Department Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley- senior thesis, 2007

An Argument for the Erasure of Everything, to then Later Realize that I’m Still Here: In My Body or 37 Degrees of Freedom¹

Tucked in the back of an exquisitely adorned building on the UC Berkeley campus is the tele-immersion lab. Inside a cage of cameras, surrounded by a technology that captures a three-dimensional image of a body positioned within the cage, users of tele-immersion can see themselves on a screen, projected, three-dimensionally, into a virtual space.² Then, another body can enter the space and virtually meet the user, using the same technology in a different geographical location. But let me take a step back; long before I ever stepped foot into the tele-immersion lab or even vaguely understood how the technology worked, I saw a dance piece that shook my ideas about how one can be embodied in a world increasingly mediated by information and communication technologies.

Last spring, I performed in a dance piece that directly followed a piece that used tele-immersion technology. It took me a few rehearsals of watching the piece before I could figure out what exactly was going on. A large screen hung in the middle of the stage and a projection of two bodies slowly dancing with one another captured everyone’s attention. Listening to the director on her cell phone, I slowly gathered that the two people projected onto the screen were dancing in real-time, in two separate locations, both within separate cages of cameras, but meeting in a virtual space and projected onto a stage for a performance. For the run of the show I gained little knowledge of the particularities of tele-immersion technology, but the beauty of two bodies dancing together and interacting with one another, yet being hundreds of miles apart amazed me.

I am invested in continually expanding an awareness of my body—my body in space and my body in relationship to everything around it. As a dancer, my body is a tool for communicating what I often feel gets convoluted through language. I am also part of a generation that has moved networking, dating, chatting, and even dancing into a virtual space of the Internet. Subsequently, I began an inquiry into how bodies are implicated in the use of technologies and virtual spaces, specifically looking at tele-immersion technology. Tele-immersion is a technology that is a particularly rich place of departure for interrogating embodiment and an understanding of presence and subjectivity both within and outside of virtual spaces.

Tele-immersion is an immersive communications technology that is being developed in the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) lab on the campus of UC Berkeley. Although there are other tele-immersion labs throughout the country, CITRIS is the lab that I have visited. Within a cage of cameras, a three-dimensional moving image of a body is captured and rendered into a virtual space. An image of that body is represented on a monitor that the person inside the system can watch while simultaneously being captured by the cameras. Unlike virtual reality, the subject cannot alter any of the objects within that virtual environment. “It is designed to allow people who are in remote geographical sites to communicate in real-time, in a 3-D shared space, as if they were in the same geographical space” (Reiner 396). I am interested in how an experience of presence within tele-immersion technology can affect notions of embodiment (both cognitive awareness of embodiment and embodiment as an unrecognized constant of the human condition which informs a person’s habitus), and the implications it can carry onto the body outside of that technology.

Arguing the implications of a technology that can effectively create a sense of presence and embodiment for the user turns into a hypothetical discussion that could coil around us and come to a conclusion only if that technology is ever actually produced. What is more immediate and currently effective is the notion of the imagination as a space that has bodily implications. My primary concern is not if the subject in the tele-immersion system can feel consistent, unbroken presence in her body within the “virtual” space; rather I argue that even the mere fact that she can imagine that she is present in that space, aided by the way the rendered images trigger her memories, has implications which affect bodily knowledges. Speaking of the importance of bodily knowledges, Stryker states that, “the body” is not “one (already constituted) object of knowledge among others, but rather [is] the contingent ground of all our knowledge, and all our knowing” (12). Within the context of technology and virtual spaces, focusing on embodiment illuminates how bodies are shaped and changed through mobile, hybrid environments.

Presence and Embodiment within the Tele-Immersion System

Tele-immersion technology, by presenting the possibility of multiple locations of presence and embodiment, creates an experience where a subject is co-located within multiple environments at the same temporal moment. According to Reiner, immersiveness deals “with what one sees, hears, touches, smells, and feels” (392); in short, immersiveness is related to how one interacts with the environment, and vice versa. Within tele-immersion, the user immerses herself into both the “real” space of the cage in the laboratory and the “virtual” space of the 3-D image.³

For the argument of this paper, a body can be thought of as integrated with the mind—the two functioning in a dialectical relationship. Speaking about the mind/body and what it perceives in relationship to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, Katherine Hayles states that,

the central premise is not that the cogitating mind can be certain only of its ability to be present with itself but rather that the body exists in space and time and that, through its interaction with the environment, it defines the parameters within which the cogitating mind can arrive at “certainties,” which not coincidentally almost never include the fundamental homologies generating the boundaries of thought (203).

