Chapter Three

Part 1 What lies between virtual and reality

In the previous chapter, Jon Rafmans video Still Life (betamale) was analyzed
in relation to the sublime, allowing a theorization of a specifically digital form of the
affective experience. Because the digital exists formlessly and at a subperceptual
pace, the theorization of the last chapter posited that the user-subject is unable to
conceive of the internet in its entirety through their faculty of reason, suspended
instead in a momentary state of heightened physiological sensation. In extreme
instances, such as when the interface is interrupted, the subject is actually expulsed
from the digital realm and made acutely aware of their bodys radical otherness.
Yet, in our everyday encounters with technology this sense of incompatibility is
rarely actually felt. Interfaces are designed by teams of professionals precisely so
that they will feel familiar and easily navigable. In describing the virtual worlds of
videogames, Shinkle asserts:
The job of the interface is to maintain [an] alternate reality by supporting a
perceptually coherent gameworld. A properly functioning interface
humanizes the technology, acting as an extension of the body and enabling
the technology to function as an affirmation of reason. It sustains a
subjectivity that is posthuman . That of a subject that is seamlessly
articulated with an intelligent machine1.
The interfaces of first-person videogames or of virtual reality programs are the most
representative as they, if well-made and properly functioning, imitate the ways we
interact with normal, haptic space, translating a flux of information into
geometrically-extended space and interaction-responsive soundscapes. Yet,
navigating this space with a videogame controller or computer mouse is hardly
equivalent to navigating space with ones full body, nor, one must object, can the
1 Shinckle.

limited audio-visual experience of the digital interface be compared to the full

sensory experience of real life. How is it that we are able to so easily navigate
digital interfaces? How are digital and haptic spaces different? And what role does
our body play in engaging with the virtual? In this chapter I will do a close reading of
Mark Hansens 2006 book New Philosophy for New Media, analyzing the ways in
which new media art is closely tied to a reinvestment in corporeal embodiment, as
well as the ways in which the digital catalyzes an understanding of our bodies that
has remained elusive in our engagement with more traditional media.
Virtual reality is perhaps the pinnacle of the posthuman dream. Replacing the
physical body with an avatar-image, the Cartesian mind-body split is realized,
allowing the user-subject to roam through worlds unhindered by their corporeality.
And if the digital realm is mimetic of haptic space, the user-subject can easily adapt
to life lived on the screen, in fact, I would posit that its interface is actually not
much different than how we interface with reality already. The immediate difference
one might register is that, because the digital image is actually only ever a
contingent arrangement of data, forms viewed in virtual reality cant really be called
forms at all. Instead they are flickering configurations of color that morph as we
move through the space, merely imitating the optical perception of forms one
perceives in real life through a single, centered perspective 2. Media becomes dedifferentiated upon digitization, which means, Hansen asserts, that although
2 Kittler proposes that the digital image, in contrast to the analog, is more like a
text that is read. In contrast to the semi-analog medium of television, not only the
horizontal lines but also the vertical columns [of the computer image] are resolved
into basic units . The discrete, or digital, nature of both the geometric coordinates
and their chromatic values makes possible the magical artifice that separates
computer graphics from film and television . It deceives the eye with the
illusion or image of an image, while in in truth the mass of pixels, because of its
thorough addressability, proves to be structured more like a text composed entirely
of individual letters (Kittler as quoted in Hansen, 73).

