Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media / Edition 1

by Mark B. N. Hansen

Overview

Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings.

Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415970167
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/19/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mark B. N. Hansen is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is author of New Philosophy forNew Media and Embodying Technesis: Technology BeyondWriting and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion toMerleau-Ponty.

Table of Contents

From the Image to the Power of Imaging; 1: Toward a Technics of the Flesh; 1: Bodies in Code, or How Primordial Tactility Introjects Technics into Human Life; 2: Locating the Virtual in Contemporary Culture; 2: Embodying Virtual Reality; 3: Digitizing the Racialized Body, or the Politics of Common Impropriety; 4: Wearable Space; 5: The Digital Topography of House of Leaves

Editorial Reviews

'A stunning work of philosophical originality and brilliance.' - Timothy Lenoir, Stanford University

From the Publisher