geoghegan againstembodiment
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Against Embodiment:
Gesture Amidst Technics and Embodied Agents
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan1
1I would like to thank Justine Cassell and her colleagues in the Articulab Research Group
at Northwestern University, as well as Jeremy Bailenson of the Virtual Human Interaction
Lab at Stanford, for opening their labs and sharing their research with me. I also owe adebt of gratitude to Mark B. N. Hansen and Tim Lenoir for their incisive comments and
kind encouragement.
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A discrete system of pulses and signals fire out of sight, their alternating states
manifest only in an easy posture and persistent gaze. Broad, arced eyebrows frame large
blue eyes. Below this inviting gaze a sculpted jaw hangs slack and agape. The agents
head rests comfortably atop large squared shoulders that sway with a strange sense of
obsessive ennui. The body is a luminous purple, except at white joints articulating the
major pivot points arm and chest, forearm and bicep, head and torso, fingers.
Hello NUMACK. These words come from a second agent sporting curly red
hair and a slight frame. As microphones, microchips, and relays, and microchips process,
members spring into motion. White articulations pivot and rotate. NUMACKs purple
face brightens and right hand extends in a friendly wave [IMAGE 1]. An electronically
generated voice punctuated by the rhythms of algorithmic processing responds: Hello
there. For a moment gesture and speech stand in strange, parallel suspension then the
hand falls to the side. Nice to meet you NUMACK continues. I can give you
directions around the Northwestern campus. NUMACKs gaze drifts to the left,
distracted, then like a scratched record skips back, on track again. Where would you
like to go?
How do I get from Annenberg Hall to the Allen Center?
Well-punctuated gestures mark out the response. Ok, the Allen Center. [pause]
Leave Annenberg Hall. Enter left. NUMACKs left hand raises and swings upward, the
flattened palm turned diagonal to the floor as it directs the interlocutor to the left
[IMAGE 2]. Another beat, then this body resumes its neutral sway. Ok, says the
student. Satisfied with this apparent accord, NUMACK continues.
Next, keep going straight. Gesturing forward, thin, white fingers make a karate-
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chop gesture at quarter speed [IMAGE 3]. NUMACKs hand bends a few degrees
inward, reproducing the precisely notated human gestures NUMACK mimics. Then the
left hand raises, fingers forming shaping an upside down bowl illustrating the phrase
When you get there Annenberg Hall is here... [IMAGE 4] The right hand rises in
complementary form: and the seminary is here. Continuing, a series of words and
visual glyphs mark out the surrounding complex. Parsed in isolation theses words and
images are unintelligible, but together they assemble an easily imagined geography.
After that, turn left on campus drive... The left hand rises again, reiterating the
gesture that lead out of Annenberg Hall [IMAGE 5]. But this time right hand, a firm and
steady stranger to fatigue, sweeps forward complementing the left: ...and go straight
after Annenberg Hall, the right palm sweeping forward in tandem [IMAGE 6]. Each
hand repeats earlier gestures, but together they comprise and connote novel spatial,
kinesthetic configurations. The paradox of theatricality whereby a body realizes its
most intrinsic powers at the same moment it becomes something else for someone else
manifests throughout. In this dialectical showcase, a path quickly plots itself not through
gesture or word, but by a play between the two, sustained by the alterity of interfacing
bodies.
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[IMAGE 1] [IMAGE 2]
[IMAGE 3] [IMAGE 4]
[IMAGE 5] [IMAGE 6]
[Images 1-6] NUMACK give directions to graduate student Paul Tepper.
Gesture and Embodied Digital Agents
NUMACK (Northwestern University MultimodalAutonomous Conversational
Kiosk) belongs to a vibrant field of gesture studies burgeoning around the study of
embodied agents, computer interfaces representing their states within gesturing,
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humanoid forms. Supported by universities, industries and governments, theorized by
linguists, psychologists, artists, computer scientists, and marketers, applied to warfare,
medicine, and entertainment, studies on gesture and embodiment hardly resolve into any
single and well-defined movement. Yet participating researchers typically hold three
beliefs in common: first, that embodied performance not only supplements speech, but
also constitutes an integral component of human communications; second, that
embodying computer interfaces in gesturing, humanoid forms may facilitate greater
nuance, comfort and trust in human computer-interaction (HCI); and third, that much can
be learned about human bodies by watching users spontaneous, embodied responses to
embodied agent-machines. Watching humans react to machines and designing machines
that imitate humans, researchers claim to discover rich, often obscure complexities
characterizing human embodiment and its dialogic performance with other bodies in the
world.
This new prominence to human and machine bodies traces a gradual bodily turn
in theories of HCI. From the 1940s through the 1980s computer theorists and designers
argued that suppressing human and machine bodies materiality was a basic pre-requisite
for rational, fruitful collaboration between humans and machines.2 This thesis,
sketched in Alan Turings 1950s imitation game, reached its apex in Ben
Schneidermans early tracts on HCI (1978; 1980; 1987). Schneiderman argued that HCI
design should be based upon streamlined, rational transactions among cogitating humans,
and that embodiment and anthropomorphization was distracting and wasteful excess.3
2 On computers and disembodiment see Hayles, (1999).3 For a gently critical summary of Schneidermans concerns see Cassell (2000: 72). Not
coincidentally, many of the same researchers bringing embodiment to bear upon HCIparadigms also argue for the importance of race, class and gender in shaping computer
use.
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The audiences, applications, hardware and marketing strategies rallied by 1980s
personal computing and gaming disrupted these disembodiment dogmas. As keyboards
gave way to handheld controllers and players identified with animated characters
navigating complex spatial worlds, human bodies asserted their shapes, desires, pleasures
and experience. Social scientists took note, turning their attention to the physical intimacy
formed among (not simply between) humans and their entertaining machines. By
examining how electronics participated within emotional, physical, and spatial
mediations, Reeves and Nass (1996) demonstrated that humans embrace computers with
the same irrational identifications and emotions associated with human-human
interaction. Social presence theorists who linked computers users frustrations to the
absence of gaze, posture, gesture and other embodied cues spurred conceptual re-
articulations of embodiments role in HCI. Meanwhile, the bulky, sweat-inducing suits of
early virtual reality reminded researchers of their obdurate embodied being, and
vertiginous virtual environs underscored the unfathomable complexity of human bodies
being-in-space. Within industry, the lucrative prospects of ubiquitous computing
provoked studies of how gesture might overcome the interfaces of deskbound keyboards
and screens.
Hence, electronic and digital technologies typically charged with eviscerating
human bodies (e.g. Heath, 1990; Crary 1990; Kittler, 1999:1-20; Sobchack, 2004)
provided occasion for their enunciation and insistence.4 In return, projects that
inaugurated as investigations into digital embodied agents today illuminate the vitality
of embodied, human agency as well. Within these studies human bodies fall back upon
4 In fact, it was as embodiment emerged as an important topic within HCI that theorists inthe humanities embraced the belief that electronics was somehow essentially and
constitutively disembodying.
