“Virtual Embodiment and the Materiality of Images” by Harmony Bench
Being from the journal of Embodied Technology, I had high expectations. The start of the article was two quotes talking about the physicality of the human body. What is a body? Is it just a shell for our soul, or something more? From there, Bench came up with these main ideas: ” that we are in a post-human era, or simply that technology is inherently anti-body and actively destroys the body. These assertions only reveal the complicated situation in which the body finds itself in relation to new technological practice” The body cannot be in two places at once, but the body can in virtual reality, a distribution of cognition, and the distance a body can travel in now greatly improved, so the interactions and experiences of that person has improved as well.
What is our identity? It use to be just our body, and how other perceive us, but now it is so much more difficult to define someone due to the advances in technology. We are no longer identified thorough our image, because our image in cyberspace is not who we really are in the physical sense. She continues on to about a 20 more ideas about the meaning of the human body in the terms of technology, which are all based on specific circumstances. The human body can now go to two places at once, destroying the rules of physics, and yet not at all. Memories and dreams are other forms of out of body experiences, comparable to virtual reality. We are nothing without our minds, and yet our bodies are needed for our minds. The thing closest thing to virtual reality in the ideal sense would have to be the cinema, as it tries to meld most closely with our natural perceptions. We believe we are there, but we are not. New age media is demanding for the integration of virtual reality and physical reality. This demand is making the field broaden greatly.
