As a student of geography, in a body called female, in a headspace which vacillates between the realms of terra and virtual, as a rock collector, messy painter, allergy haver, insatiable eater, river swimmer, perfuse sweater and always blusher, I’m thinking constantly of the way my body lands, and drips out, and imprints on the world. The way my meat, as a register, touches others. Because of this I feel a great hunger for taking things inside myself or holding them in my hands. So I chew, and tongue-at all the vegetable of my surroundings, all this liquor on my plate.
And I prefer to surround myself with a tangle of junk: Found objects, toys, trash, and pictures that I can pick up at any moment, and so feel myself become woven into the room. A messy space harbors potentiality, gathers-it up in a net you can play with. And I also like so bad to wear jewelry and perfumes or lotions, and also not shower a whole lot, so the grime of the day gets caked-up in my folds among sweet smelling metals. All these accessories make my surface very thick with things.
I like this because it complicates my osmosis into space. I think this: The boundaries of myself diffuse into my immediate environment as I come into contact. And so to deepen the texture of my skin, bump it up, makes me meet other surfaces like a topographical map might, with irregularity, craggy and unpredictable. This makes me aware of the variable and constant motion of my self becoming through interaction with the world.
On the site of our bodies, the skin-surface, as our outer layer, appears as a simple boundary between the self and the world. The skin stretches over and contains our ‘selves’, falls into the contours of our bones, creates planes across joints, licks over fat and fascia, hugs the bulge of muscle, protects our organs, gives our fluid selves shape. But this surface is no rigid boundary. It breathes. Skin is calloused, red-rashed, oil-pored, breaking in cold, freckling and blistered in heat, scabbed and scarred from event, soaked with makeup, wrinkled and colored with temporality. We find ripples breaking the surface tension. Our skin is not solid against the world, the world cuts through it.
And so I find it fun to make it really feel so much like a compound. My skin, that corrugated terrain, makes a varied threshold to my body. My body- a terrarium of mine, a place for intermingling of the intricately entangled fluxings and flowings of all the world’s things about my self. A knotty, mucked-up body covered with knotty, mucked-up skin- a body become host- may not do what you expect it to do. This is an opening, or a torqued inauguration.
I might think this: Contact between surfaces ignites the plane of immanence. Hard to get aroused without getting touched. And it feels so good to hold on to something. To clutch at texture, heft, slipperiness, collapsibility, fragility, solidity, some qualia, some internally contained thingness of the thing or the self. To sense it in your palm. I’ll say it’s comforting, what it feels like to be a surface coming into contact with another surface… even though I’m convinced of the porosity of our exteriors, of the constant streaming of things into and out of our bodies' membranes. Convinced that contact is always occurring, and can’t be contained to some definable edges. Or that edges have manifold depth.
I’m so enveloped in this idea of boundlessness, like as if to assert borders has become a problem. I guess it’s an attempt at an undoing, or unraveling. A way of dealing with that burrowed-down feeling of trying to think-out from a body while being stuck deep inside it. The difficulty of venturing out from the self. It makes me want fissure and lacuna.
I ask (with Erin Manning): What could be achieved within a paradigm of the boundless self with no delineation between the internal and external?
Thinking about virtual reality (VR) technology, worn in headsets upon the human face-skin, guides me through the liquescence of these boundaries between self and world. In its own name, a realm of paradox and contortion. ‘Reality’ itself brought to the forefront, butted-up against and gnarled with a presumed counterpart, the ‘Virtual’. With this seemingly contradictory contraction, we confront assumptions about the existence of a world that is ‘real’- has essential states, is truthful, sense-able, and material- and a ‘virtual’ world that is imaginary, intangible, ephemeral, and immaterial. The term ‘virtual reality’ encourages us to consider the ways in which these two worlds are mutually synthesized and concurrent.
Like the internal and external self, the virtual and real are not disparate worlds without overlap or interrelation. When the VR headset is brought onto the skin, it provides experience of a new, immaterial virtual environment at the same time the corporeal self exists within a material environment. It enables consideration of the oozing of the self between multiple coinciding environmental presents. This complicates the ideas that a world is external to us, is singular, is perceivable, is sense-able, or is stable. And so VR may present an opportunity to direct our attention towards the messiness and flexibility of experienced worlds, and the way experience shifts through mediated modes of perception, attention, participation, feeling, and enactment. It encourages us to think about all the swimming, the oscillation of bodies-in-worlds.