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electronic regimes for restoration to their native and otherwise obscure embodied
condition. Human embodiment takes its form as a self-differing movement of
exteriorization, familiar human bodies emerging through the provocation of uncanny
bodies acting from without. Dis-embodiment appears co-extensive with meaningful acts
of embodiment. Native human embodiment appears em-bodied, literallyput into a body
(from without). Putting digital and organic agents in dialogue, these researchers render the
heterogeneity of human embodiment goes in spectacular displays.
Confronted with such artifacts, experiments, and apparatuses, critique has not
so much run out of steam and than fallen to the wayside. It has stood outside the
apparatus it investigates, reducing technology to figures of writing and ephiphenomena of
ideology (Hansen, 2000). Rather than offering critical commentary from without, the
present essay endeavors to explore the critical perspective opened within these
technologies, and tease out implications for the so-called humanities. 5 I consider three
experiments that address different aspects of emerging research on gesture and embodied
agents. Each confronts virtual and human agents, allowing the former to provoke
original, embodying performances by the latter. While experimenting on different
aspects of gesture each illuminates distinct aspects of embodied human life within (what I
5 In this respect I see the present text as building on a tradition of critique that, rather thancommenting in technics and science from without and beyond, finds in both of these
matter for reworking and complicating the work of critique. Among the premier
advocates of this has been Bruno Latour, who has repeatedly emphasized this he is less
interested in the social construction of science and technology, than he is in showing howscience and technology furnish materials for explaining and understanding society. See
for example his recent foreword in the revised French-language edition ofPasteur:
Guerre et paix des microbes (2001). The drive to bring technology within critique (notsimply bring critique to bear on technology) is also on display in Stieglers call (2001) for
a history of the (technical) supplement and its constitutive place in the history of
philosophy, the arts, and critique. For an example of recent American work in this vein,see Emily Apters recent exploration of how the virtual avatar exposes structural
conditions of the psychoanalytic drive (2008).
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argue are) its native technical milieus. At Northwestern Universitys ArticuLab gestures
simulated by a digital agent stimulate gestural performance in humans. In the ALIVE
System built at MIT machines equipped with gesture recognition unwittingly prompt
users to stage and invent new gestures. At the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at
Stanford University, researchers automating gestural responses discern technical
conditions underpinning human judgment itself.
These researchers engagement with gesture provokes broader speculations on
embodiment, particularly human embodiment and its relations with technics. 6 Among the
most intimate, embodied traits of human being, gesture also stands out among its most
mechanical and detachable features.7 Enlisting the human body itself as productive
material, gesture emphasizes thatbody as material produced by and reproducing a social,
historical world.8Gesture throws a body upon technics responsible for its own
6 With technics I have in mind Heideggers Technik, and also Sam Webersdiscussions of this terms English translation. Critiquing existing translations of this term
Weber notes that technology tends to at once be too narrow (excluding craft, for
example) and too theoretical (suggesting a kind of applied science). See Weber (1996).
I would also add that in English technology often tends toward the deceptivelyconcrete, suggesting self-sufficient objects sitting on a desk or in a garage. Technique,
while more practice- oriented, remains overly specialized and instrumental in its
connotations. Technics provides a broader, overarching term embracing a broad rangeof iterative practices from which technology, techniques, science and many other
practices emerge. Lewis Mumford makes this particularly clear, using technics to
historicize modern technologys place within genealogies including divisions of labor,chant, or imaginative uses of the hand. But where Mumford tends to emphasize that
technics derives from the native capacity of the human body, I prefer to emphasize the
way technics brings forth (comprises part of the structure of articulation) an (always
already) historical human body. See Mumford "Technics and the Nature of Man."7 That is, human gestures are easily rendered obdurate and autonomous form human
bodies. See for example the description of cybernetic factories automated according to
precise recordings of workers gestures in Vonneguts (1999: 28-32). For a visuallystunning and less insidious account see Humbert and Drogou (1987).8 On this point see in particular Louis Marins reading (1989) of La Fontaines Life of
Aesop in which the powers of language, speech, and narration come through the dumbAesops staging and narrativizing his own body in gesture. In using gesture to recall the
living history of his own body Aesops body transcends the constraints of that body.
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constitution.9In short, gesture articulates, bridges and transposes bodily human subjects
and an external world of technics.
The following case studies on embodied agents trace gestures peculiar travels
amidst human-technical milieus, frustrating theoretical discourses in the process. Neither
theories of new media nor new theories of media grasp how these experiments re-
cover and re-articulate human bodies out of technics. 10 Not a retrenched phenomenology
of the body, nor the mirror-image argument of body-annihilating media systems
address the radical heterogeneity of human embodiment in these experiments.
Posthumanism proves premature to these studies staging ever-ongoing, incomplete
articulations of the human.11 In short, the purity of rupture intrinsic to each of these
theoretical perspectives forecloses analysis of the very categories being put into question.
9 Anthropologist Andr Leroi-Gourhan (1993) has shown how gestures are rendered
auntonmous in technics, while technics itself conditions the kinds of culture, memory,
and labor around which human bodies assume historical, concrete definition. See alsoBernard Stieglers discussions of Leroi-Gourhand (1998).10 Characteristic proposals of new media and new theory often run along the lines of
statements on radically new technological conditions that must be theorized anew, new
kinds of subjectivity attending such conditions, and certain proposals that explicitly orimplicitly treating new media as the emergence of new relational forms from an
abstract flux. Situating their objects within or through ruptures of the current, these
approaches often perpetuate the very blindness they mean to redress (the tendency ofmodern technics to disrupt and un-secure traditional ways of being and knowing).
Heidegger (1977) addressed this problem in broad sweeps by arguing for situating
modern technologies within historical rifts and strife that brought them forth. Gunning(2003) points toward a similar problem in observing how technologies appear new
precisely in how they belong to existing notions of the familiar. Both texts hint at a
relation whereby a phenomenas novelty and even its ability to impose a rupture
depends upon how a technology falls back upon, reiterates, and reworks what camebefore it.11 See for example Fukuyama (2002). The fallacy of the posthuman is the same as that of
some overly simplistic humanisms: the failure to recognize that the human and thecoterie of rich social, cultural, political notions attending its definition must always be
established, strived for, and pursued, and can never find their security in a simply existing
organism. The human is a goal organizing progressive action, not afait accompli aspost-humanist champions and alarmists might suggest. Lefebvre (1970: 36-48) gave
wonderfully curt expression to this problem.
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In fact, I believe the conceptual richness and promise of these experiments stems from a
refusal to absolutely oppose human and machine, instead allowing a complex articulation
and re-discovery ofthe human through technical environments. In the conclusion I
suggest considering these as experiments against embodiment. Without rejecting
embodiment they allow embodiment to take form against heterogeneous fields that it can
neither masters nor escape. This foregrounds the contradictions, strife, and difference
against which embodiment articulates itself.
The Human Stage: Simulating Gesture
At least three gazes bind the human-computer interaction described above.
Emanating from a jumbo plasma screen, NUMACKs (Northwestern University
Multimodal Autonomous Conversational Kiosk) blue eyes command our attention first.