presented through a specific interface, the user-subject must perform the necessary
function of framing, the process through which incoming stimuli is converted into
symbolic structures that serve to in-form information 3. This understanding of
information positions human perception not as the passive reception of pre-formed
meaning, but as a creative act of simulation. This act of conversion is understood by
the French philosopher Raymond Ruyer to be the function of consciousness itself,
and it is by no means limited to the realm of the digital 4. According to Ruyer, the
subjects perception of images is actually preceded by an act he calls the absolute
survey, a frameless vision-of-sorts that grasps the entirety of the visual field in a
single, temporally instantaneous take. In contrast to the image, the perceived
absolute surface is a nondimensional, subjective image that is only experienced
internally5. In many ways the physiological equivalent of the formless topography of
machinic vision, the absolute surface cannot be represented or conceptualized, but
is instead experienced internally as affection. This sensation, anterior to the
perception of actual information, is then processed qua consciousness. The absolute
surface is virtualized as dimensional forms, oriented in relation to one another
within geometric space. This process of virtualization, or the rendering of the
inchoate absolute surface into an understanding of the subjects orientation in
3 MacKay as quoted in Ibid, 79.
4 In contrast to someone like Kittler, Ruyer believes that information is meaningless
without framing by a human consciousness. Donald MacKay similarly understands
consciousness, stating: Consciousness ,might be introduced in this way: We
might say that the point of area of conscious attention on a field of data is the
point of area under active internal symbolic replication, or evocative of internal
marching response. When a man speaks to another man, the meaning of what he
says is defined by a spectrum over the elementary acts of internal response which
can be evoked in the hearer (MacKay, Information, Mechanism, Meaning, 53 as
quoted in Ibid, 285).
5 Ruyer as quoted in Ibid, 175.

relation to their surroundings, does not merely depend upon the eyes. Vision is by
its nature supramodal; enveloping bodily modalities of proprioception, tactility,
memory and duration, vision is not only separate from the other sense modalities,
but relies in fact on their synergistic synthesis 6. The absolute surface is understood
as thus to be affective. Employed by different theorists for varying purposes, I
understand affectivity as it was initially theorized by Henri Bergson: as a field or
milieu of forces that appears as a sort of permanent and diversified experience of
oneself7. In contrast to perception, which is an inter-subjective, or relatively
objective space, affectivity is a subjective field that does not exist in a strictly
empiricist epistemology.
The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon understands affectivity to mediate
between the individual (the subject in our terms) and the preindividual. The
preindividual is understood by Simondon as that which exceeds the self. Not unlike
the pre-symbolic realm of psychoanalytic theory, or the semiotic chora as it is
understood by Kristeva, the preindividual is felt by the subject as a force of
becoming or a sense of more-than that wells rhythmically across life. Affectivity is
thus the encoding of the preindividual into an amodal representation within the

6 In discussing depth perception, Brian Massumi states: We are not using our eyes
as organs of sight, if by sight we mean the cognitive operation of detecting and
calculating forms at a distance. We are using our eyes as proprioceptors and feelers.
Seeing at a distance is a virtual proximity: a direct, unmediated experience of
potential orientings and touches on an abstract surfaces combining pastness and
futurity. Vision envelops proprioception and tactility . Seeing is never separate
from other sense modalities. It is by nature synesthetic, and synaesthesia is by
nature kinesthetic. Every look reactivates a multi-dimensioned, shifting surface of
experience from which cognitive functions emerge habitually but which is not
reducible to them (Massumi in Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible as
quoted in Ibid, 109).
7 Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory, 74 as quoted in Ibid, 226.

body, which is then recoded and recognized by the subject through transference
into the symbolic8. It is often understood as an internal interval, through which the
preindividual is experienced as affects. Brian Massumi posits that this sensation of
more-than derives from the fact that affects are not located within the subjects
body, but instead exist across and between matter. Different from emotions, which
are merely the sociolinguistic, symbolic fixing of affects within the subject, affect is
understood as the sense of a physical system paradoxically embodying multiple and
normally mutually exclusive potentials, of which only one ever occurs. Defined as an
objects relationality autonomized, or, more simply, as the presence of the sum
total of a things interactions minus the thing, affect is the registration of an infinite
range of potential interactions, anchored around the actual physical thing that
embodies them9. Affectivity is thus the accumulation of relative perspectives and
the passages between them, an additive space of utter receptivity retaining and