...So what is this enduring love of holding things, touching brinks to brinks, feeling perimeters iterated? Maybe it’s something like a need to feel grounded, to know that you stand perched on some crust with some definite mass that gravity can work on, so you can be confident you won’t drift away.
Or maybe it’s an appreciation for the collision occurrent in encounters: That lit-up moment when two things touch, the outburst of the event. It’s maybe fun to imagine that exchanges between bodies do not happen quietly, but erupt with the wild ringing of all potentialities. To think of the endless unheard cacophony of the world-becoming through interrelation. And to imagine the sound of the virtual encounters, the could-have-been collisions... It’s tasty to think they layer the tenor of a world with imperceptible bedlam and a silent roar of other worlds on the cusp, in the flaps of uncharted bodily action and intra-action. A stacking of sonic films, dins wavering and calling-up movement between the states of worlds in motion. I want to turn-up the volume of my room (including the always mute stray hairs, the paint, the dead bugs, the dusts) and hear that slimy place behind my knees and make an anthem out of all that could stick there.
I ask: What’s the way to land the self among all this stuff?
Whatever the answer, I like to hold on to things, but I also like to feel things gushing-in and out through my skin-wrapper. Like to find the holes breaking the surface tension. The mouth is an easy one. Soaking your fingers in turpentine is a weird one that makes you lightheaded. Throwing up is a good one: Eating something that makes you sick. External object consumed, come internal biotic response, come septicity, come expulsion back out into the world, come sitting puddle of goo, might be stepped in. Such a circuit makes a minestrone world that boogies.
In all these pourings-in and pourings-out, I’m still a flanked body with edges- just a leaky, permeable one- which is nice because it keeps my body a thing I can hunker-down in and talk to, but lets it be bleed out like dappled and tap-dancing.
In VR, it also feels so good to be able to pick something up and use it. The illusion of the materiality of the virtual world becomes extra convincing when you sense your body coming into contact with something else as similarly solid as you consider yourself. Our surfaces butt-up against each other and because of this our edges are defined. This is my hand, and you are the paper airplane, and we do not collapse into each other because we are both here, distinctly, and I’m some real body like you’re some real object, I promise. And I can pick you up and throw you into space, and so we can activate this environment together.
And yet, there is always the possibility in VR that everything could glitch-out and disappear, that you could be left in a void-space. This is unsettling when it happens, and not-fun and might make you feel a bit queasy or bored and lonely. But with a certain mindset- I’m game, down, not scared ... this could also be psychically invigorating, call-forth a leaky and linky sense of self. A certain boundlessness between things might be experienced in virtual worlds rendered with fantastical transparency, fluidity, formlessness, ambiguity, mush. Imagine one with no distinction between bodies, no perspective, no laws of physics, no horizons. Different spatialities could intermingle- interior and exterior, solitary and social, physical and psychic, visible and ephemeral. In these possible counter-spaces, you’re going to have to figure out how you could sense yourself among the world differently. De-habituate perception, or de-automate sensation… This could allow you to rework the sensorial labyrinth, revealing that new paths can be taken between the self and world.
What VR imposes upon the body is a dissolving of the individual stance into the elasticity of erratic networks and assemblages. It excites me to argue this point, that virtual environments can be a site of contemplation, where users may be re-sensitized to their mechanisms of being-in the world.
What gives these virtual worlds potential, what makes this work, is that the body really yes totally remains when you enter VR. Forget myths of disembodiment or transcendence or immateriality. The body is what carries you in and out. I know this because there are sticky things that are inescapable, that linger, or carry through, bodily experiences that link up the virtual and material worlds, that seep right in. This might be fantastic, the ability of the body to be immersed by many worlds at once, to be dreaming while wetting the bed. To be playing in virtual worlds while holding within it the lunch of the day, the aching tooth, sickness, drunkenness, fullness, anger, puffed-out glands, the pulse of endocrine systems, the resonance of love or disgust. This body courts the layering of sensory worlds. With co-presence in both virtual and material space, the body is radically open to a multiplicity of worlds felt. And so how capable and complex, the VR-using body as the site where numerous concurrent worlds are accessed.
