Does the Body Disappear? A Comment on Computer Generated Spaces

1. Dematerialisation? The notion that the use of new media effects a dematerialisation constitutes a kind of lowest common denominator for the various designs of knowledge societies' perspectives: Norbert Wiener’s distinction of information from matter and energy turned information into a quantifiable ‘universal coin’ that permitted all phenomena to be commensurable and transferable under the aspect of their telecommunicational coding, regardless of their spatio-temporal and their respective meaning. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ proceeds from the assumption of an electronic shrinkage of spatial distance which enables the realisation of a form of telepresence that supersedes the principle of locality as a sine qua non of interactive communication. Hans Moravec’s utopia of ‘mind children’ projects a transplantation of our mental capability into machines, so that intelligence and information become independent of biological embodiment, and that the body, just as the brain, may degenerate into the dross of an immortalised mind. Then Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Parisian exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’ (1985) staged this tendency towards immaterialisation as a topos in the borderland of science and art, significant for out time. The assumption that the informatisation of the lived-in world leads to a dematerialisation is accompanied by a rhetoric of disappearance: the unity-endowing narrations drop away, the senses dwindle, the signs lose their referents, reality evaporates into hyperreality. Our culture’s unconcealed interest in soma—be it in terms of athletical stylisation of the body or as an endorphin-raising, extreme bodily experience—can then be interpreted as a compensation and counter movement to this apparent disembodiment which is supposedly brought about by new media: a fascination both confirmed and approved of simultaneously