Considering the Body in the Age of the Technical Image

Erin Honeycutt
Art Mediation
May 9th, 2014
 Thanatosensitivity
New research into human-computer interaction explores what is happening to this
interaction after the human user is no longer living. When one considers the sociological
and cultural nuances undergoing transformation when a user’s social media presence
does not end at his/her biological death, it is apparent that the “age-old biological, social
and cultural events concerning death are being newly mediated by contemporary
technological contexts.”1 The name thanatosensitivity has been given to describe human-
computer interaction that is designed to take death and dying into account, deriving its
name from the traditional Greek god of death, Thanatos. Although some research has
focused more on digital inheritance and online memorialization, the user interface itself is
gaining more importance at a fundamental level. Current research into thanatosensitivity
wishes to use humanist thought to gain insights into death and technology, as an
appropriate methodological stance for this kind of study does not only take place in the
computer lab. As there are no prescribed social science methods for this particular avenue
of study, human-computer interaction research has turned to the field of arts and design
to pursue better insight into the daily interaction occurring between humans and
computers.
Examples of humanistic investigations into death and technology can be taken
from Sigmund Freud whose argument was that death is not only the conclusion of life,
but also acts as a major determinant in decisions made during life. Freud considered the
extent to which humans own both a drive to live and an equal drive to die at a basic
psychological level, essentially a “death drive,” which has been maintained by the most
influential 20th century philosophers.2 One often approached outlet for the “death drive”
has been through writing, which creates the opportunity for oneself to be presented
endlessly in posthumous continuation. This was once done solely through the medium of

1 Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise, Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards
Thanatosensitivity in HCI. Boston, 2009.
http://www.sigchi.org/chi2009/altchisystem/submissions/submission_mmassimi_208_12
32961565.pdf.
2 Ibid.
paper in the form of publications, journals, letters, etc, but in the digital age the paper
medium is giving way to “multimedia artifacts” of the digital medium.3
In all of this discussion on the intersections between death and technology, it is
the fundamental basis of these intersections that is rarely directly addressed, that being
the fact that death means, in this current hour of scientific progress, the biological end of
the body (not including organ donations, of which the brain has not yet been part of). The
body, in the largest sense, has become less and less the essential daily identifier in ones
technological interactions. We use interfaces such as various social media sites for
interaction with more and more dependency. These kinds of forums are completely
mediated, and essentially never in-person, which makes their role once the body ends a
key investigative realm into how society and culture has come to consider the body in the
age of the technical image.
In this context, research into thanatosensitivity that takes death and dying into
account when designing human-computer interfaces will be considered the starting point
of a more general look into the placement and role of the body in regards to the digital,
and especially to the organization of bodily perception in becoming, as expressed by
Michel Foucault, a ‘docile body’.

The Docile Body

The term ‘docile body’ was first used by Foucault in his book published in 1975,
Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison, in which he considers, among many
things, how the body came to be likened to an economic asset of military importance:

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the
human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor
at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the
mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and
conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon
the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior.
The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it
down and rearranges it.4

3Ibid.
4Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House Books, 1995), 137-138.
 Foucault’s ideas form part of the foundation of Jonathan Crary’s thoughts in his
book from 2001, Suspensions of Perception, in which the author reviews the history of
humanity’s attentiveness, and the way it has been dissected into quantitative
classifications, while ignoring its qualitative nature in a current of overwhelming
technological and political progression. Crary expresses how institutional power has
relied on perception functioning in a way “that insures a subject is productive,
manageable, and predictable.”5 This came to be discovered early in the 19th century
through extensive research in the sciences and humanities which involved the gradual
realization that bodily perception is no longer an objective observer.6 The subjectivity of
sensory experience and the notion of it having less to do with the external world and
more to do with the actual functioning of that sensory organ, became key in the
flourishing of further thinking towards the idea that perceptual experience is related to the
outside world.7
Crary proposes that society has produced ‘docile bodies’ in the “enforced
attentiveness implicit in the diffusion of the personal computer.”8 He claims that the
majority of all basic technological objects are similar in that they arrange the body in
such a way that isolates and separates, which is just another method of governing
attention even as the user is given the illusion of free will and interaction with the
device.9 A historical analysis of human beings and machine interfaces/systems of all
kinds has been assessed in the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1955),
who proposes that Foucault’s original model of ‘societies in control’ has been modified
as there now exists a vast network combing “a global market, information technology,
and the irresistible imperative of communication” which “produces continuous and
unbounded effects of control.”10 The extent to which the human body has been subject to
more and more disciplinary procedures in the onset of more and more technological

