Phenomenology
It was the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty who most successfully challenged 'Cartesian perspectivsim’. He argued it is that perception can only exist through the whole body, that perception is not only intellectual but must include the visceral, the senses and the emotions.
Here he goes on to dismantle the dualism in Cartesian principle by stating;
‘In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world.’[ii](Merleau-Ponty, p. 238)
This is radically opposes the prevailing hegemony.
‘I think, therefore I am’ and almost overriding it by what could be termed as ‘I perceive, therefore I am’.’(Ajana)
In doing so Merleau-Ponty firmly places the body back into the frame and the mind back into the body and therefore the ‘body’ back into the world. Whilst doing so he also puts places the body as part of the world. In other words the world contains the body and the body contains the world.
As I stated the alarm with which many regard new technologies as having the potential to undermine the human being is evidenced in the popularity of the cyborgs, Avatar and in sites such as ‘Second life’.
To some extent it is the Cartesian rejection of the body that has fuelled the belief that we are in danger of living, as Hayes points out, a ‘posthuman existence’.
Hayes descriptions of ‘the posthuman’ are the apotheosis Cartesian thought.
It [The posthuman view] privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life…..
The posthuman view regards the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born[iii]. (Hayes, p.3)
My interest is on phenomenology’s influence on Interactive art installations.
I will be looking at work that has been created by Interactive artists using motion tracking in conjunction with phenomenological intent when creating work. I will be placing emphasis on work that uses natural body movements in its interactivity, as part of an attempt to both make explicit embodiment and to explore some of the outcomes of doing so aesthetically and conceptually.
I believe that the reason there is now interest in phenomenology with new media artists is because some of the principles of phenomonolgy are embedded in the technology itself so that , for example, Lev Manovich suggests
Physical space now contains many more dimensions than before, and while from the phenomenological perspective of the human subject, the “old” geometric dimensions may still have the priority, from the perspective of technology and its social, political, and economic uses, they are no longer more important than any other dimension. (Manovich)
Although most interactive modes of communication are still screen based, Manovich goes on to point out that the ‘line of sight’ has expanded to include mobile devices, surveillance cameras, gps, radar amongst others. This means that our spatial understanding is experiencing a paradigm shift which is being determined by the technology itself; in other words it is the technology that is making us challenge the Cartesian view because it no longer ‘fits’.
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that ‘We impose the form of the old on the content of the new’.[iv] seems apt to remember.
[ii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London
Routledge, 20021962), p. 235.
[iii] How we became post human Hayles, Katherine N, 1999, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature, and Informatics, Chicago
[iv] McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, The medium is the Massage p. 86 New York
