Geoghegan AgainstEmbodiment

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Against Embodiment:

Gesture Amidst Technics and Embodied Agents

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan1

[email protected]

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)

22
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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