5 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 4.
6 Jonathan Crary, 12.
7 Jonathan Crary, 12.
8 Jonathan Crary, 37.
9 Jonathan Crary, 74-75.
10 Jonathan Crary, 75-76.
consumption, correlates to the consumption of more and more technological images as
well.
Among Crary’s intensive research, he also sites of relevance German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) description of the physiological states of the artist, in
which he finds the artist with their bodily mobilization towards processes “as a kind of
automatism of the whole muscular system impelled by strong stimuli from within…”11
This is read with possibility into the painting from 1887-1888, Parade du Cirque by the
French painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891) which portrays a Parisian night at a circus
tent. In the left portion of the painting is a tree, bare of leaves and spindling up higher
than the circus master in the center. Crary proposes that the tree could be presented as
“both a tree and an allusion to the retinal tree as a sign of the body’s own inscription of
itself onto a perceptual field, a binding of the physical eye to the structure of a visible
world.”12 Earlier biological analysis in Crary’s research revealed the complex nature of
representation when it comes to the seeing eye as an organ. The human eye’s photo-
receptors lie at the back of the retina, which means that blood vessels are part of the eye’s
visibility.13

Figure 1. Georges Seurat, Parade du Cirque, 1887-88. Oil on Canvas, 99.7cm x 149.9cm

11 Jonathan Crary, 173.

12 Jonathan Crary, 217.
13 Jonathan Crary, 217.
 In investigating another structure of our perception, Crary claims that the “figure
of the cube, the theater, the volumetric closure of representation has an enduring function
within the economy of instinctual life… ” which may coincide with “a particular
immobilization and objectification of the body.”14 Crary sites the French philosopher
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1988) who maintains that the body is foremost a surface
“with no inside or outside, on which it is impossible to assume a position.”15 Lyotard is
effective in pointing out this basic truth at this juncture in the research of human and
machine interaction and more precisely in the history of humanity’s attentiveness being
dissected into quantitative classifications, while ignoring its qualitative nature in the
progression of technology, because it is essentially the body’s surface that is constantly
and continually being “reshaped into a representational schema of presence and absence,
interiority and exteriority.”16
The subjectivity of the body and its inability to be concisely conditioned towards
absolute attentiveness in any predetermined or remote sensory sphere was taken into
consideration in the efforts of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who
used phenomenological inquiry, a study which emphasizes that reality is made up of
perceived phenomena and relies on nothing outside of human consciousness, to go
beyond the quantifiable body with its perceptive capabilities which are standardized in
the terms set by technological environments.17 Husserl’s phenomenology also influenced
the work of French painter, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) who aimed to go beyond
assumptions in his paintings to an experience prior to thinking, or, put in his own words:
“to produce the image of what we see while forgetting everything that has appeared
before our day.”18

Vanitas
Cezanne began his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in southern France in the
late 19th century, a motif which he undertook over and over again, repeatedly aiming to

14 Jonathan Crary, 218.

15 Jonathan Crary, 218.
16 Jonathan Crary, 218.
17 Jonathan Crary, 287.
18 Jonathan Crary, 282.
catch every fleeting change which came over the scene in a multitude of unrestrained
geometrical forms of nature. In a way, Cezanne’s philosophical notions that drove his
paintings were pointing towards a phenomenology of experience, but also perhaps more
simply to a return to the knowledge of the body, and especially to the sensory world of
the body. In an art historical, as well as new media historical, approach to this one may
look in the context of the still-life painting theme of ‘vanitas’ or ‘memento mori’ which
began as early as the 16th century and was most renowned in northern Europe.
These earlier ‘vanitas’ paintings used objects such as rotting fruit and vegetables,
withering flowers, skulls, hourglasses, smoke, bubbles, and usually a surface with the
glint of a reflection of the artist themselves, as symbols in themselves. These objects
symbolized the ephemeral quality of life in its fleeting nature, and ultimately the vanity
of earthly pursuits. The symbols spell out as objects the fact that death is inherent within
these living things, as became apparent in the time that it took the painter to depict them.
One may view this theme as a precursor to Cezanne’s phenomenological inquiry through
the act of painting, although in the late 19th and early 20th century, Cezanne did also
complete paintings of the ‘vanitas’ theme, such as Pyramid of Skulls from 1901.19
While Cezanne apparently treated the human skulls just as any other objects in his
studio, their “overt bodiliness” in
Figure 2. Paul Cezanne, Pyramid of
Skulls, 1901. Oil on Canvas, 37cm x
45.5cm
shape and the form of the hollow
place where eyes would be “like an
object looking blindly back” is
exactly what gives his still-lives their
presence in justifying “that the
objective world of still life is itself,
more than purely optical or even
manual, a corporeal world, and that it looks and hinges upon the equally corporeal space
of the viewer.”20 Cezanne was clearly invested in the investigation of bodily relations