Set in a life-size humanoid body, attended by an uncanny coterie of gestures, and framed
by an electronic voice, he attracts a second gaze. This is an embodied human subject,
slight of frame, whose eyes pivot and dilate according to NUMACKs performance. From
outside, a third gaze looks on: in this case, a high-resolution mini-DV camera, proxy and
witness for a global body of researchers in the fields of computational linguistics and
human-computer interaction. These gazes are neither accidental nor incidental to one
another and disrupting one threatens the integrity of all three.
A lively ensemble of heterogeneous agents comprises the three bodies putting
these gazes in place. Around and in the figure of gesture these many actors fabricate their
common and bodily coherence, proliferating rather than suppressing the seams of their
own artifactuality.12 In a society that manages the multiplicities of bodies through
12 We may contrast this with Tim Lenoir's studies of how virtual environments are said to
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naturalized artifices of one privileged figure, the body (human often seems to go
without saying),13 NUMACKs body stands out as the most artifactual. Anyone can see
that pixels, programs, and hardware make up his body, acknowledges our norms by
looking sure to look humanoid but not human.14 This virtual body proves crucial for
explaining the peculiar arrangement and design of its electronic parts. 15
seamlessly bridge the real and the simulated, Lenoir (2000: 290).13 This conceptual is part of a trend in much contemporary discourse that privileges the
conception of bodies and embodiment from human perspectives. Two often unstated
measures obtain within this discourse: body and embodiment are regarded as a
physical condition specified with reference to a normative human body, and body andembodiment are considered specifiable relative to the re-presentations of an
experiencing human body. In both instances the figure of a human body domesticates
otherwise vast, heterogeneous varieties of bodies and embodiment in the world. Thisappears in even the most perspicacious critiques, as in the opposition in Hayles (1999)
between the body as an idealized representation (for humans) to embodiment as
contextually bound enactment experienced from within (by humans). In a preliminaryway, the present text to displace the epistemological priority of representation and the
human figure alike, by considering how human bodies (and humans representations)
articulate out of milieus already populated by unlike and inhuman bodies. I treat bodiesas real, obdurate and singular material assemblages forged by operations exceeding any
social construction, whose definition appears in a play of forces. Theirs is always a
tenuous coherence, put into place and sustained from without, always in some state of
assault or dissolution. Not least because embodiment means put into a body (fromwithout), embodiment must always be named by reference to already real, existing
bodies (moreover, embodying forces can only re-articulate existing and differentiated
bodies). By displacing the human from the epistemological center, by no longer makingits figuration and capacities for auto-representation the measure of bodies and
embodiment in general, the present essay gropes towards a realistic description of
humans within their native milieu, one not entirely of their own making and not entirelyforthem. In short, I propose shifting analysis from a human world to a world that
includes humans.14 As roboticist Mori (1970: 33-35) noted, giving artificial life some humanoid bodily
norms helps it gain access to human socials, but of it becomes too human-like it evokesfeelings of uncanny alarm from users. Few better examples could be given of the double-
edged character of the human body as normative body: it creates an expectation that
demands imitation but recoils at mimicries undermining that norm. It is for this reasonthat NUMACK speaks with the cadences of a white male (conforming to user norms and
expectations) but bears strange, purple skin mitigating its resemblance to humans.15 NUMACKs external appearance precedes and dictates the arrangement and design ofits internal hardware and software. This point can be contrasted with the mistaken
confusion of computer interfaces as eyewash divorced from the machines allegedly
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Yet NUMACKs body embodies much more than machinery. Every twitch, its
supporting programming, and its instantiating hardware trace hundreds of human gestures
and the laboratory apparatus that staged and classified their performance [IMAGE 7].
Included in that apparatus is a team of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and
professional staff atArticuLab directed by linguist Justine Cassell. Underwriters are
including Motorola Worldwide and the Federal Republic of Germany are also present.
Each of these actors plays an active part in composing NUMACKs bodily integrity, and
the peculiar appeal of his gaze. NUMACK embodies them all.
The second body already appeared within the ranks of the first body: Paul Tepper,
ArticuLab graduate student and computational linguist, plays the role of human
interlocutor. Tepper and his hundreds of hours of labor are already in the body of
NUMACK. But in this video NUMACK also appears within the body of Tepper, the
body of the former conditioning the production of the latter. As performer in this
carefully scripted role, Paul is no mere signifier standing in for the bodies of future
users: borrowing from Donna Haraway, it can be said that here, the sign is the thing in
itself [Haraway Birth of the Kennel]. Tethered to a jaw-mounted digital microphone
Teppers carefully chosen words, tone, volume, and rhythm realize the bodily discipline
and knowledge instilled over months of working with (and not simply on) NUMACK.
The present task entails unobtrusively lodging Paul between the flat-screened
NUMACK and the curve of the camera lens working as part of the third body a
community of international researchers in computational linguistics to which Paul and
NUMACK belong. Yet that third body also already appears within the first two bodies.
The past year of research and design anticipated this international audiences attention;
more practical, free-standing internal functions. See for example Kittler (1999: 1).
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every gesture and word aims for its dissemination among them. The conventionalized
knowledge and techniques of this community informs ArticuLabs research and
NUMACKs implementation. Shared artifacts such as NUMACK provide occasion for
renewing and re-establishing this communitys shared practice and identity. A body of
research in linguistics, gesture, and embodied agents takes form across the exhibition and
performance humans, machines, videos, graphs in tandem.
As gestures trace the embodying play among machine, human interlocutor, and
interested researchers, one figure comes into brief, clear enunciation: human. This is a
dialogic figure, introduced by contrasts and figured in relief: this is notthe fabled,
cogitating human of artificial intelligence. This is notthe human whose purity enables
its instantiation regardless of instantiating, material substratum. Cassell explains AI
[artificial intelligence] investigators and their acolytes, like automata makers before them,
ask Can we make a mechanical human?I would rather ask what can we learn about
humans when we make a machine that evokes humanness in us... (Cassell, 2007: 350).
Humanness picks up the messy, relational pieces left behind by the abstract idealism of
cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and metaphysics. Impossible outside some kind
of social, material context, Cassell witnesses human expressions when her users
subconsciously accord an embodied conversational agent (ECA) human gestural
recognition: turn-taking, posture-emulating, and gaze-meeting. These spontaneous
behaviors, Cassell explains, refer to the whole body, as it enacts conversations with
other bodies in the physical world (Cassell 2007: 351). Gesture, long dismissed as a
superfluous sign of cognition happening elsewhere, re-emerges as a fundamental
component of thought and communication, and as such as a condition for recognizing
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human-ness. Embedding these gestures in NUMACK does not alienate the foundations of
the human. The human emerges as precisely this dialogic figure articulated itself through
encounters with something other than itself.16
By introducing the tandem performance of human and machine bodies, the
ArticuLab intervenes in competing traditions that suppress the materiality of both. Cassell
notes that experiments with embodied agents date at least to the early 1990s, when
designers asked actors and animators to help plan machinic gestures (Cassell, 2000: 72).
