The exhibition "In the Flesh" is part of the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) 2007 conference entitled Expanding Bodies. For more information, please visit the exhibition web site .

The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.¹

For the last 100 years perceptual modalities have been and continue to be in a state of perpetual transformation, or, some might claim, a state of crisis. If vision can be said to have any enduring characteristics within the twentieth century, it is that it has no enduring features. Rather it is embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configurations, and economic imperatives. What we familiarly refer to, for example, as film, photography, and television are transient elements within an accelerating sequence of displacements and obsolescences. Part of the delirious operations of modernization.²

"In the Flesh" is an exhibition by contemporary artists who explore the relationships of embodiment and technology through themes of complexity, sensorial experience, interactivity, physical computing and digital conceptualization. Conscious of working in a culture of obsolescence, the artists in this exhibition critically and creatively explore the agency of the technologies they engage. While consumer markets and the structures of control societies persistently reify the conditions of embodiment and sensorial experience, many artists continue to invent the potentiality of technology in our own time.

Experiencing something in the flesh has usually been a guarantee of actuality and presence. To encounter someone or something in the flesh implies an experience that is direct and unmediated. Although this notion functions to describe a common understanding of experience, embodied perception is already a form of mediation, an interface of sensation and affect that allows me to feel and apprehend what is around me. The actual and the virtual are never separate. Most often, I confirm what is in the flesh through my vision, like the days when I saw Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, and later, Monica Lewinski in the flesh. In these cases, the presence of notable and recognizable historical figures confirmed what popular culture affirms as being "in the flesh." My knowledge and visual perception of such figures were enhanced by an encounter that was not mediated by representation systems such as television, photography or text. Sound, smell and tactility will also confirm what I perceive to be an actual presence.

The spectre or apparition, by comparison, would imply the inverse of such an experience. This is what common sense, historical convention and intellectual boredom has stereotyped as the virtual, the imaginary or the theoretical. When I touch the keyboard, move the mouse, focus my eyes upon the screen, I am active in a world of sensation. The extensions of human appendages as prosthetics also imply the metaphor and physical reality of being in the flesh. The Cyborg mythology of late twentieth century science fiction is more than present in the contemporary use of prosthetic technology. Our connectivity is actual and virtual in this domain as well. Prosthetic technologies are systematically redefining the previous limitations of physical disability and access.

At the same time, we know that being in the flesh has raised serious doubts about how and what the human sensorium perceives. The origins of scientific method were hatched in these moments of doubt. In relation to contemporary technology and the systems of accelerated distraction that they imply, to discuss experience in the generalized and historical terminologies of art and media has become increasingly difficult. The instability of media and technology has created an environment of continuous flux and change, an environment where the expectations of established meaning and experience have become provisional.

Digital culture, the purveyor of new technology, is already historicized. It is neither new, nor was it revolutionary in the context of a political history. Digital culture has been transformative and the use of digital technologies in all aspects of Western capitalist culture has influenced and altered our experience of daily life, labour and leisure.

The clutter of language and definition that has developed during the emergent epistemologies of digital transformation has left a lexicon of terminology that continues to be debated and redefined. The post-digital environment seems less encumbered by definitions and classification and is more responsive to the myriad ways that technology functions as an interface between the body and the machines that typify our everyday existence. How many emails did you send and receive today? What is your relationship to cellphones, Facebook, eBay, YouTube and other forms of on-line shopping? Do you own and use webcam technology? Is a Blackberry fundamental to your daily activities? These are questions that define our identity as data images.³

If there is one thread of unity between the artists in this exhibition, it is the fact that the technologies they use and reference are integral to the conception, reception and process of making implied by each work. In other words, the technologies deployed in this exhibition perform specific functions as enabling tools that are inherent to the meanings that are implied or produced. This diverges from the typical ways that contemporary digital and electronic technologies have been packaged for popular consumption and indicates creative options that are available. In this respect, the discourse of culture and science has shifted from static archives of texts and image and has entered into a flow of media and code.