19 Carol Armstrong, Cezanne in the Studio; Still Life in Watercolors. (Los Angeles: The
J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), 65.
between humans and objects and an anthropomorphic recognition of those objects,
especially objects from nature.
Cezanne’s painterly investigation of the body in its interactions with the world of
“animacy and inanimacy,” are a curious precursor to investigations of the body in its
interaction with a technological environment.21 As discussed previously, the industrial
revolution, which began during Cezanne’s lifetime, increasingly subjected the body to
apparatuses of quantifiable sensory awareness that took its subjective relationship to
experience for granted. Not unsurprisingly, Cezanne is often understood in terms of his
phenomenological viewpoint “in which the world seen… comes into being in the living
act of seeing and is all bound up with the temporal, physical, and kinesthetic subjectivity
of the person doing the seeing.”22 Here, the body is taken into consideration as a
subjective, interactive entity in which the practice of image-making is tandem with
learning how to see as well as how the operation of seeing with the organ of the seeing
eye builds the image. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
described the act of perceiving as an act akin to drawing: “definite qualities only draw
themselves in the confused mass of our impressions if it is put in perspective and
coordinated by space.”23
Another take on the ‘vanitas’ theme has been proposed by the British philosopher,
Alain de Botton (1969- ), who says that the consuming of the daily news is the modern
day ‘memento mori’, having the ability to help us in our daily life to sort out things that
are more or less meaningful to us in the broadest sense. In a talk given at Google
Headquarters in New York City this year, De Botton considers the popularity of the gory
news article that describes a tragic event and explains that it is not because we consumers
are monsters, but because it might be the only source that touches on the true reality of
our lives that one comes across in their daily life, comparing it to our “skull on the table.”
He says this along with the hint that “very little information today that is gathered is
through our own experiences, through our own senses” which makes this a valuable

20 Carol Armstrong, 65.

21 Carol Armstrong, 67.
22 Carol Armstrong, 129.
23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge Classics, 1962), 251.

resource in the context of this research because he relates, in a similar vein as the earlier
phenomenologists, and in Jonathan Crary’s history of attentiveness as well, the lack of
immediate sensory experience to the image consumer’s disjunction with reality.24

The Technical Image

The most acclaimed painters of the ‘vanitas’ theme were the Dutch in the 16th and
17th centuries, renowned for their attention to detail and use of life-like oil painting
techniques full of texture that highlighted their representation of scale in a startlingly
monumental way. For example, as noted in Gardner’s Art Through The Ages: “the
globule of dew on a leaf in a Dutch flower becomes the aqueous globe of earth itself.”25
Shifting from the traditional image universe of paintings to the technical universe of
various media and screen-views, scale and perspective remains a key bridging point in
their fundamental differences.
The subject of scale and perspective, of the intricately detailed in the midst of a
larger expanse, is also related in Vilem Flusser’s (1920-1991) philosophy of media
written in his text from 1985, Into the Universe of Technical Images, in which he details
the patterns of communication that have developed throughout history, beginning with
the invention of writing, to the invention of photography, and finally to the (then) current
state of the technical image, and specifically, to his idea of the role of the “key” in the
technical image.
Considering the progression of image-making towards the development of the
current state of the technical image, the possibility of a ‘vanitas’ theme developing in the
technical image in the same way that it exists in the traditional image brings attention to
the importance of medium. The medium of the technical image, the electronic screen, is
composed itself of particle pixels that the viewer’s eyes correlate into a scene that is
recognizable to them, which is instrumental when considering the previously examined

