Extended Bodies
Collaborative Efforts in Cyberspace

A mobile phone advertisement in Australia pictures a woman and a man with their arms around each other. The caption reads 'hold'. There's something very comforting about the image of this gentle embrace and I read it as representing the electronic embrace which enfolds our daily communications: that there is comfort to be had in the stasis of 'hold'; we are not lost in suspended animation but rather nestled or carried in an electronic cocoon. I have yet to see the advertisement (assuming one exists) which says 'in touch' despite this expression being part of the vernacular and metaphorics of communications: how we understand and experience our communications and our writing as an extension (of ourselves) towards someone else (an outstretched hand which lolls in the air, soliciting the touch of another).

I begin.

"Grrls need modems".1 Communications and networked technology provide us with increased opportunities to form loose connections.

I venture. [Nothing ventured, nothing gained!]

ppp : dialup : handshaking

An impulse. I touch, extending a hand as a gesture, a sensitivity, a tenderness. I make an extension, an ontological shift ... a connection. The world on 'FreePPP Setup' turns.

I am connected.

"What was once face-to-face communication runs between the fingertips strung across the world ..."2

My purpose here is to simply begin a discussion: to explore some of the implications of this sensory experience as providing a vernacular for embodied interactions via communications technology as experiential and perceptual phenomenon. Preferring to enter into a collaborative relationship with you as participants, I offer no conclusions. The particular focus, of course, is collaboration in cyberspace. My approach to this topic will be very localised in the sense that I draw on my own experience, using as points of departure online writing collaborations between Perth-based writer Josephine Wilson and myself: *water writes always in *plural and *between the Devil and the deep blue sea*. These projects are collaborative writing endeavours which have not only emerged from the processes and politics of being 'in-computer-mediated-touch' but also demonstrate those processes as textual, narrative and/or subjective strategies. The process aspects of *water moved around a bit, but mostly, the way we worked together was via IRC. Simply, we entered into a series of computer mediated conversations and developed content for the site from those interactions.

*Devil* is again a project which seeks to highlight those communicative and tangential aspects of collaboration. It is a series of letters/emails which move in and out of the idea of correspondence: collaboration, contact, communication. It is part of a much more complex collaborative project, Ensemble Logic instigated by the Adelaide-based Electronic Writing Research Ensemble and involving people worldwide. This project is based around nine (or so) online lectures and ensuing discussions via listserve, IRC and MOO. It is partnered by another project by several artists, Choragraphy. To me, it is very much a collaborative project - perhaps a loose formation of a writing 'community' - because there is such an intense level of exchange between practice and theory, between writers and artists, between writers and writers, etc: the notion of delivering a lecture or paper is shifted into a hypertextual and interactive realm: the notion of delivery becomes not only diffused but transparent.

By stressing ideas about touch in virtual space, I want to shift the primacy of vision and stress an embodiment effect, as an ontological shift, a body-machine relationship or exchange, an acknowledgement that knowledge, as Donna Haraway argues, is situated3 even if and when, as Rosi Braidotti argues, subjectivity is nomadic.4 In so saying, I am following the trajectories mapped by Marshall McLuhan and Sadie Plant who argue the 'extreme and pervasive tactility'5 of multimedia and virtual environments. Referencing McLuhan, Plant states that:

zeros and ones are utterly indiscriminate, recognising none of the old boundaries between passages and channels of communication, and spilling out into the emergence of an entirely new sensory environment in which "begins to be evident that 'touch' is not skin but the interplay of the sense, and 'keeping in touch' or 'getting in touch' is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell."6

If seeing is believing, then touch might result in uncertainty (and in keeping with the theme of ISEA98, this touch might result in an experience of 'terror'). Sadie Plant suggests that

sight is the sense of security which tactility completely undermines ... Touch is the feeling that nothing is safe. While sight is organised around the organs that see and the things that are seen, touch is not a localised sense. It is dispersed and distributed across the skin.7

Sight is separation and distance:

sight depends on separation, the 'possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched.' Anything seen has no say in the matter, but that which is touched always touches back.8

'Touching back' is at the core of collaboration. I don't mean being caught in a feedback loop or a closed network but rather in rhizomatic terms, of 'radical encounter' which acknowledge and account for critical and shifting positionalities of partiality, hypertextuality and interactivity. It is a subversion and a risk. As Alphonso Lingus has stated:

To enter into conversation with another ... is to risk what one found or produced in common ... One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other.9

The rhizome forms the line between points of this unfolding otherness, and therefore forms both the connection and the flight, the in-betweenness of collaboration by which the 'one' is always divisible.10 The line is tactility, a becoming that flows in-between, from being in touch and touching back.

When we communicate, we desire: the sort of desire which Elizabeth Grosz argues can be understood:

as what produces, what connects, what makes machinic alliances ... a series of practices bringing things together or separating them, making machines, making reality. Desire ... aims at nothing above its own proliferation or self-expansion. It assembles things out of singularities. It moves; it does.11

It extends. This idea of extension is important to me in collaboration because desire moves and accounts for the body's intensity and nodality as location and materiality: it establishes a series of contingencies between shifting realities as connexity. As Lingus states

Reality is contingent; it is the eventuality of them being impossible that makes the possibility we reach for real. The real world extends before us as a configuration of possibilities suspended in the abyss of impossibility.

Our substance acts out of a sense of the contingency of the position that supports it and out of the sense of its power to apprehend possible positions ahead and to cast itself with it own forces unto them.12

Touch. Desire. Communication. Collaboration. Touch is contact and proximity. We reach. Becoming closer. We fear our isolation, being behind the rest of the world and worst of all, being out of touch. When we are in touch, we are making our realities via connexion and/or collaboration: plugged into our corporeality and plugged into our environment/s. Being in touch: the channels of communication are open ...

 
NOTES
1. Rosie Cross, 'Geekgirl: Why grrls need modems' in Kathy Bail (ed), DIY Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p 77
2. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, Fourth Estate Limited, London, 1997, p 185
3. Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Position' in Donna J. Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, passim
4. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, passim
5. Marshall McLuhan cited in Sadie Plant, op.cit., p 185
6. ibid.
7. ibid., p 186-187
8. ibid., p 188
9. Alphonso Lingus, The Community Of Those Who Have Nothing In Common, Indianna University Press, Bloomington, 1994, p 88
10. Linda Carroli, 'Virtual Encounters: Community or Collaboration on the Internet?', Leonardo, Vol 30, No 5, 1997, p 361v
11. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994, p 165
12. Lingus, op.cit., p 159

Written for ISEA 98 Webcast