While such an approach capitalized on the established traditions of theater and film, and
also the human body itself as a medium, it disembodied the capacities of digital
processing. Digital, nonlinear database was likewise estranged in its slavish adherence to
modes of production and narrative tailored to other media. 17Likewise, a still flourishing
trend in simple iconic embodiments onscreen, such as the thumbs-up or smiley-face
signs, radically abstracted embodiment from the contextual nuance integral to gestural
16 Cassell here shows conceptual affinities with Turkle, who argues that virtual humans
can be used to reflect constructively on the real (2004: 288). This is part of a broadertendency in HCI to treat the virtual as a kind of an experimental play space for clarifying
what happens within real space. I take some exception to this perspective. Less
interested in a sharp distinction between digital virtual humans and fleshy realhumans, I am interested in how human itself (like gesture) tends toward a performative,
historical enunciation. Virtual humans do not reflect back on real humans always already
there, but instead provide material supplements that essential to the enunciation of thehuman. This conceptual shift helps overcome the repression of supplementarity
characteristic of Western humanist philosophies. For example, according to the OED,
human originally connoted characteristics of mankind brought into reliefthrough contrast
with animals (an essentially differential definition). This suggests considering the humanless as a self-contained object looking outward to reflect on its already existing (or real)
self than something whose very identity depends upon an external relation to forms of life
around it. Only with the enlightenment and the rise of new human-centered philosophiesdid human come to designate the nature of man.17 Even video games and digital films depicting embodied interactions tend to reproduce
certain linear, narrative forms characteristic filmic and novel-istic logic. Using an on-the-fly generative method, Cassells research works at tailoring the representations on digital
interfaces to the material specificities of digital processing.
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meaning. Cassells embodied agents, specifically tailored to medium-specific qualities of
human and machine, aim to redress such lacks.
[IMAGE 7 Above]
NUMACK: video stills from one studentgiving another directions around campus.
Through video these gestures are broken
down into discrete units for codingECA movements. (Cassell 2007)
[IMAGE 8 Above ]Excessive Bodies: Earnest agents
Agents, using gesture, intonation, and
discourse to discuss financial affairs(Cassell et al, 1994)
Cassell discovered the value of dialogic exhibition during her earliest work on
ECAs. In 1994 Cassell and her colleagues presented Animated Conversation (AC)
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(IMAGE 8) a simulated conversation about finances between two embodied agents, at
SIGGRAPH (the leading computer graphics conference). In contrast to traditional
cartoons and graphics, designed with gestures, intonation, and facial expressions pre-
arranged and pre-coordinated AC generated its communications on the fly, with
nominal autonomy among its three registers (face, intonation, gesture).18 As the lights
went down and the screen lit up audiences erupted with frenetic laughter. The decision to
assign a different human coder to each communicative register had wrought havoc.
Animated Conversation gestured, intoned, and mugged with frenetic abandon before a
thoroughly amused audience. As Cassell put it, [t]he result was an embodied
conversational agent who looked like he was speaking to very small children, or to
foreigners (Cassell, 2007: 360). Cassell and her colleagues realized they had to function
as a single laboring body in order to endow their agents, too, with the properties of a
single laboring body.
As a mediator between designer and audience, denotation and connotation, human
word and image, idealized data and what Brecht termed social gest, ECAs embody
treacherous conjunctions and disjunctions. In the case of Animated Conversation, the
theoretical assumptions of the researchers, their division of labor, and the constraints of
relatively rudimentary technologies were literally embodied on the surface of an
awkward, excitable, somewhat spastic agent. What was designed as smooth story
between embodied conversational agents was instead twice interrupted. The first time by
frantic electronic bodies in excess of themselves, unwittingly demarcating every
communicative act with an excessively literal demonstration of its fully embodied
18 By nominal autonomy I mean that the words, expressions and gestures do not have apre-programmed arc. Instead the system devises a way to coordinate these registers in
real-time, in response to the emerging state of conversation.
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character.19The second was by the laughter of human audiences at once active,
entertained, and critical. The shock of well-defined, citable, discrete situations activated
audiences until then intuitive, latent, natural and collective knowledge of human
bodies in performance. What emerged was a properly didactic exhibition. While the
producers emerged more self-knowing about their own social and material productions,
audiences were exhorted to recognize, through an estranged agent, their own robust sense
of embodied knowledge.
From the SIGGRAPH performance Cassell developed methodologies guiding her
work to this day. Cassell and her students base their embodied gestures on human
interactions captured in real-time videos [IMAGE 7]. These are interpreted and coded
into an ECA. After these gestures are digitally embodied, Cassell and her team confront
the virtual human with a real human (Cassell, 2007: 361). User responses of all
varieties, from boredom to alarm, provide feedback for improving system design and
implementation. This performative dimension organizes all her work: it appears in the
videos forming a basis of gestures programmed into an ECA, it appears again in the
agents mediation between data and social gest, and yet again in spontaneous human
responses. Through the spontaneous reactions, potential failure is planned into each
design process. When this emerges, it does so in the form of estrangement, as the labor
of human bodies (that of Cassell, her students, and the videotaped subjects) returns in an
unfamiliar form.
Gesture materializes these communications as a play of process, history, and
inscription. In the early stages of NUMACK gesturing human subjects recovered their
19 For example, in IMAGE 8, bottom left corner, the agent says You can WRITE acheck, at once earnestly engaging its conversant, emphasizing its intention in language,
and iconically simulating a check with its hands.
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bodily experiences of campus space, re-cognizing the co-presence of a person in shared
space while tracing their mutual inscription in conventional communication techniques.
The subsequent confrontation between virtual human and human subject re-capitulates
that first stage while exhorting human subjects to re-cognize their own until now tacit
and obscure knowledge of embodied life. Witnessing this event ArticuLab researchers at
last re-cognize their own labor in material, durable, objective form, adapting their
theories and implementations accordingly.
THE MACHINE STAGE: RECOGNIZING GESTURE
Before a gesture, there is a space for gesture: before that space appears, gesture
traces its topography. This topography is technics, concrete and historical. Without
exhausting the possibilities for life, technics provides basic possibilities for the
articulation, maintenance and transmission of all that goes by the name of culture. 20
Culture is never given in technics but must be made through embodied, historical
labors. Gesture traces these events out of which embodied life confronts an obdurate
world of technics (and nature), self-articulating as a body in the process.21 Without this
encounter with technics, there can be no body. Without embodying forces, technics must
grind to a halt. Without an ongoing, evolving relation to human bodies, technologies
become irrelevant.22
20 On technics as at once historical and the condition for culture in history see Stiegler
(1998).21 Gilbert Simondon (1992) labeled this individuation, and called this process of fallingout of step (or phase) with a surrounding milieu. See "The Genesis of the Individual.22 For an example of how particular technologies flourish through their adaptation to the
body, see Hayles (2003: 303- 304). For rich descriptions of once thriving technologiesthat have disappeared from the contemporary cultural scene, as their pertinent relations
with the body faded away, see Crary (1990) and Sterne (2002).