What Hayles identifies and what is important for this argument is that the body interacts with the environment—the mind knows only through the body interacting with the environment. The body knows regardless of what we are aware of the mind knowing. The mind is not separate from the body; yet the mind and body can function and produce knowledges on unconscious levels; embodied knowledge production is influenced and affected through the use of tele-immersion technology.

Presence and embodiment, two concepts that are central arguments of this paper, are contingent largely upon subjective experience and perceived reality. While interviewing someone who has been in the tele-immersion system, I inquired about the experience of watching and either identifying or not with the image seen in the “virtual” space and on the monitor’s screen, and then how that might affect her sense of embodiment in “real” life. She replied using Reiner’s concepts of haptics in relation to presence,

Sometimes there’s resonance and sometimes there’s dissonance…There’s a moment where it really resonates, where my memories of how I look, what I’ve formed in my head, how I hold, how I visualize myself, my body image, aligns with what I’m seeing. It’s that my haptic cognitive system is mapping with the visual image. So my memories, my sensations are aligning with what I’m seeing… I tend to live in that visual image. I tend to feel my body through the image a little bit more (Personal interview, 26 Sept. 2007).

The interviewee is a dancer who already has a heightened awareness of her body in space and is comfortable with relating the image of her body that she sees in a mirror to her fleshy body that is in a particular space. The tele-immersion system is distinctly different from simply looking in a mirror. Firstly, one of tele-immersion’s defining characteristics is that a 3-D image of a body is rendered into the system and represented in the virtual space, on the monitor. This means that by using computer controls, one can look at the image from any angle or direction, giving views of the body that cannot be captured by simply looking in a mirror. Secondly, because the image is rendered into a “virtual” space, two remote bodies, while both using this technology, can meet in one shared space without being in the same “real” space; to both be located in a mirror, two bodies must be in front of the same mirror, in the same “real” space, at the same time.

Within tele-immersion, the user inside the cage can have multiple experiences of presence, which are contingent upon a flow between perceptions of presence and embodiment. Miriam Reiner discusses presence functionally in relation to haptics. “Haptics (touch and kinesthetics) is not only a sensory channel to receive information, but also a channel for expressiveness through actions” (392). She says presence “is influenced by the fine synchronization between the flow of haptic sensations and action” (392). With this definition, Reiner is looking at the information necessary to create an experience of presence. Presence is thus not based in actuality but in perceived experience. This is an important definition of presence for tele-immersion because of the ability for memory to trigger haptic sensations, which is discussed later.

Another definition of presence is presented by “The Presence Project,” which is an ongoing project occurring at Stanford University. The project tackles the question, “what constitutes presence?” Through various kinds of performance and digital media, the project questions presence specifically on the stage and describes presence as a concept where “interaction is implicated—presence often implies being in someone’s presence” (“Performing Presence”). Along with Reiner’s definition, stated above are two ways of thinking about presence: one that is more functional in relationship to touch and feel, and one that highlights interaction and implies that presence occurs because of a lack of absence. Presence also implies the location of a body or bodies, which can have an awareness of their place in space based on notions of embodiment.

Two aspects of embodiment are body image and body schema. They are two systems that closely interact but are distinctly different. “Body image consists of a complex set of intentional states and dispositions—perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes—in which the intentional object is one’s own body” (Gallagher 25). Body image is about an awareness of one’s body. On the other hand, body schema “is a system of sensory-motor functions that operate below the level of self-referential intentionality” (26). With these two definitions it is clear that embodiment is an interplay between conscious perception and hidden bodily functions that can interact on a continuum. Embodiment is not contingent upon awareness; “when we are not perceptually attentive to the body, we still may have some degree of marginal awareness of it” (28). Presence and embodiment are in a relationship with one another—a relationship that is constantly interacting but difficult to see because of its ability to slither between consciousness, unconsciousness, reality, and virtuality. These aspects of embodiment are essential in understanding the potential bodily implications of tele-immersion technology.

Tele-immersion can expand a phenomenological awareness or sense of one’s body, which is expressed by the same user that is quoted earlier. She says,

So, if I’m in the system, my body image is immediately affected because I see my body and it’s a remote body, but I see a whole different body image… That changes then what I might sense of my body or my body schema. So then I have a different relationship to the environment… I can get this deeper range of understanding of my body image and therefore that affects how I might understand, or create different neural pathways. I might start slightly standing in a different way if I think that’s aesthetically more interesting; or shift, ooh, I didn’t realize my hair looked that way, or whatever it is. Those external stimulus are going to change several of these pathways, these neurological things that happen to us. So then my body schema gets altered, which then my body image is changed, and it’s this interplay that’s happening (Personal interview, 26 Sept. 2007).

