[-empyre-] Virtual embodiment made of meat As Time Goes By

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks for the recent postings and replies, especially Daniel's on "saudade", absent embodiment, and the collective fear of certain masks (this was a brilliant story about ideology?), and Wesley's commentary on "multi-layered, multi-document pieces where the non-physical digital artefact does not have to resolve all elements of the work – in fact often I explicitly work to ensure that enquiry and wonder are aspects of these documents." 


The collective virtual experience -- have we addressed it enough? (I think, also, John Hopkins' research on ways of sensing the world and dynamic public platforms that can transform creative practices in what he calls the "regime of amplification" may really offer fertile ground...)

At the beginning of the month, there was the stipulation:

>>a new virtual experiential space [becomes] widely available:  this raises questions concerning the impact of the virtual when it converges with popular social media. As shared VR experiences becomes pervasive how might social conventions shift and the underpinning notions of selfhood and collective evolve? What might a collective virtual experience contribute to notions of extended or distributed mind, agency or identity? Does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices? What will the quotidian affects be?>>

have we explored the notion of a virtual experiential space (and its "quotidian affects") or a critique of popular social media enough? would we even be able to delve into an extended critique of "social technologies/media" and their protocols?

My own limited, and short-sighted, comments on "dispositif" (back then I assumed we were discussing so-called interactive installations or performances involving performer or audience participation in a sensory bodily experience of a 'work')
certainly would need to be revisited if we were to think of the infinitely larger "techno-social system"  that John had evoked, and John's position (like Simon Biggs's) argues that we are indeed embedded in the techno-social system as a whole, as holistic and related organism. Thus, I take John to propose, it's not possible at all to participate in any collective social system (or culture) and remain unaffected by the collectively generated protocols (and these protocols imply parameters, limits) that technologies, and social media, apply to individual creative expressions. Further, it would then not be possible to not be affected by the protocols of embodiment.   (Coding, incidentally I heard, is to be included now in school curricula at an early stage, which is a necessary move, I think, to provide accesses to algorithmic languages and thus hopefully a greater critical awareness). 

Perhaps we could take another closer look at the forms of these protocols of embodiment (my suggestion of slapstick was one, Simon Taylor added disease and death processes, Alan Sondheim the wired,abject body and economically abjected and overpowered body, while Roger Malina spoke of intimate science into what bodies in fact cannot sense and what protocols are involved in such intimacy?  & there were numerous other suggestions made over the weeks of our discussion), and  marvel at how expansive, and unbearable,  our melancholic despair (saudade) would have to be?

Johannes Birringer