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Or, thats the theory. Anthropologists such as Andr Leroi-Gourhan (1993) and
Gordon Hewes (1992) locate the basic articulations of language, body, and culture in our
changing historical relations to gesture and technics.23 Philosophers as diverse as Marx
(1990: 492-550), Foucault (1977: 152-153), Didi-Huberman (2003), and Agamben (2000)
have argued that the minutiae of modern gesture actualize the technique-driven, epistemic
reconfiguration of human bodies in the modern period. 24From a local study of how
machines could learn to recognize movements as gesture (Rosenlueth et al: 1943),
Norbert Wiener built a grand cybernetic vision (Galison, 1994) of finely tuned machine
systems responsive to the slightest of great steersmens gestures.
Uniting these studies is a
roughly similar movement: patterned movements by human beings assume obdurate,
technological forms, gesture appears in its specificity against these technical forms, and
finally gesture itself traces or adapts its movements to these technical forms.25
Prudence cautions against embracing whole-scale any trans-historical theories of
gesture, but these speculative accounts yield space for tracing out more local, empirical
questions. Indeed, each of the aforementioned theoretical and philosophical accounts
contains a claim that accounting for gesture demands inquiring into the empirical space
where it forms. This will be a material, structured space, populated by non-human and
imposing agents. Without reference to this, gesture, like the human itself, remains,
23 Hewes (1992) in particular hypothesizes that gestures-as-mimicry provided the firstmeans of transmitting knowledge of tool use and construction.24 The common thread across all three, briefly stated, it to credit the rational, economical
operations of modern technics with making human gestures and the human itself newly legible in spastic, excessive singularity, while providing the new framework
through which newly discipline bodies of knowledge and gesture formed.25 Each in some sense recalls origins of the human, either in its Latin, etymologicalnotions of mould or its Greek, mythical description as that which could imitate and
borrow others qualities.
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abstract, a-historical, and meaningless.26
A general account of the technics and gesture in the present epoch stands beyond
the present study, but recent experiments on embodied agents and gestural recognition
provide laboratory conditions for studying the emergence of gesture around emerging
technical infrastructures. These agents recognition technologies provide novel technical
frameworks, or an obdurate space, for gestural re-articulation and re-newal. But gesture
recognition is perhaps an inappropriate description. At best these machines recognize
patterns of movement, ultimately encouraging humans to adapt these patterns. Humans
learn to recognize the space of these recognition technologies, trace its contours, and
tactically repeat those movements for communicative purposes. Such a process yields
gesture.
Designers of MIT's ALIVE (Artificial Life Interactive Video Environment)
System argue that gestural recognition may emerge as the key component in attuning
virtual environments to the obduracy of flesh-bound users.27As they explained it, The
cumbersome nature of wired interfaces often limits the range of application of virtual
environment (Maes et al 1997: 105). Virtual reality fantasists to the contrary, few
technologies underscored the weighty materiality of human embodiment like clunky
1990s immersive cyberspace technologies draping users in cords, helmets, gloves and,
in popular deployments, safety railings! [IMAGE 8]. These failures of virtualization
26 Brecht's On Gestic Music (1964) made this point through the distinction of a gest
and a social gest, associating the former with an entirely natural movement, and the
latter with a human bodies performance as part of a recognized social, historical context.It was Walter Benjamin (1977: 151-153) who likened Brechts gestural aesthetic to the
technical grammars of the age, notably typeset and cinema. On gesture in Brecht and
Benjamin see Weber (2002).27 For more on lead designer Pattie Maes and her work with autonomous agents see
Johnston (2002).
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drove the ALIVE systems rediscovery of a more native human embodiment. ALIVE uses
visual recognition technologies to identify human bodies moving in space, free from
gloves, helmets and cords. Users in turn could recognize their own bodys re-
presentation in a virtual space, where they interacted with the computer system via
playful embodied agents.
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[IMAGE 9]
[Image 9] An example of the weighty, tethered virtual reality systems.
( Image courtesy http://www.designsodistinction.com/images/virtuality.jpg)
QuickTime and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
[IMAGE 10] [IMAGE 11]
The ALIVE (ArtificialLife Interactive Video Environment) System
[IMAGES 10-11] Two different views of the same scene: on the left, a human user in realspace watches his real-time interactions on a magic mirror compositing himself with a
playful virtual dog. On the right, the image from the mirror, plus the dog which sits in
response to the human users gesture. IMAGE 17 represents the same scene from thecomputers perspective. (Maes et al, 1997: 106)
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http://www.designsodistinction.com/images/virtuality.jpghttp://www.designsodistinction.com/images/virtuality.jpg -
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[IMAGE 12]
Scene represented in image 11, but now from the computers perspective. Salientpoints of contour have been extracted through for the computers vision. (Maes et al
1997: 106)
Between the human and virtual agent, a new bodily space for performance and
interaction emerged. As the computer learned to recognize and respond to human
gestures, users recognized system-states through signs of pleasure and distress exhibited
via an agents face, body and comportment. Despite their knowledge these were only
simulations of system states, users brought new varieties of empathy to bear upon their
interactions with these embodied, lifelike avatars. The same user likely to grow frustrated
with a virtual light switch that did not flip accepted that a non-responsive virtual dog
hasnt seen me. Relying on feedback from their virtual partners, humans quickly
refined vague, intuitive movements into well-defined, meaningful gestures. The
designers explained In the ALIVE system, whenever an agent recognizes a gesture by
the user, it provides some distinguishable visual feedback to the user. This helps the user
get an understanding for the space of recognized gestures (Maes et al, 1997: 110).
Embodying agents28 in the ALIVE systems helps hermeneutically-, socially-, and carbon-
driven humans discern through an agent darkly the calculations and architecture of the
28 With the phrase embodying agents I refer both to the event of putting these agentsinto bodily forms humans users interact with, and also to how these digital agents help act
as forces informing and provoking users recovery of their own embodiment.
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system. Untrained users enter the system moving freely, but feedback from agents shows
these users how their particular movements can elicit changes in the system state. This
system-feedback enabled users to refine their movements in space into discrete, well-
defined gestures. This is the space of recognized gestures.
This space, of course, comprises the patterns of movements recognizable by the
algorithms and equipment driving ALIVEs vision system. While allowing relatively free
movement in space, the pattern recognition systems impose strict constraints on
recognizable bodies and commands (so-called gestures). Users at play within ALIVE
discovered movements and modes of comportment eliciting reactions from agents and the
environment. Prompted by the system, users develop self-consciousness within this
system and literally begin to mimic themselves: that is, they repeat their own earlier
movements but now in a more disciplined and significantway. Their body conforms to
its history of successful movements, success defined in this context as conforming with
a pre-determined algorithmic architecture. In this way, while users may enter ALIVE
purely in movement, they leave it forming well-articulated, citable gestures.
By emptying out the social dimensions of gestures and creating a formal system
for gestural discipline, the ALIVE system provides for a singular, historical genesis of
gesture. Over the space of just a few minutes users perform the becomingof movements
into gestures. The becomingand conditioningof a body, from unrestricted movement
into formal, citable gestures, creates a powerful stage for discipline. Designers
themselves imagine implementing future ALIVE systems as teaching and training agents.