Tele-immersion can shift one’s recognition of an objective happening of a particular function of the body to an experiential awareness of that function through heightening the dialectical relationship between a person’s body image and their body schema. In other words, tele-immersion can emphasize that which goes unrecognized in the body schema and consequently bring that function into the realm of the body image. Phenomenology is thought to emphasize “the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role of repeated habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 544). Simply, Ahmed states that phenomenology is a result of living in relationship with the objects and bodies that surround us and that awareness shifts within that relationship. By focusing on phenomenology within the tele-immersion system it is easier to understand the implications of communications technologies on bodies and awareness of those bodies.

The user within the tele-immersion system expresses a feeling of ‘that’s me, but that’s not me.’ While this is a feeling people express when seeing themselves in film or in photographs, what is particular in tele-immersion is the ability to shift points of view of the represented body in real-time. Cognitively, the fact that bodies can be co-located and abstracted into a virtual space does not have to make sense to the user in order to have bodily implications. The “virtual” space inhabited by a “virtual” body is an ambiguous place that is not quite reality, but has real implications on bodies in “real” life, as is exemplified in the changing interplay between body image and body schema. Reiner discusses how haptics can be triggered based upon stored memories that do not necessarily have to be consciously remembered. “Research on neurology of haptics shows that haptic patterns are memorized and recognized even if the haptic experience itself is not remembered” (394). Bodies both remember and feel regardless of a mind’s memory. Similarly, a person in the tele-immersion system does not necessarily have to believe that she is present in the “virtual” space in order for certain stimulus to trigger memories in her haptic cognitive system, nor does she have to believe that she is present in the “virtual” space in order for new haptic patterns to form.

Tele-immersion is a place where resonance and dissonance can occur simultaneously, creating ambiguities in place, presence, and embodiment. One person I spoke to shares her feelings of dissonance within tele-immersion. She describes her apprehensions at seeing her image in the system:

I felt like my movements were not reliable and that at any moment my image could fall apart…I felt far removed from her because in a sense I was. I was many analogues and formulas away from my virtual self. She had been taken apart, analyzed, then put back together in order to show up on the screen. It seemed that in someway, through all that processing, some of her was lost (Personal correspondence, 29 October 2007).

Although this user felt distance from the image on the screen, she refers to the virtual image as “my virtual self.” There is an implied recognition that the virtual image is part of her, albeit a fractured part of her. Returning to a discussion of phenomenology, Ahmed states, “orientations are tactile and they involve more than one skin surface” (551-552). When floating awareness is between a “real” body and a “virtual” body, the surfaces of skin are both felt and watched; they absorb and reject proximity.

As stated earlier, the possibility of multiple locations of presence, within the same temporal moment, within one individual, in a virtual space is available inside the tele-immersion system. Subject formation occurs under a multiplicity of environments. How we experience presence and our bodies mediated through technology must have implications in the notion of how subjectivity is constructed. If bodies can be abstracted, co-located, split, and there can be multiple locations of felt embodiment and experienced presence, how does that affect the concept of a self? How might this affect the notion of where bodies begin or end?

Using the notion of multiple surfaces of skin within the interplay between reality and virtuality reminds me of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theories. Haraway defines a cyborg as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (425). Haraway’s question, “why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin” (449) implies that within the tele-immersion system, it is possible to think of the body that enters as becoming a cyborg—“the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (457). The co-location does not necessarily have to be seen as a split but can rather be seen as a continuation of the body, a re-visioning of the space of the body.

The body is re-envisioned in relationship to its place in space. According to “The Presence Project,” to interrogate presence is to move outside of the self. “To be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial” (“Performing Presence”). Conceptualizing presence in this way shows the social and spatial implications of living as a body—a body is located in space within a network of social relations. The notion of space is foregrounded when looking at tele-immersion. In order to feel present in tele-immersion, the “virtual” space must be somewhere. The “virtual” space has a location; it exists. Does that make it a “real” space? There is not a clear line drawn between “virtual” and “real” space (bodies also)—they are dialectically related. Subjectivities, then, “must be reconfigured for an economy of information” where there is not just one location for a subject to inhabit at any given moment (Hayles 64).

