When Bodies Go Digital

• Main Author: Claire Larsonneur
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAES 2016-04-01
• Series: Angles
• Subjects: digital perception; immersive reality; body engineering; surveillance; abjection; contemporary fiction
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1856

This article intends to investigate contemporary works of art (“Rain Room”, “On Air”), fiction (David Mitchell, Jeannette Winterson, Thomas Pynchon, Kazuo Ishiguro) and films (The Congress, Black Mirror) together with emerging social practices to charter the impact of digital technologies on our relation to the body. Devices such as Google Glasses or Go-Pro cameras prompt a reframing of our perceptions through borrowed and enriched sensory experiences. Digital practices, tailored to blend in seamlessly with our daily activities, contribute to implement further the logic of immersion and compositing described by Lev Manovich in his analysis of new media. Beyond the field of media, digital technologies are also playing a role in the re-engineering of the human body itself. Bodies are being produced, tailored and marketed in a society that thrives on continuous body-display and monitoring, raising political and economic issues. Those digital body-chimeras could be described as unstable entities that threaten our sense of order and of ourselves, echoing Kristeva’s analysis of abjection.