Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

by Mark B.N. Hansen

Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings.

Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Text was not as philosophically interested as I had hoped. Hansen spends most of his time analysing virtual reality through the lens of digital art, but provides no sustained engagement with interfaces. Use of theory is hazy and underdeveloped. The text sustains no clear focus throughout and feels largely disjointed.

[nick]

The theory of technics and embodiment that makes up Part I—Merleau-Ponty with a heavy dose of Simondon and reconfigured by postmillenial digital tech—is impressive and full of (mostly-undelivered-on) promise. Like so many "new" media theories past, aspects of this have taken on a retrofuture quality: the janky-seeming, half-forgotten quality of the art at the book's center (the last chapter is on House of Leaves) and also the deep well of optimism Hansen finds in the preindividual basis of technology's underlying conditions of embodiment, an attitude that (while still basically convincing) feels quaint in the wake of so many tragedies of the "sensory commons."

[Beverly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too hard to read. It was all about particular examples of digital art; not what I was looking for.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most fascinating aspect of the book, was the correlation of technics to Merleau-Ponty's conception of flesh.