“Real” and “virtual” become obfuscated through their interaction within communications technologies, which re-asserts their ambiguity and highlights their instability as distinct concepts (regardless of my attempt to give the terms distinct definitions at the beginning of this paper). Katherine Hayles wonders about her subjectivity as she stands viewing a digital media installation. She reflects,

What kind of subject am I as I stand musing before this installation? I certainly am not the autonomous liberal self that located identity in consciousness and rooted it in my ability, first and foremost, to possess my own body… I am one kind of material embodiment; the virtual creatures are another; and we are connected through intermediations that weave us together in a web of jointly articulated cognitive activities (213).

What Hayles expresses, being interwoven with the virtual creatures, can be applied to how the “real” human engages with its “virtual” body inside the tele-immersion system. Who possesses the body that is rendered into “virtual” space through tele-immersion? Is it the “real” human? Is it the computer? Is it the engineer typing the algorithms into the system? As Hayles suggests, the joined identity, formed between different types of material embodiment (whether “real” or “virtual”),⁴ calls into question the self as possessor of a free body—a notion present in nearly all modern constitutions.

A Glimpse Beyond Tele-Immersion

Indeed, for the first time in history the entire planet is capitalist, since even the few remaining command economies are surviving or developing through their linkages to global, capitalist markets (Castells 2).

Tele-immersion technology problematizes the idea that a person has one body over which that person has ownership by locating multiple bodies that exist in multiple locations within one individual simultaneously. This technology exists within a larger framework of communication and information technology that has reshaped the global economy and repositioned the bodies that serve the economy.

If everything, and everyone, who can be a source of value can be easily connected—and as soon as he/she/it ceases to be so, can be easily disconnected (because of individuation and extreme mobility of resources)—then the global system of production is populated simultaneously by extremely valuable and productive individuals and groups, and by people (or places) who are not, or are not any longer considered valuable, even if they are still physically there (Castells 9).

Information technologies, which are often focused on how to represent bodies in virtual spaces in a way that mimics or even duplicates reality, are placing bodies in a space that is increasingly connected to information capitalism, as well as making it easier to select and deselect entire populations or groups of people based on value and productivity. This opens a possibility to bring Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics” into the virtual realm and question how “biopower” might play out on “virtual” bodies.⁵ How might information technologies like tele-immersion provide new ways for the state to exercise control over bodies?

Earlier I posed the question, who possesses the body that is rendered into virtual space through tele-immersion? Another relevant question is: who/what controls the body that is rendered into a virtual space, by what means, and for what end?

Life in an electronic panopticon is tantamount to having half of our lives permanently exposed to monitoring. Because we live composite existences, this exposure may lead to a schizophrenic self between being ourselves off-line and an image of ourselves on-line, thus internalizing censorship (Castells 180).

The internalization of censorship is a reflection of the censorship and control that the state exhibits through biopolitics.

The development of the great instruments of the state… [act] as factors of segregation and social hierarchization…guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony…The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces [are]…indispensable (Foucault 141).

Bodies as indispensable mechanisms of the state, which work toward capital accumulation is reframed within global information capitalism. Information technologies, as instruments of the state, will spread hegemony and highlight new ways to create unequal power structures through bodily control (masked as promises of freedom from bodily constraints in the material world).

Populations of people are already used by the state as resources in the information global economy. As Castells notes, “there is…a systemic relationship between the rise of informational, global capitalism, under current conditions, and the extraordinary growth of social exclusion and human despair” (10). Moving back to tele-immersion, it is a technology that arose and continues to be developed out of a society steeped in prejudices and inequalities. It is not a site of open possibility for all bodies; rather it can reinforce the subjugation of certain bodies on the small scale of the individual to the large scale of bodies that make up a population.

Marginalized groups are still subjugated within these new subjectivities that are created through information technologies—it is not a utopian ideal that lends itself toward equality.

On the one side the dream of freely flowing information strains to escape scarcity, restricted physical space, class, gender, embodiment, time, and mortality; on the other side the claims of corporate profit, stratified social structures, physical confinement, gender inequalities, marked and failing bodies re-assert their inevitability (Hayles 64).

The structures of power in place are reproduced through these new technologies. Looking at tele-immersion within information capitalism shows the implications this technology can create that extend beyond individual bodies. While the technology presents a possibility to expand and confound phenomenological notions of presence and reality, these changes continue to oppress and exclude certain groups of people and types of bodies.