(Maes et al, 1997: 110). Using the example of an aerobics agent that would models
activities in users opposing screen (presumably expressing discontent at the
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unrecognizable gestures and undisciplined bodies), the authors indicate how these
gesture-recognizing machines could produce all kinds of new behaviors in its human
subjects.
Yet even within this local, disciplining stage, the ALIVE System and its
successors delineate a more promising relation between human and machine bodies. The
gesture itself traces the historical and mutable socio-technical regimes into which a
human body is thrown. Human bodies are not simply subject to these structures, but also
function as active agents in its configuration. Systems can adapt from within and to new
communities, as when ALIVE learns and accommodates to users idiosyncrasies. No less
promising are human users meaningful elaborations within the system something
technically conditioned but not technically determined. Within ALIVE and related
systems, a new technics of the self can emerge, through which users actively construct,
contest, and rewrite their own structures of embodied interactions. The mutability of this
embodiment, and its potential for exploitation, will be elaborated in the next section.
The Gestural Stage: Manipulating Gesture
Speculative reason organized the imitation game, Alan Turings 1950 proposal
that the best way to test machine intelligence was its ability to counterfeit human
conversation. The computer succeeded by fooling a man into imagining a woman at the
far-end of a tele-terminal, and Turings fantastic proposal relied upon scientists and
readers beliefs in a future populated by lively, interacting and communicating machines.
I believe, Turing declared, that at the end of the century the use of words and general
educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines
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thinking without expecting to be contradicted. I believe further that no useful purpose is
served by concealing these beliefs. The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably
from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by an
unproven conjecture is quite mistaken (Turing, 1950: 442). Such conjectures suggest
useful lines of research, justifying outlandish inquiries in the process.
Turing followed this thesis on imagination with an example of one more
imaginative conjecture. Questioning colleagues preoccupation with teaching computers
through abstract games Turing imagined another pedagogical method: It can also be
maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money
can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak EnglishThings would be pointed
out, named, etc (Turing, 1950: 442). Turings proposal situated language within
embodied, social, gestural milieus, and hypothesized that only similarly embodied, social
machines sensitive to gesture could learn and participate in this milieu. Though Turing
dismissed efforts at making a thinking machine more human as ridiculous, he held
fast to the possibility that embodied experience remained a pre-condition for achieving
higher-level intellectual operations. Imaginative figures confronted the obduracy of the
present, entering into exchange and embodiments transfiguring both. Putting humans
into the loop with the imagined electronic mock personages, allowing each to confront,
test, and possibly assimilate bits from the other, was in fact the most apposite test of
Turings thesis.29
29 This points toward a dimension of Turings work that has been suppressed by those
who have made him a poster-boy for the de-materialization of the body. See for example,Turings commentary that strictly speaking (1950: 439) there are no discrete state
machines (digital computers), and that the notion of a discrete, digital machine is itself an
artifact of scientific conceptualization. As with his recourse toward belief, here Turingstheses pivoted and wove between idealized formulations, and the insistence on
recognizing these formulations as essentially artifacts. Paired with his discussion of
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Such imagination and belief figure centrally in experiments on embodiment and
mimicry at Stanford Universitys Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory (VHIL).
Researchers at the VHIL pair human and virtual agents within virtual environments,
testing under what conditions the former comes to trust, believe, and identify with the
latter. These experiments instantiate and simulate so the researchers believe a not-so-
distant future when simulated and virtual agents may populate a broad array of media
technologies. In recent experiments on virtual agents ability to imitate human users
gestures, the VHIL takes steps toward the embodied, virtual milieu Turing once
imagined. Finally, VHIL researchers themselves assert that themes developed by
cyberpunk science fiction writers have shaped the paradigms in which virtual reality
researchers operate (Bailenson et al; in press) adding that novelists authors and scientists
have collaborated and consulted for more than two decades, their respective modes
working in fruitful composition.30 Rather than reducing science to fiction (or vice versa),
their observations recall the broad variety of textual, technical, and social artifacts
involved in configuring properly scientific research.
Jeremy Bailenson, founder and principal investigator at the VHIL, honed his
embodied gestural machines, it becomes clear popular descriptions of Turing as anadvocate of abstract, disembodiment are unfair (or at the very least, overly simplistic).
Instead Turings work suggests a kind of spectral activity integral to the material play that
takes place within scientific practice. In the process of embodying new problems and
configurations a kind of oscillation emerges between existing and possible bodies (ofscience, knowledge, experiment, practice).30 This excellent article by VHIL researchers elaborates on the influence of science fiction
upon virtual reality research. Its beauty stems from its nuance: rather than reducingscience to science fiction, or even arguing that fiction constructs scientific knowledge,
authors indicate something like a compositing of scientific, fictional, technological, social
and other assemblies within the respective forms of scientific writing and fictionalwriting. The two kinds of writing are mutually implicated but do not collapse into
identity. This article informs my theorizations throughout this case study.
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mixture of rigorous empiricism and fantastic31speculation during an earlier tenure at
Santa Barbaras Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior. He and his
colleagues argued that immersive, virtual environments could present a new paradigm
for experimental social psychology that may enable researchers to unravel the very fabric
of social interaction (Blascovich et al, 2002: 103). Rejecting the nave empiricism of
traditional natural- and life- science experimental models they embraced an alternative
paradigm of society-as-machine, and experiments as reverse engineering of that machine
(Blascovich et al 2002: 121).32 Rather than simply taking that machine apart, however,
researchers could also experiment with its artifactuality. They proposed non-veridical
renderings (representations not accurately reflecting the represented) of real human
subjects interacting within one another in virtual space. Automatically manipulating
gesture, gaze, stance, and race through real-time algorithms, researchers could introduce
spectral traces that reveal the mechanics of real, everyday interactions. Researchers
suggested these studies might comprise a new Turing test, one that embodied social
scientific paradigms themselves in agent-form. Instead of testing computing machines,
researchers could test the artifactuality of their own animated theories. Bailenson and his
31 Todorov (1973) defined the fantastic as a moment of uncertainty when readers must
decide whether an unlikely event belongs to rules of the known world or instead occupiessome kind of supernatural world. By throwing users into bizarre virtual realities and
testing what they believe or embrace, and again by inviting fellow researchers to re-
consider real social behaviors according to these machine conjured fictional worlds,
VHIL researchers drive the fantastic deeper and deeper into social scientificexperimentation.32 Bailenson and his colleagues embrace of the engineering paradigm occasions a
surprising and deft championing of themes dominating science studies in recent the lastfew decades. Latour (1987) and Shapin and Shaffer (1985) among others have argued for
understanding scientific knowledge as fundamentally inscribed, material, and engineered.
A brief discussion by Bailenson (Blascovich et al, 2002: 105-6) and his colleagues ontheatricality and media simulation in the history of social scientific performance enriches
and even radicalizes aspects of the arguments made by science studies.