8 Although this will be explored in more detail below, it may be important to note
that affectivity gives the subject a sense that their being exceeds their body.
Existing processually and relationally, rather than as a fixed form, affectivity is
essentially concerned with vitality, futurity, and creativity: Affectivity is precisely
that mode of bodily experience which mediates between the individual and the
preindividual, the body and its virtual milieu: whereas perception appeals to
structures already constituted in the interior of the individuated being, affectivity
indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and
preindividual reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating
to the individualized being that it is not a complete and closed set [ensemble] of
reality. As the mode of experience in which the embodied being lives its own
excess, affectivity introduces the power of creativity into the sensorimotor body
(Simondon as quoted in Erin Manning, 8).
9 Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by)
the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is
its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to
the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or
potential for interaction, it is (Massumi, 35).

combining past movements, in intensity, extracted from their actual terms 10. This
sensation within the body doesnt correspond with any precise image, as its an
experience that exists across forms movement through space (aka time); the
vision of the absolute survey, or the experience of the preindividual, is formless.
Rather than the optical, this type of vision is primarily felt within and across the
body through proprioception. Understood as the sense proper to our muscles and
ligaments, proprioception is an enfolding of tactility (the sense of our skin) into the
body. Experiencing our skin and fleshs physical contact with the external world as
conditions of movement, we form a memory of our bodys relations with the world,
bringing with it the memory of our bodys externalized responses within these
endless interactions11. Affectivity is thus temporally nonlinear: extending into the
past and future, it anticipates the potentialities of the world around us.
Perception, as a function that includes affectivity, is thus the virtualization of the
milieu of the preindividual into forms and the potential relationships that exist
between them.12 Our bodys capacity to translate images into four dimensions
suggests that perception is actually an act of simulation, a process of datarendering that takes place within the body-brain. Virtuality is therefore not a
property inherent to space, but a property that comes into fruition only in the act of
correlating spaces various parts. Nowhere is this more evident than in virtual
reality, which confers the illusion of a geometrically-extended space when in fact
10 Ibid, 57.
11 Ibid, 58-9.
12 The idea of retention and protention are key aspects of Edmund Husserls
phenomenology of temporality, essentially explaining how our perception of the
present incorporates the past and future. (Explain better and direct to some specific
passages)

there is none. In his extended analysis of the pioneering new media artist Jeffrey
Shaw, Mark Hansen illustrates this notion with The Telepresent Onlooker (1995),
which utilizes an early virtual reality interface called EVE (Extended Virtual
Environment), created in collaboration with the ZKM Karlsruhe and the
Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Figure 1). Housed inside a large inflatable dome, the viewer

wears 3D glasses and a helmet that identifies the position and angle of her head,
controlling a projector mounted to a robotic arm, as well as a camera, which is
similarly mounted to a robotic arm set-up outside the dome. Projecting stereoscopic
images across the interior surface of the dome, the interface follows the viewers
gaze, both capturing and seamlessly reconstructing the space just outside, which is
presumably also full of other museum-goers. By coupling the viewers movements
with that of the interface, the piece attempts to confer a sense of telepresence,
triggering the virtualization of an actual space that the viewer isnt presently in.
Disjoining media from the bounded-frame of say a photograph or movie screen, The
Telepresent Onlookers machinic components act as an extension of the process of
simulation that underlies and constitutes perception, utilizing the digital images
variability to craft a dynamic coupling of the viewer-users body and a digitallysimulated environment13. Essentially tricking the subject into affectively
experiencing the images as forms, rather than mere representations, virtual reality
dissolves the distance between the subject and the artwork, moving from a
represented reality (which is recognized as being contained within its material
support) to one that is simulated through the viewer-users bodily experience. As
virtual reality continues to be perfected with pieces such as Daniel Steegman
Mangrans lauded Phantom at the New Museums 2015 Tiennial, which utilizes the
13 Ibid, 170.

Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset to transport viewers into the disappearing Mata
Atlntica rain forest it becomes increasingly clear that virtual reality, although it
may interface purely through the audio-visual, is actualized through its engagement
with the entirety of the affective body.