Again: What’s the way to land the self among all this stuff?
While wearing my virtual reality headset, I’ve spent hours in the pixeled delights of a storied forest. I’ve planted and uprooted, built and unbuilt, terraformed as a god. A wild erase-ability, lacing and unlacing the stamp of my avatar body on uncarvable terrain. I’ve never felt farther from dirt wedged underneath my fingernails.
And I’ve flown as a virtual spore in constellations over the profile of a fantastic fake forest-city with the wild silence of no memories, no others, no responsibility. It’s all so good, so easily indulgent. The dangerous and delicious feeling of action without repercussion, something we’re so inclined to believe in.
The escape calls to me. It speaks the sweet-talk of a peddler of elixirs: Come in, rush in, where you’ll find new places to be, new ground to stand on. Come, curl yourself into this buzzing cocoon. Stay here most hours and miles and you won’t see anything change through the blinds. Solidify, linger, steep in my rows. Calcify, stay awhile, and glide without friction through the dallying flexing maze made here.
I’m fading and fainting with absorption; the virtual world digests me.
I’m snapped out, a pang in my stomach.
I remember that I ate a sour breakfast, of smudged yellow-gutted blabber and a cup of sludge brown stink.
I know this: A virtual world, deep with code and trimmed in blue-light and neon lives before my eyes. Another world, material, far and rosy, lies outside me somewhere, full of songs and names and tree-color-greens and mildews and furious country and humped blisters and acidic food and rocks and shampoos. I am planted in the center of these worlds- in one, transparent and inconsequential. In another, thick and burning. My body lives in holy tumult between the two.
None of the things of my material world is visible in the virtual one. Forgotten, momentarily, but I don’t miss them because if I try I can remember, or smell them easily. I’ve brought them along with me as I always will wherever I am because their residuum is embedded in my creases, and has taken up residence inside me, and I can’t release myself from it all. This is the stuff I’m made-up of.
I can ignore for a moment, when occupying a virtual body, the unlikeable parts of myself, the lead-headed river and greasy-mouthed child I am. As avatar, I’m emptied and without history, a benign and sterile electric gossamer. This virtual body has no history of accumulation, things do not build-up or reside, there is no residue of interactions with the world. This hollowed body is mine for a while, and it might be a relief.
But yet, I always return to my firm beefsteak and blood. I’ve got a humming somatic self that I can’t ignore.
The return happens and happens again. I feel the bleed-through of my body from one world to another. I mingle in both, attention shifting as my senses negotiate inputs. Shock me in, vibrant psychedelics of virtual paradise. Shock me out, the heat of the light flooding in through that window behind me, to the right. My sweat pooling up around the headsets edges. The sickness of dehydration. Lusty cravings, dry mouth, hot organs, sleepiness, the prick of a bug bite from a yesterday spent in the backyard.
What does it feel like, to notice the waves and intensities of the self flowing through these porous boundaries between worlds, undulating inside and out of our skin? What’s the way to remain open to transgressions, and becomings of worlds while our bodies stay ripe, and carry us through? There’s no sharpness to any of it, our bodies are stubborn, yet our selves mutable and reformed through immersions in flux. VR might be brought forth as a conceptual tool with which we can contemplate the bodily experience of the self-in-place as something unsolid, wavering, and temperamental. With it we may feel the easy percolation of the self between worlds.
Life is viscous and slippery and terminally re-rooting. Environments might treat us like a candy they can suck on. As we encounter the stuff of worlds, and come into contact, it all soaks in and envelops us. Every bulk, or chunk, or sliver infects, and we find our bodies host. In this webbing of parts into wholes, our bodies are thoroughly co-constituting all sorts of worlds. Galores, torrents, wild ecologies of things. It’s a sticky feeling, like being lapped-up by muddy ground or losing your fingers to the peeling of a clementine. But yet, the body endures, moves us along, the viscera sustains. And so all these worlds run through with heaving bodies, chords of tomato skin and veined flesh, scuzzy teeth, snarled hair, drippy eyeballs and soupy palms, the Earthly gastronomy of Corpus. And isn’t this lovely, all the fat fare, all the carnal alterity emergent in the face of fickle relations? Carnivorous world!
Comments