Formerly, discourse was considered a linguistic activity; now it is a multimedia activity. Forms of expression and reading can no longer be considered as simply spatial or temporal, or distinguished by simultaneity and succession. Rather, digital culture presents us with mixed, layered, and heterogeneous audiovisual images unfolding in a nonlinear space and time.⁴

Accessibility to video, audio, photographic and other forms of digital reproduction technologies generally has to be presented in a form that is user-friendly. The user-friendly interface does not necessarily imply simplicity. In fact the general frustration and difficulties that many of us have experienced in the process of adapting analogue practices to pre-designed digital applications would indicate that the transition has been less than obvious. On the other hand, the user-friendly interface ensures that the consumer or user does not need to be an expert in computing and creating software code that will direct machines to perform specific tasks. This means that I can unpack my iPod, plug it into my computer and have immediate access to a network of musical data. I merely need to learn how to manage my data files through network access to be successful with this technology. The rapid transition of the consumer market to the digital snapshot is related to this pattern as well. For cultural historians such as Jonathan Crary, technologies such as television and the personal computer have been over utilized to perpetuate "routinization," a spatialized spectacle of distraction and inattention rather than to enhance an ethical awareness of human potential.

Spectacle is not an optics of power but an architecture. Television and the personal computer, even as they are now converging toward a single machinic functioning, are antinomadic procedures that fix and striate. They are methods for the management of attention and use partitioning and sedentarization, rendering bodies controllable and useful simultaneously, even as they simulate the illusion of choices and interactivity.⁵

In many respects, this historical criticism defines the task of contemporary artists working inside the multimedia discourse of digital culture. The works in this exhibition challenge certain aspects of Crary's reduction. They prompt us to question the term virtual, a word that has been historically situated in the gaming industry as a sensory helmet and glove apparatus and identified by the oxymoron virtual reality. By 1995, the Oxford English Dictionary had adapted a definition of virtual as denoting "not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so."⁶ While the etymology of the word virtual continues to transform, fold and mutate historically in a network of adaptations, the common sense understanding of the virtual, instigated by the digital industries and echoed in popular media, has given the impression that somehow, the effect and experience of digital technologies is not real or tangible. Adapted uncritically, these terms have also been deployed to imply an inherent inauthenticity of experience associated with digital technology; an implication that these technologies are inherently alien to human cultural experience. What is mystifying about these tropes in language and understanding is a need to propagate static and essentialized notions about the potential of digital technology and media as embodied experience.

The virtual is a transformation of the materiality of representation - defined not by invisibility per se, and certainly not by immateriality, but by a technological transformation of the lived materiality of human communication, which is informed by the velocities, automation, and geographically distributed nature of communication across and through computer networks. What is worked now is the space of communication - a composing of bodies and information in space-time regardless of distance in the architecture of global computer networks. Although these architectures are invisible from the point of view of the user, they are no less material for that. It is not that representation has become more and more immaterial and insubstantial. Rather, the eye and hand have gradually withdrawn their powers and relinquished them to machines - the very definition of automation -and in this way, the concept of the interface comes to define, both figuratively and literally, the machinic connectivity of digital culture.⁷

The artists whose work appears "In the Flesh," engage digital technology as potentiality, creativity, temporal and sensorial affect rather than an absence or a mysterious apparition that is phenomenologically missing or does exist in actuality. This approach to the discourse of technology considers what is possible, what is becoming, what is embodied. Subject to the pattern of adaptability referred to by Jonathan Crary and the contingencies of simulation, the virtual and the actual coexist to provide an interval that does not privilege a dichotomy of presence and absence. For Deleuze, actuality, as a condition of temporality and becoming, is the realization of what is virtual in our experience. This allows us to engage the critical and creative potential of digital media and technology in a way that does not exclude experience and that envisions an ethical requirement to invent our future as what is possible, what we are becoming.

1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 208.
2. Jonathan Cray, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1999), 13.
3. For additional discussion on contemporary issues regarding identity and network technology see: D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001) and Tim Druckrey, "Secret Agents, Security Leaks, Immune Systems, Spore Wars…" in CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel (eds.), (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002).
4. D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 212.
5. Jonathan Cray, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1999), 74.
6. Della Thompson (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Ninth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1565.
7. D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 214.