Part Two The Affective Body

Despite the fact that virtuality is a function of the body-brain, rather than a trait of
technology itself, virtual reality conventionally tends to ignore the bodily dimension
of simulation. This limitation stems from the human tendency to ignore the body,
sublimating it instead through a process called facialization. Delueze and Guatari
posit that, because we are primarily visual creatures, the face becomes our primary
mode of interfacing with one another. As a sort of abstraction of the bodys
affectivity, the face stabilizes the bodys largely imperceptible micromovements
(which include internal responses, such as an acceleration of heart rate), expressing
them through more legible signifiers, which are understood as emotions 14. Nowhere
is this process made more evident than in New Media artist Bill Violas The Quintet
Series (2000), a four-part video series that films five actors conveying various
emotions at extremely high speeds. Capturing sixteen times the normal amount of
footage (or 384 fps), the film is then converted into digital video files and projected
at normal speed, resulting in a 16 minute video of events that actually transpired in
the length of about one minute. The result is an extension of human perception
beyond what is normally allowed by our fixed neuro-chemical hardware, an
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acceleration, so to speak, that allows perception to function along a temporality

closer to that of the digital. Stable human emotions are thus converted into
sprawling, almost unrecognizable distortions of the face and body, affective
tonalities that catalyze inexplicable sensations felt within the viewer 15. As clear
semiotics are lost at this temporality, the viewers experience of the work can only
be described as affective. In his analysis, Hansen understands Violas work as
employing new media to catalyze an experience unfound in conventional media,
noting Violas assertion that the location of the content of the work is within the
viewer as a subjective image an image that can only be experienced
internally16.
In attempting to define whats new about New Media, Hansen looks at the Rosalind
Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois-authored exhibition catalog for Formless. Drawing from
the section titled Pulse, Hansen identifies the newness of new media precisely in
its reinvestment in an embodied experience, which Krauss and Bois understand as
counter to the project of modernist painting. Hansen finds a sort of proto-new media
aesthetic in Marcel Duchamps rotoreliefs, as documented in the Man Ray-directed
film Anmic Cinma, which is analyzed in the catalog:
The throb of his revolving discs, pulsing as they do with erotic
suggestiveness, opens the very concept of visual autonomy of a form of
experience that is wholly and purely optical, owning nothing to time to the
invasion of a sense of dense, corporeal pressure . The pulse itself, in its
diastolic repetitiveness, associates itself with the density of nervous tissue,
with its temporality of feedback, of response time, of retention and
protension, of the fact that, without the temporal wave, no experience at all,
visual or otherwise, could happen 17.
15 Ibid, 260-265.
16 Ibid, 268.
17 Formless, 135.