24 “Alain de Botton, “The News: A User’s Manual.” YouTube video, 51:31. Posted by
“Talks At Google,” March 3, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4aAJrJB6h0#t=430
25 Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Maniya, Gardner’s Art Through The Ages. (Belmont:

Wadsworth Publishing, 2008), 865.

role of the organ of the eye in a phenomenological sense “in which the world seen…
comes into being in the living act of seeing and is all bound up with the temporal,
physical, and kinesthetic subjectivity of the person doing the seeing.”26
Flusser discusses how apparatuses were invented to aid man’s search for eternal
life, as man’s answer to death has been to “inform” his surroundings, and that, in this
way, “technical images are reservoirs of information that serve our immortality.”27 The
uncanny ability of the ‘key’, or interface, in technology is coming from the ability of the
‘key’ to reach over into the gigantic, by their being infinitely small in size. They are
instruments capable of reaching into the mass of particles for us and operate in a time
unrelated to everyday human-time and exist in an infinitesimal particle universe.28 They
bridge the atomic, human, and astronomical, exercising the monumentality of scale as
they sort out for the apparatus the enormous field of possibilities made up of particles.29
What is invisible to the naked human eye is for the apparatus another set of possible
functions, for example, in the way an apparatus “transforms the effects of photons on
molecules of silver nitrate into photographs…”30 The apparatus performs this function
blindly in the same way that it is blind to us, which, according to Flusser, “is what a
technical image is: a blindly realized possibility, something invisible that has blindly
become visible.”31
Considering the extent to which a ‘memento mori’ can be read in the technical
image, it would be best implied by the fact that the technical image, through its pixilated
medium of being both infinitely small and infinitely large simultaneously, occurs in a
“field of possibilities… from which something accidentally emerges.”32 Flusser uses
“possibility” in this sense to mean “the stuff of the universe and the consciousness that is
emerging.”33 In the production of a technical image, we use a ‘key’ to make this

26 Carol Armstrong, 129.

27 Vilem Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), 18.
28 Vilem Flusser, 18.
29 Vilem Flusser, 18.
30 Vilem Flusser, 16.
31 Vilem Flusser, 16.
32 Vilem Flusser, 16.
33 Vilem Flusser, 16.
connection between the micro and macro, but perhaps in the creation of a painting, the
human body becomes the ‘key’ doing the particle organizing and placing. Perhaps the
same thing that inspired the ‘vanitas’ still life paintings, a ‘memento mori’, is what also
inspired us to create apparatuses that serve our immortality; perhaps they are a
continuous thread in the human urge to create because all creativity has its roots in
suffering.
Flusser describes in the chapter of his book titled “To Suffer,” how his whole
treatise on the emerging universe of technical images, is, in fact, about the effort to
become immortal through images. Flusser describes how memory is the opposite of
death, and therefore the underlying theme throughout his book. Relating this back to the
placement of the body in the technical image universe, the only place in which there can
exist suffering, both physiological and existential, is in the human body; technology
cannot do it for us. To relieve this suffering by way of anaesthetization, would be to
numb consciousness as well.34

Memory
The importance of memory here, in the context of Flusser, is placed in terms of
how it has changed in form following the introduction of the institution of writing and
how the change from an oral, non-linear movement to a linear movement changed
“scenes into processes.”35 Flusser also posits the disposition of “media as material forms
of memory” because of the transcendental nature of time within technology.36 Flusser
claims that technical images will be the end of history; they were programmed to bring
about the end of linear time, therefore reactivating “a memory that eternally returns,
bringing everything into the present.”37 This trajectory towards a loss of history and
consciousness of history could be thwarted in some parts by an organic rupture in the
feedback loop in the form of a revisioning of the body and its placement in the technical
universe, and consider Flusser’s suggestion that “if cultural objects are regarded as

