who defined the neo-television (reality TV for example), as an ‘auto-referential’ medium: images and news are created ad hoc with no direct relationship with the real world. This proceeding – in which the ‘enunciation’ has replaced the ‘enunciated’ and in which the audience is constantly bombarded with misleading messages – can cause a serious deformation of reality. All those questions should be examined from a phenomenological point of view in order to avoid what Heidegger predicted in 1966 – in the near future cybernetics (computer science) would replace philosophy. According to Merleau-Ponty, philosophy will not disappear at all if it will be supported by sciences and arts in general. Sean D. Kelly, for example, following Gareth Evan’s path, defends the position that any perceptual content is non-conceptual and emphasizes the importance of skilful capacities of bodily movement for perception. In his work he focuses on various and interesting aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific nature of human ex-perience.

The works of Hubert Dreyfus – whose famous book What computers can’t do (1972) provoked a large and public debate about the limits of AI and technology in general – have underlined the role of the body in intelligent behaviour and the relevance of phenol-menology to scientific explanation. He has outlined also a phenol-menology of skill acquisition as the basis for, as he says, “a Merleau-Pontian nonrepresentationalist cognitive science.” If the body is “the source of our sense of our grip on reality” and its shape and move-



ments play “a crucial role in our making sense of our world,” the loss of embodiment provoked by a “virtual world” can lead to “a loss of the ability to recognize relevance” and also “a loss of the sense of the reality of people and things” (H. Dreyfus, On the Internet, 2001).

In the multiplayer online role-playing games for example, indi-viduals are in the same virtual location at the same time. Where one used to imagine individually through dreams and stories, ‘reality’ is now actively and jointly created in virtual spaces. A new category of virtual worlds has also come into existence: users are required to populate, build and exploit empty digital spaces. The new reality created is becoming gradually more linked to our physical reality. As pointed out by Van Kokswijk in his Architecture of a Cyber Culture (2003), the physical and the virtual world seem to merge into one creating a new phenomenon, known as ‘interreality’: the interreality is an hybrid and absolute experience of physical and virtual reality, the creation of a hybrid total image of and in both the physical and virtual worlds. (De Nood and Atteema 2006, 10). In interreality, there is no clear distinction between the physical ‘real’ world and the virtual ‘artificial’ world. However those virtual worlds and technologies provide feedback for only three of the five senses. If the visual, auditory or tactile senses are concerned, smell or tactility are not included in virtual environments. Above all, kinesthesia – the sixth sense that we discussed above – is totally cut out since digitally pro-duced models often lack a sense of scale.

A space which is not assumed and experienced by the body and its movement remains an artificial space created ad hoc to be close-like to the body’s reality and doesn’t represent the whole multisensorial human experience. We are still in the homogenous space of the science, digital space has mathematical and geometrical properties but yet is not conceived to be experienced by the body’s kinesthesia and could so be misleading. The objects created can be wonderfully realized and can constitute an original experience for humans but they are conceived as detached, opaque objects in which lived space is derivative and the body’s movement is approximate, compelled secondary.



7. Conclusion

The sense of movement, as we demonstrated above, is crucial to provide access to the world. In conceptualizing space the cognitive theorists Lakoff and Johnsson points to how: “The body is not merely somehow involved in conceptualization but is shaping its very nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 37). The decisive role of the sensory-motor system for human understanding and perception of space is crucial. How we perceive spatiality and interpret space is the common denominator for both the cognitive and phenomenological perspective. While drawing the architect “thinks in drawing” (Smith 1993, 121–49), his hand reproduces on the paper a symbolic world following an ‘inner vision’ – the mental representation of an achieved building. In a virtual environment the process of creating through 3D software creates an alternative reality in which the Demiurge-Architect has endless possibilities to create and manipulate objects and in which estheticism becomes the priority rather than the laws of gravity. His ‘inner vision’ is replaced by software defying the laws of physics. The body is no longer the centre of the architectural project. While drawing, the mind creates spaces according to a bodily con-sciousness – the experiences of the body in physical space. Mental representations of those experiences can support the creation of new artificial spaces (Katz 2008).

However, in a virtual environment, the space is not conceived to be experienced by the human body and the attention is no longer focused on the impact of the achieved building on the environment or on human lives. In the new ‘interreality’ the distinction between a physical ‘real’ world and a virtual ‘artificial’ world becomes thinner and the connections between the two are becoming closer. These close connections have also strong social implications. The projection of an avatar image of the body in a virtual context is strictly connected with the idea of simulating the percistency of the Body Image in a virtual world: however, as we discussed above, a Body Image disconnected from its physical background, disconnected from a notion of kinesthesia and praktognosia, can lead to a mental ex-perience which is a mirror of reality and not the reality irself and for this could be misleading. From this point of view digital architecture –



whose main purpose seems to be the design in itself and not the concrete architecture – appears ‘detached’ from human life and devoid of any link to the concrete existence. Bodily space should be the core of the process of architectural design because any structure will be experienced, lived daily by humans. From this point of view, architecture shouldn’t simply manipulate or juxtapose architectural objects without any link to the physical existence. The structure of buildings should reflect our being-in-the-world. Putting the human body and its sense of movement in the center of digital architecture would be a new frontier for exploring the multiple nature of human perception. A ‘spatiality of situation’ should guide the work of the architect rather than a ‘spatiality of position’. Therefore we need to consider the context of the ‘flesh’ – the intertwining between the body and perceived world – the fundamental ground in order to grasp the intimate nature of space.

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