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colleagues slyly suggested, If a sufficient knowledge base existed, social psychologists
could create agent-avatars that interactants would be unable to distinguish from
veridically rendered human-avatars. Science fiction? Time will tell (Blascovich et al,
2002: 121).33
Consider the configuration of spectral and material figures in the recent VHIL
article Digital Chameleons: Automatic Assimilation of Nonverbal Gestures in
Immersive Virtual Environments (Bailenson and Yee: 2005). Summoning images of
digits and hands, mimicry, automatism and assimilation, spectrally constituted containers
overwhelming their contained, the title alone throws readers into galleries of the uncanny.34 But objective prose restores readers subjective poise: In the current study, it reads,
participants interacted with an embodied artificial intelligence agent in immersive
virtual reality. The agent either mimicked a participants head movements at a 4-s[econd]
33 Researchers at the VHIL have also written a excellent article on the influence of
science fiction upon virtual reality research. Its beauty stems from its nuance: rather than
reducing science to science fiction, or even arguing that fiction constructs scientific
knowledge, authors indicate something like a compositing of scientific, fictional,technological, social and other assemblies within the respective forms of scientific
writing and fictional writing. The two kinds of writing are mutually implicated but do
not collapse into identity. This article informs my theorizations throughout this casestudy. See Bailenson et al, "Sciencepunk: The Influence of Informed Science Fiction on
Virtual Reality Research.34 In contrast with the already discussed fantastic, the uncanny tends more to beassociated with some kind of alterity at work within the self. Automata, self-animated
limbs (or limbs coming to work with bodies other than the organic human), lifelike
inanimate objects, non- and extra-conscious forces at work within the human, the
inability to distinguish between self and other, and the foreign at work in constituting thefamiliar or the intimate have all variously been associated with evoking feelings of the
uncanny (or more precisely, the unheimlich). Robots, automata, and self-animated
machinery stand out among the most striking and enduring figures of the uncanny,particularly when they enter into the human social or somehow insinuate themselves into
the intimate life, judgment, and emotional frameworks of human subjects. On the
uncanny see Freud (2003). For a discussion of the uncanny and androids see Weber(1973). On what might be called the perseverance of the uncanny within contemporary
objects endowed with computing capacity, see Andrejevic (2005: 115-118).
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delay or utilized prerecorded movements of another participant as it verbally presented an
argument (Bailenson and Yee, 2005: 814). In this way the article seems to reassure
readers they were the subjects, not you, their reality was virtual but not real, and even the
intelligence was artificial, derivative, staged for the detached, scientific eye alone. 35
Through such scientific narratives empirical experiment on virtual reality takes form.
Researchers confronted human agents with virtual agents that subtly mimicked their
gestures in the course of delivering a pre-recorded persuasive speech. With this simple
algorithmic automation virtual agents penetrated deep into human judgment. Mimicking
agents were more persuasivedespite participants inability to explicitly detect the
mimicryThese data are uniquely powerful because they demonstrate the ability to use
automatic, indiscriminate mimicking (i. e., a computer algorithm blindly applied to all
movements) to gain social influence. Furthermore, this is the first study to demonstrate
social influence effects with a nonhuman, nonverbal mimicker (Bailenson and Yee,
2005: 814). In other words, the framing of raw digital data in an embodied, humanoid
form entered into the framing of human subjective evaluation and subjectivity itself. 36
But this narrative already starts midway and its astonishing effects, 37 its
35 Of course, this detached eye is not an alternative to the uncanny estrangement, but its
condition. Brechts epic, gestural theater (1964: 192) famously called for evoking a
detached, scientific eye in its audiences to promote experiences of estrangement. InHoffmans The Sand-Man (1967) the struggle for detached eyes (scientific,
instrumental, narrative) likewise provokes uncanny effects.36 Hansen (2002) argues that the very mutability of new media reinvigorates native
framing capacities of the embodied human. Borrowing Hansens useful schema, I thinkwe can push the argument a little further: VHIL research suggests that technics also
enters into the basic structures of human framing, and that we cannot think of human
embodiment or framing outside the varieties of data and technology that take part instructuring its articulation or performance.37 Most of the researchers I discuss, and particularly work at the VHIL, have gained
attention from the popular press (and been exhibited at various popular exhibitions) fortheir spectacular and unsettling appeal. Enrolling such excitement plays an important part
in promoting and funding this research, as well as anticipating its future relevance and
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subjective sway, depend upon the historical techno-scientific structures it inhabits,
assimilates, and repeats. Hence in classic scientific form, Bailenson and co-author Nick
Yee recall what came before, setting the stage for their own iteration. For thirty-odd years
researchers have re-established the various manners by which humans unconsciously
synchronize, assimilate, and mimic one anothers gestures in social interaction. Posture,
poise, and gaze travel not between but across participants in conversation. 38 Participants
re-consolidate as one social body, defined by greater levels of accord and intimacy,
proportionate to the level of gestural synchrony achieved. One study even found
anticipation of future interactions magnifies these effects, suggesting the conjecture of a
future social body compelled its investigation and elaboration in the present. Scientists
call these unconscious practices of mimicry the chameleon effect.
Bailenson and Yee carried out their experiment in a collaborative virtual
environment (CVE) that mimics the conditions of real-space interaction. CVEs resemble
familiar video conferencing technologies, except that they are fully immersive and
substitute more-or-less analog reproductions of a human body for digital avatars
mimicking human users movements. Algorithmic mediations also enable a strategic
decoupling of behaviors from their virtual representations, what the authors termed
transformed social interaction. But the CVE is more than a traditional scientific lab,
propelled by dreams of its own effacement from every experiment; each experiment
demonstrating social interaction within the CVE lends credibility to social reality, agency,
promise. With the term astonishing effects, I suggest the exhibition modes of
embodied agents can be usefully considered in part for how they rework what Gunning(1995) describes as the aesthetic of astonishment, including its appeals to uncanny and
the body, in early cinematic exhibitions.38 One could say this process refigures mere movements as gestures by recruiting evenan incidental stance into social posture and poise with social, communicative
significance.
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and robustness of the CVE itself. That is, the structure or frame of laboratory itself
comprises part of the research and its successful operation suggests the possibility of
successful insinuating such technologies into the technics of everyday life. Performing
users validate these structures proper and intimate place within the human social, and
discern social lifes conditioning by (often obscure) technics.39
39 For more on the how technologies structure and act within human socials, comprisingan essential element an actor within human social spheres, see Bruno Latours
pseudonymously authored text (Johnson, 1988).
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[IMAGE 13]
Components in the VHILs chameleon experiment. Top: 1) Orientation
tracker. 2) Computer generating visual display, and a screen showingwhat appears through the head-mounted display. 3) Head mounted
display. 4) Game pad for interacting with the system. Middle: View of
embodied agent. Bottom: Male and female agents. (Bailenson and Yee,2005: 816)
The VHIL iteration of the chameleon effect tested avatars ability to accrue social
influence by imitating human partners. Each virtual system equipped its subjects with a
head motion sensor, image generator and head mounted display. Male and female agents
were used, each exhibiting an androgynous body and a pivoting head. Some agents
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executed prerecorded head movements, others mimicked their human subjects. All agents
blinked according to a predetermined algorithm and moved their lips in accordance with
the pre-recorded message concerning the importance of students carrying ID on campus
(test subjects came from the Stanford University undergraduate populations). Following
the 195-second message subjects indicated via a game pad how persuasive the agent had
been (Bailenson and Yee, 2005: 815).
