#post nature

The body now performs beyond the boundaries of its skin and beyond the local space that it occupies. It can project its physical presence elsewhere. So the notion of single agency is undermined, or at least made more problematic. The body becomes a nexus or a node of collaborating agents that are not simply separated or excluded because of the boundary of our skin, or of having to be in proximity. So we can experience remote bodies, and we can have these remote bodies invading, inhabiting and emanating from the architecture of our bodies, expressed by the movements and sounds prompted by remote agents. What is being generated and experienced is not the biological other - but an excessive technological other, a third other. A remote and phantom presence manifested by a locally situated body. And with the increasing proliferation of haptic devices on the Internet it will be possible to generate more potent phantom presences. Not only is there FRACTAL FLESH (bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected, generating similar patterns of recurring activity at different scales); there is now PHANTOM FLESH(Phantom not as in phantasm, but as in phantom limb. Haptic technologies generating tactile and force-feedback that results in a more potent presence of remote bodies). The biological body is not well organ-ized. The body needs to be Internet enabled in more intimate ways.

In modern mythology, the replacement of a mode of comprehension that simply projects human needs and values into the cosmos by a mode that views nature at a distance and dispassionately 'puts nature to the question'... is seen as a major accomplishment of the maturing human intellect