Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft. Bodily Perspectives on Postdigital Spaces

This book exhibits an investigation of the remarkable ability to simultaneously
occupy two different places: as a form of second nature, contemporary Western bodies rely on digital devices “to travel in one direction through sound
or image while proceeding elsewhere physically.” In an Artforum magazine article entitled “Navigating the New Territory: Art, avatars, and the contemporary mediascape”, art historian David Joselit observes the uncanny situations that accompany these particular pairings of bodies and technologies: “It’s the electric whisper bleeding from earphones in subway cars, and it’s the disarming experience of believing for a minute that the well-dressed guy talking to himself on the street is crazy — until you see his headset.” Joselit frames these bizarre phenomena as “symptoms of a new spatial order,” in which the Walkman, iPod and smartphone gather in a seemingly invisible layer that is not only co-existent but “coextensive” with physical space, meaning that two worlds — the physical and the mediabased — occupy the same place. This “new” order is no longer so new; today it is commonplace. Since Joselit’s text was published in 2005, to my mind, the tone of discussing this new spatial order and how it affects us bodily has shifted from celebratory to overburdened, from an interest in the peculiar to a state of indifference. The relevant phenomena have expanded from the streets, as noted in the article, into bedrooms, particularly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not brought changes to the coextensive nature of this spatial order as such but has made it more immediate. A new urgency seems to exist in the need to discuss how this spatial order may be inhabited, especially regarding an empowerment on the part of the users involved — the Artforum article offers a set of key notions from which to depart.

This is the slightly modified second edition of a book project realised with the financial support of the City of Vienna’s culture magistrate (MA7) and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. I am indebted to the Bartlett School of Architecture’s AVATAR programme, for sparking my interest in phenomena related to avatars, and to Mike Aling, who showed me what the space of a book can be. I am very thankful to Anna Krumpholz, for fresh insights, to Valerie Messini, for hands-on help, to Marco Palma, for writing the lidar camera sequence capture script, to Elisabeth Richter, for graphics inspiration and to Seth Weiner, for the room to test my thoughts. Most importantly, many thanks to Ulli, Florian and Lilith for gifting me the time needed to realise this project.