Meant to be displayed atop a record player, Duchamps rotoreliefs subvert the

modernist desire for paint to float atop a flat surface, instead giving way to the
illusion of three-dimensional form (Figure). Rather than form as its presented
through illusionistic painting, these abstract form-like forms are constituted through
movement, gently distorting and shifting in patterns across the disks surface. As
soon as the record player stops spinning their three-dimensionality dissipates. The
transparency of the illusion creates an uncertainty within the viewer, for instead of
form presented as something that is anterior to movement or that exists within
time, form is presented as something that exists precisely through movement and
time.
Kruass and Bois understand the temporality of these works as imitative of the
corporeal. Discussed briefly above in relation to proprioceptive memory, the
subject, according to Hansen et al., is said to be constituted through ones sense of
autopoiesis over time. Explained in relation to Edmund Husserls notion of double
intentionality, the subject is said to perceive themselves as form through their
retensive and protensive experience of self. Most commonly explained as the
relationship of a note to a melody (which is heard not only as an individual note, but
as part of a phase within the flow of the song as well), double intentionality is the
tendency for the present to be experienced at two levels, first as the subperceptual
experience of the overflowing present (as affectivity, or the preindividual), and
again as the retention of that present through consciousness, oriented within its
relationship to time18. We thus experience the note first in its own right, and then
again as part of a larger form. As explained in chapter two, Varela understands this
double experience of the present as stemming from the framing of microphysical
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temporal objects within the brain, an endogenous process in which various regions
of the brain synthesize stimuli from across the senses into coherence and
singularity. The body is thus constituted in this second phase through the
virtualization of the subjects interactions with the world over time. Through
processes of retention and protention, the subject understands their various
sensuous relations with the world as constituting a singular self, rather than as
existing as independent relations in their own right.
Duchamps rotoreliefs manifest as patterns or forms, but only momentarily. They
exist transiently, emerging as shapes only as long as the disks movements create
continuity. Endlessly materializing and dematerializing, shifting and transforming,
they confront the viewer, bringing an understanding into awareness that their
forms constitution is a feat of the body-brain. The difficulty of putting this
experience into words seems similar to the difficultly in describing the viewing of
Violas videos. While both suggest that forms are constituted across time, stabilized
in the mind as patterns or as expressions of emotions, they also catalyze the
desublimation of such form through revealing their constituent parts, which, as they
exist in stasis, dissolve into meaninglessness. Through their inversion of the
hierarchy of image over affectivity, these works reject the hylomorphism that
characterizes most art (which is the elevation of form over matter), instead opening
form to the realm of the processual. I understand new media, through its ability to
expand time beyond the 0.3 seconds of human perception, as holding the potential
for a certain kind of experience I posit as abject. This specifically digital kind of
abject art relates to a posthuman sense of time, existing somewhere beyond the
fixed perceptual capacities of human consciousness. Through the exploration of a
digital sense of temporality, certain contemporary artists are subverting the

understanding of the subject as form. But what is it about new media that feels
imitative of the corporeal? What is it about the pulse that makes one aware of
their relationship with their body?
Throughout his work, Hansen holds an interest in how digital technology is
increasingly able to interface with human affectivity. Following the assumption that
media, since the invention of writing, simultaneously diminishes and supplements
the sensory-perceptual and expressive capacities of humans, Hansen recognizes the
opportunity within digital technologies to interface with the affective interval of the
perceived now. Despite the fact that computers are cognitive machines, incapable
of a truly sensuous perception, they are capable of recording the sensuousness of
the human body, reconfiguring the ecology of microsensibilities as data 19. What this
ultimately means is that digital technology, through a machinic sense of
temporality, can accelerate cognition to the pace of human sensibility. This is
described at its most utilitarian in a keynote lecture at Eugene Lang College, in
which Hansen describes Alex Pentlands work at MITs Human Dynamics Laboratory,
as well as the third-generation search engine Recorded Future. Both of these
projects are innovating ways to measure affectivity, either of specific individuals, in
the case of the former, or of the entire internet, in the case of the latter. Pentlands
work is most easily conveyed through a device he and his fellow researchers are
calling a sociometer. About the dimensions of a credit card, the device contains a
microphone and accelerometer, analyzing patterns in movement and speech to
interpret and make claims about non-linguistic forms of communication. The
sociometer is said to be able to decode variations in the tone and pace of a
conversation to accurately predict the outcomes of job interviews, presidential
19 Hansen keynote

debates, or even first dates. I will point out that the leap made by Pentland is found
in his expansion beyond the non-linguistic communication of a single subject,
instead exploring affectivity as it exists within the back-and-forth patterns of
signaling between multiple parties. In his lecture, Hansen particularly emphasizes
its potential use in the workplace as a way to measure and improve the working
dynamics of different groups within a company. Pentland states that these
unconscious, honest signals, the title of his 2010 MIT Press-released book, can be
deciphered in order for us to become better managers, workers, and
communicators20.
This colonization of non-linguistic communication is taken to an even more
dystopian realm by the Swedish intelligence company Recorded Future. Described
by Hansen as a third-generation search engine, Recorded Future is a real-time
threat intelligence company that analyzes billions of events through publicly
available information including news articles, financial reports, tweets, Facebook
posts, blogs, and RSS feeds in order to build a timeline of events that extends into
a predicted future. Funded in its infancy by small-venture capital grants by both
Google and the CIA, the company primarily markets itself around predicting and
preventing threats to a companys cybersecurity 21. Its web intelligence platform,
however, can be employed to process and predict trends in technology, science,
business, politics, media, civil unrest, etc. for use by both corporate and
government bodies. Differing from second-generation search engines, such as
Google or Facebook, which measure direct links or interactions between pages and
users, Recorded Future analyzes implicit links between information. Looking beyond
20 Citation Needed
21 Hansen Fast Forward, 206