As social influence accrued to mimicking agents self-immanent, bodily
movements became transductive, embodied gestures. Machines reproduceduser
movements
40
but users embodied social, affective gestures and consolidated the body of a
new techo-social milieu. Users brought them into their own body, informing their own
judgments in tandem with the machine they stood against (they em-bodied). In other
words, absent any affect on judgment, agents movements might have delimited and
reinforced their own electronic body, but in being received as meaningful gestures they
disrupted bodies of the virtual and human agent alike. This embodiment does not
transcend the body, but derives from and re-incorporates it. Embodiment always
embodies the movements of other historical and artifactual bodies, and does so through
its own equally historical, limited, but lively and unpredictable body at hand. 41
Embodiment is always already re-embodiment.
Against Embodiment (How We Become Post human)
40 I suggest that (like the ALIVE System) the VHIL computers recognize movements but,strictly speaking, cannot distinguish these as gestures.41 A question emerges however regarding the encounter with something like a kind of real
that has not been domesticated into historical bodies. The exception to this might besomething like what Paul Virilio (2007) calls the accident which effectively ruptures
and tears asunder existing bodies.
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These studies on gesture, bodies and embodiment provide a powerful correction
to mythologies of global information circulating in endless loops outside the
contingencies of history, materiality and embodiment. In the laboratories investigating
embodied agents bodies re-articulate as a condition of more robust computing. Human-
computer interaction, once the abode of abstract fantasies of disembodiment, reinvents
itself as a fertile ground for the gestural rearticulation of embodied human-machine
configurations. But in the course of a rebuke, these researchers validate the informational
fantasys deep intuition of truth: with the march of technological change we lose sight
and sense of the human bodies we know. In the ArticuLab surfaces of human expression,
folds of embodied knowledge, emerge from bodily estrangement before embodied agents;
users of the Alive System uncover the original creativity of their own body by allowing it
to trace, in a gesture, foreign algorithmic architectures; the Virtual Human Interaction
Lab reveals the foundations of human embodiment in events of its technical de-framing.
As these researchers take notes and distribute papers, as parallel engineers re-fashion
hardware, as users experience the immediacy of a body embodying and articulating
against alien forms, the feeling and knowledge of familiar human bodies scatters like
packets of digital bits. This is disembodiment in pure form, coextensive with
embodiment, indebted to existing bodies, en route to other bodies.
The work of gesture proves integral to these observations. Gesture exhibits and
disrupts existing bodies. It recovers the history of a body and its emplacing technics.
Gesture traces already existing bodies, providing matter for embodying operations. In
tracing, assimilating, recalling that bodys production at the hands of technics and history,
gesture reveals embodiments submission to a contingent production out of a field it can
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never master. Even as embodiment remains an original and native human condition, it
remains in default to extrinsic forms it embodies and historical human bodies that provide
the basis for this assimilation. Showcasing alterities in work within human
embodiment, gesture reveals the essential heterogeneity of human life.
From this sense we can see yet another thing these researchers share with the
immaterial information fantasists: they work against embodiment. Each recognizes
embodiment as something contingent that transforms against broader fields: as something
that em-bodies, and that sense finds it origins in something other than itself. In surprising
conceptual sympathy, Kittler and Cassell alike point out that embodiment at once
depends on something other than itself, and is often on the way to assuming (but not
becoming) that other something. Affirming the reality of embodiment also demands this
adoption of a position against opposite, alongside, complementary, supporting,
challenging, resisting, repeating42 embodiment. Affirming human life as embodied life,
we must also affirm the human as life dialogical, elaborated in the play among
biological, technical, social, political and other forces.
It appears, for a moment, we are on the precipice if some new theoretical
breakthrough bridging the impasse between the proponents of new media disembodiment
a la Kittler and a more recently championed phenomenology of embodiment but
looking again, this impression appears against preexisting well-known (but unfamiliar)
cybernetic insights it recovers. Neither information theorist Claude Shannon nor
cybernetician Norbert Wiener possessed much expertise in biology of phenomenology,43
42 For more on these various connotations see the OED entry on against, including its
early association with again and repetition, and how changing, varying historical usage
allowed the word to consistently embody new connotations.43 Although Shannon wrote a Ph. D. dissertation on genetics, upon finishing it he left this
field for other topics. Wiener worked closely with physiologists and psychologists, but
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but both recognized something phenomenal about human embodiment in the feedback
assemblies of World War II. While humans resided within definite, quasi-autonomous
bodies individuated from the world at hand, embodiment lent the membranes of these
bodies a diaphanous, permeable, and adaptable quality.44 Coupling observers [IMAGE
13] with informational assemblies, these systems allowed humans to relay data through
their fingers, palms, hands, ears and eyes, and simultaneously to modulate these
transmissions with input from other systems (e.g. changes in the environment, input
from colleagues, event the rich sensibilities or intuition and insight).45 As under-
determined and obdurate bodied beings that did not resolve into the technical system or
its external environments, human observers could embody becoming sites of mediation
but not assimilation an over-determination of data and practice proper to no particular
system or environment. In an instant of de-framing the human body these systems
showcased the uniquely creative promise of an always de-centered human embodiment.
never became an expert in these fields himself. According to the finding aid to theNorbert Wiener Papers at MIT, in 1914 Wiener went to Gttengen, Germany and studied
with phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. As far as I know no one has done research into
this or claim or suggested Wiener had much knowledge or interest in either Husserl orphenomenology.44 This was hardly an original observation, particularly in the fields of electrical and
communication engineering. As Mindell (2002) details, similar insights informed at least
half a century of the modern feedback research both exploited.45 Wiener originally encountered this observer as the bodily human solider operating
massive artillery systems, but using his embodied capacities to gather and assimilate data
not strictly belonging to the artillery system, such as an enemys unpredictablemovements or comrades warnings of danger. Shannon imagined it as an informed
human observer that could correct obvious errors in transmission a proof reader, so-
to-speak, for transmission signals. Shannon noted devices might also serve this purpose,but such devices were modeled on this malleable, mediating capacity of the human
observer.
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[IMAGE 13]
Observer feedback as illustrated in Shannons The Mathematical Theory ofCommunication (Shannon and Weaver, 1964: 68)
With diachronic obduracy of existing bodies and synchronic diffrance of
embodiment affirmed, a few contemporary research concerns fall in (and out) of place.
Tendencies to valorize human embodiment as a transcendental self-presence, or
alternately to resolve human ontology in dominant media forms, are both mitigated. As
an essentially differential capacity, embodiment differs even from that which it comes to
embody. As a function of historical bodies, media change moves from liberal invention
into the strife characteristic of recovering and re-articulating existing forms. Most of all,
the human is no longer threatened with posthuman annihilation. The human appears
born through this struggle and strife, never fully present, but always in want of being
asserted, established, and achieved however briefly. A lively discourse of the human
results, not based on transcendent endowment or empirical achievement, but instead as
some promise meriting articulation.
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