Hansen, Mark B.N. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT.

Working from the traditional of Hayles. Phenomenological restructuring of the digital and body. Body is central processing unit of digital image and thus even more important.

INTRODUCTION

Body as ubiquitous form of aura that actualizes data.

Working off of Bergson. Body as a filter of images which selects those images most relevant.

Affectivity Definition: “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7).

Critiques Deleuze. Frame cannot be seen as autonomous since its very form is dependent on embodied perception. Must reverse Deleuze’s project and move from the frame back to the body.

“Beneath anyconcrete ‘technical’ image or frame lies what I shall call the framing function of the human body qua center of indetermination” (8).

Content of image and frame no longer connected.

Digital image must be redefined as the entire process by which information is made perceivable, including the body’s involvement as the nexus of this enframing.

“When the body acts to enframe digital information—or, as I put it, to forge the digital images—what it frames in in effect itself…the act of enframing information can be said to ‘give body’ to digital data—to transform something that is unframed, disembodied, and formless into concrete embodied information intrinsically imbued with (human) meaning” (13).

CHAPTER 1

Defends his use of “new media.”

“there occurs a displacement of the framing function of medial interfaces back onto the body from which they themselves originally sprang. It is this displacement that makes new media art ‘new’” (22).

Digitization reinvests the body as the site for preserving the differentiating function once accorded to media.

Critiques Manovich. Manovich overdetermines and overvalues cinema, situating new media as an “amplification” of cinema. This limits his theorizations.

Manovich’s historical analysis of cinema technology does not emphasize how nineteenth century pre-cinematic devices required bodily manipulation. Hansen sees this as something new media are reactivating.

Manovich sees VR as a paradox: simulated freedom and physical imprisonment. Hansen disrupts this by emphasizing what takes place, phenomenologically, within the body as a processing of action and making real.

CHAPTER 2

Virtual as a fundamentally human capacity (I think he is channeling Bergson here) to be in excess of one’s state (50-51).

Hansen so far has been issuing a pretty harsh critique of what he sees as Kittler’s vision of digitization and information being disembodied (drawing from Shannon-Weaver) and transcending the human. I am not convinced of this reading of Kittler.

Digitization reconfigures virtual as emerging from within images rather than between them as in cinema. Incorporates the virtual from within the actual. An infinite generator of images from within itself (75).

Hansen proposes a different theory of information using Donald MacKay who emphasized the context of information (Shannon reduced everything to probability and said meaning was irrelevant).

“the technical operation of a message is necessarily conditioned by the nontechnical context out of which it is selected, which is to say, the ‘range of possibile states of orientation’ of this or that particular receiver…embodiment in its entirety as the context that determines what information will be selected in a given situation” (79).

Information is essentially meaningless without a human framer. This framing must be understood as both biological and cultural contextualization.

CHAPTER 3

Uses the investigatory imaging scene from Bladerunner as an example of the digital image. Analog, two-dimensional photograph being impossibly explored and unraveled three-dimensionally.

Mitchell views digital image as a kind of manipulable photograph, Hansen sees this as reductionist.

Digital image not a referent to a real, but a data set.

Machinic vision forces a reorganization of human vision.

New media artists affectively engage and foreground the bodily dimensions of experience which arise in the face of machinic vision.

Microscope, telescope extend human vision, vision machines, however, bypass it. Is this really the case though? And what are these vision machines anyway? This chapter is definitely a bit more unclear.

Paul Virilio theorizes the possibility of technology forcing a reimagining and retooling of human perception.

New media art creates haptic space which forces us to use our bodies to see or to recognize how embodiment, spatiality, and affectivity are involved in perception.

PROBLEM: Joystick as an example of greater involvement of body (116-117), but this is not very convincing.

Prosthesis: Perception through the computer not a kind of extension of human capability but as an embodied prosthesis. “catalyst for bodily self-transformation” (121).

New media art experiment with and create new modalities through which the body can filter information.

Embodied prosthesis do not extend our senses outward but augment our own capabilities.

QUESTION: Is there really a distinction here?

PROBLEM: Hansen seems to have a rather Cartesian view of the body as ultimately just an effect of the mind. Where is the analysis of sensation?

PROBLEM 2: Where is Heidegger in all of this? Hansen is seemingly building off Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” but never quite addresses how he is deploying the terminology.

PROBLEM 3: Project seems awfully ahistorical and not accounting for the rich history of production and theory around various technologies and art works that have recuperated and highlighted the body in the experiencing of various forms of media. Why is it necessary to declare that this is a “new” movement. Why not situate new media within this history?

PROBLEM 4: Perhaps this is outside of Hansen’s scope but how about power? What of institutional forms generating affective responses that are fully within and constitutive of networks of power?

PROBLEM 5: Where are the other senses? Lenoir opens the book with a foreword proclaiming Hansen as moving away from ocularcentrism, yet there is little to no interest in anything but vision.

PROBLEM 6: How is this a new philosophy if it is simply a return to Bergson?

PROBLEM 7: Hansen’s reading of Kittler seems a bit reductive. He positions Kittler as a post (anti) humanist, but post and antihumanism are two completely different things. Surely Kittler is arguing for a kind of postmedia convergence in the aftermath of digitization but he is definitely not including the human in this digitization. Hansen’s critique is that the body now becomes the medium, which is a radically different view than Kittler who would not figure the body as significant. But Kittler seems more antihumanist than posthumanist. This definitely needs clarification.