Subjugated Bodies: Implications Information Technologies Can Have on Marginalized Bodies

Societal structures and institutions in the “global north” are made up of bodies that interact under legitimated structures of inequality, science being one of them. Women’s bodies, bodies of people of color, bodies with disabilities, bodies not gendered along the binary, etc. suffer because of practices which separate the bodies from the subjects. To support this claim I will discuss a real situation that occurred in the tele-immersion lab, which will function as a metonym for the subjugation of marginalized bodies.

Whether or not the haptic cognitive system will align with what the viewer inside the tele-immersion system sees of themselves on the monitor is influenced by how accurately what the viewer sees aligns with a mental image of what the viewer thinks her body looks like (body image). Science’s default body is the white, male body. All other bodies are problems to later overcome and add-in. As Susan Stryker notes, it is imperative to

investigate questions of embodied difference, and analyze how such differences are transformed into social hierarchies—without ever losing sight of the fact that “difference “ and “hierarchy” are never mere abstractions; they are systems of power that operate on actual bodies (3).

Stryker is stating the importance of looking at structures that create bodily difference and highlighting the power within those structures. I see a correlation between a fracturing of selves of marginalized people in “real” life to some technical difficulties in the tele-immersion system.

I was told early in my research that the tele-immersion “system cameras often read "white" skin better than any other color” (Personal correspondence, 19 September 2007). While on the one hand this is a technical problem to be overcome by enhancing the quality of the algorithms used to render the images, on the other hand it has implications in how particular bodies can be represented and the likelihood of resonance between the real body and the represented body. The non-technical description of one of the reasons why this happened is because the system does an action called background subtraction. Because the background of the system is a black screen, subsequently all black that is against that screen is subtracted. One engineer in the lab called the fact that this subsequently erased the skin of the black student a coincidence. I gave a sarcastic, “yeah, coincidence” in response.

While in the lab for the first time I saw firsthand the graduate students implementing new algorithms that would make it so the cameras can render darker skin clearer. There was no talk about race and barely even a mention of skin color;⁶ the interaction was simply that the black student in the class was asked to pose inside the system to see if the new algorithms could render his face and arms (the only areas of exposed skin) more clearly. The body of the black student was literally erased (“subtracted”)—could not be rendered—by the system cameras before the new algorithm was implemented, as an after-thought.

Watching a dark-skinned person pose so that cameras could render his image more accurately brought up a couple reasons for discomfort: one, the positioning of a dark-skinned subject under technologies that are reminiscent of visual surveillance, which can have implications on subject formation under that framework, and two, the individualized affect that the initial lack of a clearly rendered image might have on embodiment within that technology and how that might shape bodily knowledges. Both of these can create fractured notions of self. Joseph Pugliese positions himself within technologies of surveillance:

Even as I am positioned within a particular frame, a series of other identities dislocate me and situate me outside its parameters. Coexisting, at one and the same time, these other identities are nourished and performed in heterotopic spaces that are invisible to technocratic regimes of visual surveillance. They signal the dumb limit of a scopic mastery – biometric, digital and globally networked – that founders at the very threshold of the racial fault-lines it constructs and patrols. Located in the locus of the non, occupying no proper place, these other identities articulate alterities not encompassed by Orientalism’s exhaustive inventory, its multiple dossiers, its claims to absolute mastery (Pugliese).

Pugliese notes that identities other than the one in which he is being framed, at a specific temporal moment, are reinforced through biometric surveillance and subsequently coexist and co-mingle with his positionality in that particular frame. It dislocates him to a place for which he has no historical inventory—a place that cannot be mapped geographically; it exists as a shared fantastical construction that is real because it is believed to be real. Technologies that rely on visual input, which foreground sight as the sense which can most accurately position someone’s identity, create a knowledge production that erases subtleties and constructs new identities through, as in this example, dark skin. These new subjects are located in the “locus of the non.”

Pugliese’s use of notion of the “locus of the non” has ramifications when applied to virtual spaces.⁷ The tele-immersion system is a specific frame in which the dark-skinned student is positioned. Because of the dark color of his skin, he is constructed and projected into “virtual” space with an unclear rendering of his identity. “I am what is pre-comprehended before me. My body is captured within a horizon of interpretation not of its own making. Regardless of what I am about to say, I am already said...”(Pugliese). His represented image is racialized in a “locus of the non,” which occupies no proper place—it is a place in which non-white-skinned bodies are fragmented in a way white-skinned bodies are not. The “virtual,” fragmented, alteric identity coexists with the identities of the “real” body standing inside the cage of cameras.

