Article 3: Green

Green, Nicola. “Beyond Being Digital: Representation and Virtual Corporeality.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 59-78.

This essay by Green is the closest to my own interest in nested, or overlapping, spaces. She cites work by two new media theorists, Lanier and Kramerae:

Both Lanier and Kramerae rely exclusively on an interpretation of the digital representations generated by virtual reality technologies as independent spaces bounded by technological artefacts. They thereby tend to marginalize the ways in which human/technical artefact systems operate as spaces which institute embodiment in ‘virtual’ locations; that is, in worlds which overlap, and which are simultaneously digital and non-digital. (63)

What Green is saying here is, for me, a merging of my other two articles by Vasseleu and Ostwald. She is interested in issues of embodiment, or the space of the body, and the simultaneity of spaces this introduces. How are spaces defined/bounded? Walls? URLs? Bodies? Avatars? In the last few classes we have talked about ontology. Green says that “the ontological status of virtual worlds is worked through at the level of embodiment, in the ways people negotiate ‘being digital’ through the pragmatics of organic and physical activities” (73). I am curious about the assumptions we bring to virtual spaces when we try to think of them the same way we look at physical spaces and embodiment.

Green claims that “the digital status of economic exchange relations, of long-distance communications, of imaging techniques and of writing are just a few of the ways that produce bodies as already digital before encounters with virtual reality systems” (73). (Note: the “virtual reality systems” are the sort of full emersion helmet/glove/suit experiences talked about more in Vasseleu.) This makes me think that Green is saying embodiment extends to virtually any of mediating systems. But where are our “bodies” in writing? She cites Mark Gottidener in regards to the relationship between sign and materiality: “The ‘expression’ is the appearance of shape of objects. The expression of a sign refers to ‘object themselves…which exist materially, even if that materiality is simply a text’” (Gottdiener qtd 64). And further, “The ‘content’ refers to both generalized sets of ideas and cultural mores, and more specific sets of ideological relations that are coded in particular ways in specific modes of social interaction” (Gottdiener qtd 64). I think she is saying that embodiment is about expression and content, about having some sort of representational element and set of cultural guidelines that determine how I engage with this element.

Green takes a different view than Vasseleu (you’ll have to read that post for a deeper explanation of her work) with respect to the issue of embodiment. Essentially, for Vasseleu, disembodiment is caused by the lack of sensory connection between the avatar and the physical body. She focuses on the body’s knowledge of where it is when and how that knowledge doesn’t exist with respect to the avatar body. Green, on the other hand, sees disembodiment in two ways. First, disembodiment occurs because of digital avatar’s infinite reproducibility: “The representations are digital and their substance is etheric, so the ‘disembodiment’ of these bodies is articulated through their ‘immateriality’ in juxtaposition with and opposition to the material substances of organic bodies” (65). Green’s second aspect of disembodiment is actually tied to the first when she point to the generic nature of digital avatars. Here I should point out that she is using as a case study the game Dactyl Nightmare (DN), which came out in 1991. Also, DN is a helmet-based virtual environment experience, which means you have a helmet, or goggles, and a joystick controller. Further, Green points out that “These devices code disembodiment and an opposition to more everyday material embodiments by representing bodily impossibilities and underscoring the otherness of digital embodied experiences” (66). Here is Green’s third qualification of disembodiment: the bodily “otherness” associated with digital games. For example, the ability of the avatar’s to fly, have heightened senses, or come back from the dead.

I think Green’s piece is about complicating her broad conceptualization of embodiment in digital contexts (expression and content) with the sort of disembodiment that occurs in virtual environments. She sums it up in her last line: “Being digital is one means of embodiment, virtual corporeality is another” (75).