34 Vilem Flusser, 145.

35 Vilem Flusser, 14.
36 Vilem Flusser, 19.
37 Vilem Flusser, 60.
property to be used, then the living body is the greatest property of all, the focus of all
others.”38
In an aptly named book series pairing artists with philosophers titled Postmodern
Romantics, there lies a clue to what could be the best route for investigating the role of
the body, of memory, and of the future of the traditional image in an ever-increasing
universe of technical images, especially in consideration of Flusser’s hypothesis that the
technical image is the end of humanity’s memory of history as we know it. The title of
this series Postmodern Romantics answers in part the question of mediating these ideas in
a wider context. Romanticism, in the art and literary since of the term, implies strong
emotionality, the giving of anthropomorphic qualities to natural environments, as well as
strong penchant towards nostalgia, especially for the remnants of past cultures. The idea
of situating ‘romantic’ thought in a postmodern context, lays the groundwork for the
fundamental issues at its core: how to be nostalgic for anything in space/time when all of
space/time is right next to you, how to express genuine emotion without an interface, and
how to place one’s corporeal body in the digital world.
This particular edition in the Postmodern Romantics series pairs the French
philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) with the French pop-realist painter,
Jacques Monory (1934- ). Lyotard describes Monory as being both a realist and romantic
by the way his images “connote exchangeability, repetition, the loss of aura, the techno-
science of capital. They seem to be the reality they purport to show, a reality already
dead.”39 Interesting to note here in relating the importance of scale in terms of an image’s
aura (as it is often purported to be the aura that is lost in the technical image rather than
the traditional image) is the criterion posed by the original creator of the idea of an image
possessing ‘aura’, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who defines the creation of the aura
as the “appearance of a distance, however close it may be.”40 The nature of this criterion
does not necessarily lead to the aura being more defined, but may lead one to a better

38 Vilem Flusser, 146.

39 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting-Monory,
(London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1998), 218.
40 Dirk Baecker, “The Unique Appearance of Distance,” in Mapping Benjamin: The

Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marrinan
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 3.
understanding of a work of art having cult value because of it’s “appearance of a
distance.”41 The appearance of nearness or distance stems from a spatial awareness that
arises from an involuntary memory from which the aura arises and gives it “the
profundity of a temporal far-off…” as “there is no aura without continuity in the time of
the psyche and of tradition.”42
Lyotard echoes in his description of Monory’s paintings the idea of the body
performing the action of the ‘key’ that Flusser proposed, especially as he continues in
saying that “knowledge passes through the body of the painter, because it has to organize
in him the distribution of energy over the visual receivers and muscular motors.”43
Monory’s painting oeuvre often
repeats the motif of portraying
digital life as if taken from
illustrations, for example his film
screen stars in blue monochrome,
which somehow acts as a memory
device in getting the viewer to
remember our digital condition.
Lyotard calls the photo-electro-
optical set up an economic activity,
that the work involved is the kind
that implies the disappearance of
both the doer and the done-to Figure 3. Irena no. 2, Jacques Monory, 1970. Oil on
Canvas, 120x120 cm
occurring in the act itself, which is
therefore what is preserved in the process: its memory. We skip the processing of things
and go straight to the memory of things, which, as expressed in Lyotard in his declaration
that “the experimentation resulting from techno-science leaves no place for the aura of
memories and hopes. It knows only facts… that make possible the analysis of forms of

41 Dirk Baecker, 3.
42 Jean-Francois Lyotard, 211.
43 Jean-Francois Lyotard, 132.
power and knowledge and their infinite expansion.”44 The technical image absorbs all
other images and texts; everything becomes eternally reproducible, so the only reservoir
for memory may be in the body. In looking at Monory’s paintings of skies, Lyotard
suggests that “these reconstitutions of bizarre objects… go beyond our perceptive and
interpretative capacities. The cosmological infinite seems to be effaced behind the
technological infinite.”45

44 Jean-Francois Lyotard, 227.

45 Jean-Francois Lyotard, 194-195.
 Bibliography

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J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004.
Baecker, Dirk. “The Unique Appearance of Distance.” In Mapping Benjamin: The Work
of Art in the Digital Age, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael
Marrinan, 9-23. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge, MIT Press, 2001.
De Botton, Alain. “The News: A User’s Manual.” YouTube video, 51:31. Posted by
“Talks At Google,” March 3, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4aAJrJB6h0#t=430
Flusser, Vilem. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis, University of
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Massimi, Michael, Andrea Charise. Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards
Thanatosensitivity in HCI. Boston, 2009.
http://www.sigchi.org/chi2009/altchisystem/submissions/submission_mmassimi_
208_1232961565.pdf
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith.
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