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Linda Dement, I Can't Bear What is Left , detail from Typhoid Mary, 1992 |
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| The bricoleur sensibility of browsing describes a
common approach to interpretation of computerised
material where exploration is instantaneous and shallow
without an in depth awareness of multiple contexts. A
contrary rhetoric of user "interactivity" with
computers and "immersion" in their on-screen
content has been encouraged by the discourse of Virtual
Reality and the fantasy popular culture of science
fiction and cyberpunk. Yet how can these terms suggesting
bodily submergence and tactility describe a relationship
between an eye and a screen? The possibility of
physiological sensations that Ian Burn referred to as the
self-consciousness referencing of the "the 'space'
between what we see and what we know” is being
questioned by critics and artists interested in the
experiences mediated by new technologies. In the writings
of Jean Baudrillard, the contiguity of the eye and the
computer image is devoid of an organic sense of touch,
the image collapses into an aesthetic distance
"unbridgeable by the body".2 Footnotes |
