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

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks to Susan Kozel and her thoughtful opening, and to the moderators for inviting me to address a subject that may indeed be widely open to interpretation.....suggesting concepts and practices that are situated in the physical, the computational, the imaginative, the metaphysical or all of these spaces, depending on context. 

[Susan schreibt]
>>“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.
[...]
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>>


As I listened to last month's discussion on new sonic pathways, and pleaded for breathing room, so I wish to start slowly and hope that many here on the list will feel comfortable joining in, right away,  and having a chat amongst us. 

Susan's comment made me pause and reflect on how terms, such as the "virtual", change meanings and how the sexy utopian attachments fall off by the wayside, yet to be replaced, perhaps, by other industry promises and accoutrements, like
the soon to be fashionable (if dreadful) Google glasses and other riff raff. (I do not know what Oculus Riff is but have to trust Simon Biggs, who's already retro-engineered it for an exhibition, that many social media users will inevitably use it?). 
I remain calm and undisturbed by this prediction. This in the week when I read in a British paper that Facebook conducted a covert study on how to manipulate our emotions........ "Facebook fiasco: was Cornell's study of ‘emotional contagion’ an ethics breach? A covert experiment to influence the emotions of more than 600,000 people" [http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach]. Well, good luck Facebook.

Before continuing, I urge us to reflect on Susan's conclusion to her post: > 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.>

The notion of "other audiences" is provocative; we not live in a post-snowden world though since secret/state agency collection of our data was a common assumption, i think, and many folks involved in civil rights, grass roots and activist action movements had always been aware of the audiences. 

I have no position on "virtual embodiment,"  but just like Susan, after some years of experimentation with telematics and networked performance (across distances and time zones, and some technical obstacles), around 2005 or 2006 I became bored with it or, rather, dissatisfied - the distant touch felt less and less real, the projected/screen spectre more and more predicable, and our gestures increasingly redundant (no "love in the telematic embrace," sorry Roy Ascott, sorry Paul Sermon). We went back to the dance studio to focus on working with more physical ideas, including (perhaps contradictorily) a greater tuning towards sound and the sonic. I do I touch hearing your movement.

If I may add here a small proposal for a reconsideration of the terms and technologies we use, it would be to question the now abundantly academically sanctioned jargon on "embodiment."

I often do not quite know what is meant and how it is mean precisely, this "embodiment,"  and how you would think the virtual (the furthest-extended "socially" mediated selves, whatever those are) in conjunction with bodies and the sensorial/sensual beings we are or were, and those sensual experiences, as I also remember, did not need or collude with audiences.

regards
Johannes Birringer 
dap-lab