the information contained within documents (such as keywords or links), Recorded

Future correlates topics, geography, sentiment, and varying temporal aspects of
events unfolding as they exist across the web to understand what information is
actually about, attributing both a level of importance and sentiment to the
information as a way to index the event or entity in respect to its potential future
impact22.
In his book Feed-Forward: On the Future of 21st-Century Media (2014), Hansen
asserts the necessity for a new type of media criticism that recognizes the
contemporary registration and modulation of affect by media. While entities such as
Recorded Future, Facebook, or Google do not literally operate within the missing
half-second of human consciousness, Hansen insists that they do similarly
translate the precognitive into legible data that allows users (or corporate entities)
to operate on and modulate human behavior in the future. Termed info-capitalism,
this capture of massive of amounts of data is employed to better serve users,
effectively predicting future desires the users are themselves unaware of. This
development in contemporary capitalism exploits users leisure time as a source for
surplus value, as manifest in the already recognizable industries of neuromarketing,
experience design, and predictive analytics 23. Hansen understands this

22 Ibid, 207.
23 If the biopolitical dimension of Google is widely debated , what is missing is a
bioeconomic analysis to explain how Google extracts value from our life and
transforms the common intellect into network value and wealth. Besides true
concerns, there is an abuse of a Foucaultian paradigm that highlights only one side
of the problem, as Googles power is not given as a metaphysical being but it is
originated from its technological platform and business model . The metaphor of
the Panopticon must be reversed: Google is not simply an apparatus of
dataveillance from above but an apparatus of value production from below
(Matteo Pasquinelli as quoted in Hansen, Feed-Forward 3969)