The concept of the “locus of the non” relates to Fanon’s assertions about consciousness of the body being a negating activity:

It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world (110-11).

Environments, over which certain subjugated bodies have no control, inform and influence the knowledges of bodies. Subsequently there is a loss of control over how the self is affected by the bodily changes. For Pugliese, he has identities thrust upon him based on an idea of what he is or where he is in space, whether he has consciousness of his body or not. Fanon notes the constant dialectic bodies play with the spaces they inhabit and that “below the corporeal schema [there is] sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that [are] used [have] been provided…by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (111). Fanon’s writing highlights the fact that constructions of identity are based in historical relations of power. Information technologies do not and cannot exist outside of history.

Conclusion: Imagination

The notion that “virtual” spaces can free people from the material constraints of “real” bodies is complicated by the fact that “virtual” space and the technologies used to access that space cannot be separated from the unequal structures of power that create hierarchies of bodily difference. The necessity of re-envisioning the space of bodies in an age run by information technologies, through foregrounding how technologies are shaping and changing bodily knowledge, illuminates how bodies are implicated in power relations in the material world.

An element that this paper did not explore in depth is the function of the imagination specifically inside immersive communications technologies. Yes, the imagination was both implied and implicated within experiences of presence and embodiment, but its role in affecting bodily change can be foregrounded. Butler notes the function of fantasy and imagination when she says, “fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home” (29). What is the appeal of inserting bodies and identities into virtual spaces? Is it the seemingly infinite nature of the space as an open possibility to experience a different sense of reality? These are questions that should be answered with more ethnographic work. As in tele-immersion, the imagination is asked to fill in sensory input and fantasize a reality through a variety of subjective experiences of presence and embodiment. Butler emphasizes embodiment in fantasy; do technologies that provide possibilities of virtual embodiment literally bring fantasy—the elsewhere—home? But again, the material reality within which virtuality is situated problematizes this fantasy, as the above section on subjugated bodies demonstrates.

Thinking back to the dance piece last spring, the intimacy in how the virtual dancing bodies interacted made it difficult to imagine that the real bodies dancing together in the virtual space were co-located in material space. That image is what, combined with my own embodied daily experiences with technology, compelled me to walk into unknown territory, up the stairs to the tele-immersion laboratory, and realize that, regardless of a popular shift into information technologies and virtual realms, I’m still here, in my body.

Notes

1 “In mechanics, degrees of freedom (DOF) are the set of independent displacements that specify completely the displaced or deformed position of the body or system” (“Degrees of freedom (engineering)”).

2 In this paper, “virtual” is a concept that is dialectically connected to “real.” Felluga’s interpretation (I find Felluga’s descriptions of Lacan’s theories to be concise and useful for the purposes of this paper, rather than turning directly to Lacan) of Lacan’s notion of ‘the real’ helps problematize the notions of “real” and “virtual” and helps to understand why I am not placing virtual and real as oppositional concepts.

As far as humans are concerned… "the real is impossible," as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality") (Felluga).

If recognition of our materiality is traumatic, then virtual space can be seen as a space of potential escape from that trauma. Virtual space as a space of fantasy can be an opportunity to mediate the disjuncture humans feel (according to Lacan) with their reality. The complication between “real” and “virtual” can be applied to both space and bodies in space.

3 The “real” space here is the space outside of the virtual aspect of tele-immersion. The “virtual” space, then, is the space where the virtual body is located. These two spaces interact and overlap, which highlights the ambiguity between “real” and “virtual” spaces. This is a point that will prove important when I begin to talk about information capitalism.

4 The “virtual” realm is not a material realm per se, but the mechanisms used to create and enter “virtual” spaces are material and exist in “reality.”

5 “Biopower,” as an indispensable element of capitalism controls populations of bodies in the interest of the state (Foucault 140-141).

The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar

technology—anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life—characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through (139).

6 Except that the engineer told me that he doesn’t show up in the renderings too well either (he has brown skin, similar to my own).

7 Virtual space is not quite located anywhere geographically, even though a notion that it is located somewhere is necessary for feelings of presence and embodiment in those spaces. It becomes easy to imagine virtual space as having a concrete location through websites like “Second Life”, in which virtual space contains representations of imagined, shared geographic locations which can be bought and sold, and serve the function to recreate and re-imagine social, civil, and political structures virtually.

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