Daniel Black

Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin: Tools, Machines and Interfaces

Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to all living things, the closeness of this engagement making any account that seeks to draw a clear boundary between body and artefact problematic. By doing this I seek to clarify the nature of our embodied relationship with various kinds of artefacts; moving from tools to machines to digital interfaces, I consider their differing potentials to be gathered into the body schema, and thus change our embodied horizons of perception and action. While much research currently seeks to facilitate a more ‘natural’ mode of interacting with technology, I argue that such a mode of interaction does not exist outside the particularity of our relationships with specific objects. As a result, rather than trying to cater to supposedly more natural modes of action and perception, future technologies should aim to enrich our experience with new modes, inviting novel relationships that produce new kinds of sensory and other experience.

What Is a Face

The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most mercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any one body. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggest that the differences separating each account are merely reflective of the multiplex nature of the face itself.

The virtual ideal: Virtual idols, cute technology and unclean biology

The virtual idol, a computer-generated media starlet largely confined to Japan, takes the logic of corporately managed celebrity and simplifies it to the point of caricature. However, despite the simplicity of the motivations behind virtual idol production, this figure also constitutes a point of intersection for discourses of femininity, technology and corporeal aesthetics. Part machine, part cartoon character, part media-disseminated pop star, part toy, part pin-up girl, part game, part doll, part puppet . . . in the design, function and aesthetic evaluation of the virtual idol can be seen an interplay of seemingly quite disparate themes, each of which has a much wider resonance in the culture of contemporary Japan, but also elsewhere in the post-industrial world. What is most striking is that, when placed within the larger context of simulations and affectations of femininity, the streamlining of technology and the design of cute consumer goods, these differing discourses reconnect through a set of shared concerns, anxieties and aesthetic judgements about the human body. The virtual idol can be seen to quite literally embody the interplay between these three areas.

An Aesthetics of the Invisible: Nanotechnology and Informatic Matter

The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, has been an object of fascination and admiration since the 19th century. However, the discourse surrounding nanotechnology – at least at its most optimistic – promises the possibility of human mastery over this domain and, as a result, over all matter. This belief carries forward the old idea of a division between a realm of the base, material and particular, on one hand, and a realm of the perfect, immaterial and abstract, on the other, one which today is most powerfully expressed in information discourse. Within this framework, nanotechnology promises the ability to negotiate and even dissolve this division, allowing matter itself to be treated as a kind of information. The most enthusiastic adherents of this idea believe that this will one day allow us to ‘reprogram’ material reality itself.

Why can I see my avatar?: Embodied visual engagement in the third-person video game

This essay seeks to answer two questions raised by the success of video games where the player looks at the character she is playing rather than seeming to inhabit the same coordinates as the character within the game space. First, why is the experience of playing these games not innately inferior to that of playing games with a first-person point of view, given that the sense of being a character sensing and acting inside the game space could be expected to be much stronger when the character’s body seems to be one’s own rather than a separate entity in the game space? And second, if the first-person point of view is so “immersive” and provides such a sense of being “inside” the representational space as is sometimes claimed, why has it never been so prominent in other audiovisual entertainment media such as film and television?

The Virtual Idol: Producing and Consuming Digital Femininity

Idols exist primarily as a carefully constructed mode of performance. While, of necessity, this mode of performance is most commonly generated by a living body, dependence upon a physically present performer is not inevitable. Originating in Japan but also experimented with elsewhere, the virtual idol is a media performance which exists independently of the referent of any living performer. While the virtual idol is a native inhabitant of the digital media world in which all idols primarily operate, it perhaps remains the case that a lack of living materiality limits her capacity to emulate traditional forms of media celebrity; at the same time, however, this media image’s independence from any single living body provides an opportunity for a new kind of relationship between idol and fan to appear. This new kind of relationship, being overwhelmingly one between an artificial woman and a male consumer, crucially depends upon the commodification and mass-production of a certain kind of femininity.

Algo-Rhythm And Mello-Dy: A Consideration Of The Relationship Between Technology And The Embodied Performance Of Music

The use of found or appropriated sounds in music has taken place for as long as magnetic tape recording has been generally available, starting with figures like John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, and it became more mainstream in the 1960s with technology such as the mellotron. While the utilization of found sounds by the musique concrete movement later produced more mainstream successes such as Sergio Leone. The development of digital synthesis technology, the rise of software-based music production, and the sheer volume of computer hard drive storage, has led to a vast increase in the sophistication of sampling. Popular definitions of musical performance have tended to be exclusionary and reactionary, and seemingly aimed primarily at asserting the superiority of particular genres. They have tended to present graduated differences as absolute differences or make untenable appeals to abstractions or interior states. Keywords: digital synthesis technology; mellotron; musical performance