As a follow up to Rosa's PSU Conference shout out, I thought I'd offer an observation about the conference.

Beginning with Anne Wysocki's plenary talk, traveling through the plenaries by Jimmie Killingsworth and James Porter, and then trickling out into the concurrent sessions was the idea that rhetoricians of technology are turning their attention back to the body. Thus the title of this post: Where's the beef?

I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing Anne Wysocki's talk as an example of this kind of work. As a group of us are reading through Zizek's The Parallax View with Josh, we are noting that the body is reinserting itself in his work as well (in fact, Josh notes that we might even set The Parallax View alongside Butler's Bodies That Matter in that it is an answer to critics who are looking for more materiality...)

Wysocki's talk was concerned with the use of certain aesthetic theories to discuss the bodily experience of certain digital art installations. One such installation is "Saturday" by Sabrina Raff, an installation that allows users to place a glove to their forehead and eavesdrop on cell phone conversations via bone transducers. That is, the sound comes to the participant without the use of their ears...the sound travels through bones when you put the glove to your forehead. This is art that is in no way separated from from the body. In fact, it is impossible without a body.

Mark Hansen and other critics make use of aesthetic theories rooted in Kant to discuss the embodied experience of the those who encounter these installations. These Kantian-based theories stem from the idea that the aesthetic experience allows, say, a viewer of an artwork to see that they the "fit" in the world. Wysocki's question is this: If we no longer think that there is a world "out there" that already makes sense (she assumes that most of us don't think this), then can we really apply traditional aesthetics to such installations? Considering the lack of a given world that fits together and makes sense, how do we bridge the gap between individual aesthetic experience and collective experience. Or, as Anne says, how do we move from epistemology to ethics when discussing digital, embodied experiences. How do we move from “this is a great experience and I understand it in this way” to “this is the same experience that others have, thus I share something with them?" For Wysocki, Hansen and others don't account for this move.

And lest you think that such digital art installations have little to do with the public at large, Wysocki points us to the Nintendo Wii. How are digitally embodied experience being designed and critiqued? How are games for the Wii being designed and critiqued? Ann calls for a different way of designing digital experiences (video games) and a different way of critiquing them (reflection about what certain digital experiences mean, how they/if they point to ethical questions problems). Her concern is that if there is no world "out there" anymore that holds everything together, then we might end up w/ isolated aesthetic experience...with no move to ethics.

Wysocki, Killingsworth, Porter and others are all looking for ways to reintroduce the body into our conversations. That body isn't separate from technologies or, in the case of Killingsworth or Marilyn Cooper, separate from ecologies, contexts, or other bodies. Where's the beef? It's mixed up with a bunch of other stuff...and these folks seem to be looking for a way to make sense of that mix of stuff without forgetting that a body is in there somewhere.