[-empyre-] virtual embodiment - some thoughts on resonances of the virtual in 2014

[Susan Kozel]

Hello - it is good to be back on Empyre. Thanks to Sue and Simon for luring me back and for drawing together a good range of hosts for this discussion.

It seems we are following on from a particularly vibrant month of discussions around the sonic. Threads from that discussion can certainly be brought forward.

Here are some reflections to get things rolling:

“virtual embodiment”: When I first heard this topic I felt a little sense of deflation, as if I had said all I wanted to say. As if it were a tired topic.
BUT…
the ‘virtual’, always a polysemic term demanding definition and redefinition, has not gone away. It might not be in my artistic life the way it was in the 1990s or the 2000s where we integrated cameras, sensors, and computers into studios, galleries, theatres and garments for explorations of materiality, but the lives of everyone are far more extended and extenuated with networked digital media technologies than they were then.
What does virtual mean now? As a term it replaced ‘cyber’ (thankfully) and came to stand for freedom and digitization (in some cases freedom through digitization): the freedom to live across multiple materialities, the ability to communicate, create, conduct relationships, and achieve pleasure or distraction outside mainstream industries, conventions and spaces (think of everything from crowdsourcing, to self-publishing, to virtual sex). Practically, the virtual offered the ability to question material practices. Philosophically, the virtual opened a sense of that which has not-yet-been-formed. Something protean, filled with the potential for things to be otherwise. Seductive indeed.
(It should be clear by now that virtual for me is not exclusively that of virtual worlds – the acquisition of Oculus Rift by social media giant Facebook also reveals that virtual domains bleed into social networked and mobile media.)
It is impossible to avoid the question of whether the utopian potential of the virtual is crashing around our ears. The dark side of the technologies many of us use to explore corporeality, connection, transformation, and choreography, is surveillance and containment. We live in a post-Snowden world, where we can no longer adopt a stance of political or creative obliviousness to the way the digital technologies so many of us have used in art have the potential to track and store more information about any of us than we ever dreamed. Our virtual selves are extensions of ourselves but now at one remove: we don’t know where they live or what triangulations of our data may reveal to others who interpret our data. We have other audiences.
So my initial sense of deflation at the prospect of discussing virtual embodiment has been replaced with a sense of the necessity of such conversation at this time.



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