This article employs the writings of early 20th-century phenomenologists to examine physical/virtual dualism a century later. It considers the nature of embodied experience in mixed reality environments through an analysis of the author’s encounter with an art installation. The article reflects on post-Cartesian approaches to the body and new media, noting the resistance of the language of philosophy to the articulation of mixed reality as a concept. If the language of the field constructs dualism, and the cyborgian unitization of human/technology invokes responses of horror or pity, are we prepared socially or culturally to inhabit mixed reality environments as embodied beings?
BoddingtonG (2009) Virtual/Physical Bodies. Enghien-les-Bains, Fr: Centre des Artes.
2.
BoellstorffT (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
3.
BolterJDGrusinR (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4.
deLahuntaS (ed.) (2007) SwanQuake: The User Manual. Plymouth: Liquid Press/i-DAT.
5.
DoveyJKennedyHW (2006) Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
6.
DreyfusH (2001) Telepistemology: Descartes’ last stand. In: GoldbergK (ed.) The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 48–63.
7.
FraleighSH (1995) Dance and the Lived Body. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
8.
GiannachiG (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
9.
HansenM (2006) Bodies in Code. London and New York: Routledge.
10.
HarawayD (1991) A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 149–181.
11.
HusserlE (1999 [1907]) The Idea of Phenomenology (trans HardyL). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
12.
IhdeD (2002) Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
13.
KozelS (2007) Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
14.
LederD (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
15.
LepeckiA (2004) Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
16.
MalpasJ (2009) On the non-autonomy of the virtual. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies15 (2) : 135–139.
17.
MassumiB (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect Sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
18.
Merleau-PontyM (1968) The Visible and The Invisible (ed. C Lefort, trans. A Lingis). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
19.
Merleau-PontyM (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (trans. SmithMB). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
20.
PalmerSPopatS (2007) Dancing in the streets: The sensuous manifold as a concept for designing experience. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media2 (3) : 297–314.
21.
ParviainenJ (1998) Bodies Moving and Moved: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Dancing Subject. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
22.
PonterottoJ (2006) Brief note on the origins, evolution, and meaning of the qualitative research concept ‘thick description’. The Qualitative Report11 (3) : 538–549.
23.
TurnerV (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ.
24.
YoungGWhittyMT (2010) In search of the Cartesian self: An examination of disembodiment within 21st-century communication. Theory and Psychology20 (2) : 209–229.