technological apparatus as creating a feed-forward structure to contemporary

consciousness. Because human perception of the sensory qua consciousness always
lags behind the perceptions causal bases, phenomenological experience is always
in the future, so to speak, of the event perceived. Hansens feed-forward structure
thus refers to the presentation of pre-cognitive behavior in a way that is accessible
to conscious perception, allowing the pre-cognitive to be operated on either in the
form of reflection and deliberation, or as targeted modifications of future behavior 24.
It is thus a structure that is inherently future-oriented, employed primarily as a
means to predict, and thus modulate, behavior before it would otherwise be
consciously observed.
Drawing heavily from the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, in
particular his ideas on potentiality, Hansen sees within data-capitalism a recognition
of the futurity contained in the present. As made most evident in the example of
Recorded Future, twenty-first-century media analyzes information available in the
present as a means of determining the potentiality of future events. The predictive
capacities of such technologies are inherently limited, however, as their reliability is
dependent upon excluding data that is deemed uncharacteristic or irrelevant. In
contrast to potentiality as it is understood by Whitehead, which recognizes the
infinite possible futures contained in the present moment, the predictive
precognition of twenty-first-century media casts a version of the future that follows
an assumption of sameness and predictability 25. Medias employment by data
industries is thus understood by Hansen as creating a form of micro-biopolitics, as
its modulation of human behavior is inevitably geared towards normalizing ends.
24 Ibid, 4030.
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Further, because the data of sensibility that is captured and fed-forward has no
direct interface with consciousness, our access to this information is necessarily
mediated by technology. The prosthetic basis of media is thus thrown into question,
as our agency in utilizing technologies such as Facebook or Google is not only
limited, but intentionally foregone26. Through its attempts to find patterns and
structures within affect, twenty-first-century media dulls precisely what Whiteheads
ontology of potentiality maintains for human agency. By asserting and enforcing the
stability of human behavior, twenty-first-century media ignores and even hinders
the subjects propensity for newness and change.
Recognizing the reality that these technologies exist, Hansen calls for a
media criticism that champions their employment for non-capitalistic ends. Within
this thesis I hope to extend the notion of abject art into the digital age, employing
this bourgeoning body of theory to champion the works of certain contemporary
artists that are renegotiating and exploring our understanding of the affective body.
Although Feed-Forward does not provide specific examples of what such new media
works would look like, Hansens analyses throughout New Philosophy for New Media
provide a glimpse of what he has in mind. I find his analysis of Alan Dunning and
Paul Woodrows project Einsteins Brain (Errant Eye) (1997-present) to be
particularly salient, particularly considering the works emphasis on both the body,
and our understanding of such as it is constituted through consciousness. Donning a
stereoscopic Head Mounted Display (HMD), participants are wired through
encephalographic, galvanic, and cardio biofeedback to a computer that uses their
physiological output to generate and modify the HMDs images in real time.
Combining a navigable forest landscape with abstract visualizations of the subjects
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internal physiological state, the work attempts to recognize the coupling of the
subjects internal landscape and the external world as it is perceived by the bodybrain. Just as the external world shapes the sensations felt within the body, so does
our sensory experience reciprocally shape the perceived world. In an artist
statement, Dunning and Woodrow state:
In the construction of a dynamic self, the mind attempts to engage the
world(s) beyond appearances. These worlds are in perpetual motion and
unstable transformation, without attributable frames of reference, without
material bodies or finite borders, in constant flux, linking past to future and
memory to prediction. It is as if we are inside ourselves, like a threedimensional eye which constructs itself as it moves through internal haptic
space (188).
Instead of the Lacanian understanding of self as a singular form as viewed from the
outside, the work attempts to catalyze an experience of self that accounts for the
more-than of affectivity. In providing a dynamic representation of self, inextricably
connected to and affected by its surroundings, Einsteins Brain explores the body as
it is sensuously experienced through its relations with the world.
The body is understood less as a self-contained form, but rather as a conduit
of affect. The visualizations of the viewer-users affectivity begin to cohere into a
navigable space; not quite forms, the distortions on the screen act as a
representation of the otherwise non-visual experience of the body. As the viewerusers anxiety increases, for example, the visualizations on the screen appear
jagged and the music becomes more dissonant. The body thus becomes porous and
leaky, constantly affecting and being affected by its surroundings. Not unlike ones
perception of the forest floor after stepping on a snake, the landscape and the body
become interconnected in a reciprocal exchange of affect. The body is recognized
as a milieu of sensations, all experiencing sensations beyond itself. I understand the
Einsteins Brain project as being abject in the sense that it threatens the unity of the

subject. Like the digital sublime, which cannot be resolved through human
consciousness, this digital manifestation of the abject refuses to be abjected.
Instead of presenting an object of ontological uncertainty, which is eventually
objectified by the subject through the act of abjection, this experience of the self
threatens to reveal the illusion behind subject-object ontology altogether. The
abstraction of the body as a singular, unchanging subject no longer seems suitable.
Instead one most confront the heterogeneity of sensations experienced; recognizing
the body as a site for the transduction of affect, of a conversion that takes place
within the body-brain of affect into experience as it is consciously understood.
Digital abject art thus functions as a means of resistance against the
colonization of affect by info-capitalism. While media as employed by the data
industry modulates affectivity to create a more lucrative consumer, digital abject art
lends the modulation of affectivity a distinctly aesthetic dimension. In attempting to
interface with affectivity in a form that is legible to consciousness, Einsteins Brain
allows the user-viewer to open-endedly explore the way the self is affected by its
surroundings, as well as how ones perception of the external world is inflected by
the latent potentialities affectively felt welling within it.