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Reconceptualizing Body, Space and Place: Telepresence and Mobile Media in Art

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M. Luisa Gmez Martnez

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Reconceptualizing Body, Space and Place:

Telepresence and Mobile Media in Art

M. Luisa Gmez Martnez

Abstract

Since the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), but above all since the emergence of the Internet, the traditional concepts and experiences of place and body have radically changed.

The possibilities of interconnection and networking in real time seem to give rise to the definitive overcome of spatial and temporal boundaries, generating a space-time compression and challenging the role of place as stable and localized environment in which human activities are developed. Thanks to Cyberspace, mobile communication devices and to telepresence, we have become ubiquitous and deterritorialized subjects, inhabitants of a new Space of Flows where the physical body seems to be obsolete.

By means of the creative use of the same digital technologies, the artistic practices, not alien to this transformation, have turned into an important way of reflection and experimentation about spatiality and corporeity.

This paper intends to reflect about the spatial relationships built in this context, showing how digital artistic practices play a key role in the r-conceptualization of the notions of space, place and body. By analyzing specific and significant examples of artistic works focused on telepresence and the construction of new cartographies by means of Locative Media, the aim of this proposal is to study how the notions of space, place and body, far form blurring, acquire an increasing importance in experiencing the current technological reality. The main objective is to show how telepresence and locative media, rather of provoking a loss of the subjects physical relationships with the place, can become important elements to reinforce the links between them. At the same time, these tools generate a complex notion of place and body by making visible the real, virtual and imaginary dimensions that shape them, giving rise to a complete re-signification of the concepts of physical action, mobility and spatial occupation.

Key Words: Space, place, body, cyberspace, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, telepresence, locative media, digital art.

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1. Introduction

The body is, in common terms, the physical and material structure of human being. Its the framework of cells and tissues that articulates our complex biological system. The body is organic matter that, as such, gets corrupted, aged and finally dies.

However, the body is much more: it is the means through which we relate to the environment, the material form of our way of being-in-the-world and the place where subjectivity, feeling or identity meet.

Although the body has been a central topic along the history of occidental thought, the duality mind-body and the predominance of idealism within the dichotomy between nature and culture relegated the body, for centuries, to the condition of mere container of the soul and the mind.

The progressive recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of the body gave a new direction to this debate, turning it into a central object of study for history, anthropology or sociology and leading to the redefinition of its nature in phenomenological terms that overcame duality in favour of integration.

Coinciding with the deep socio-cultural transformations caused by Postmodernity, new approaches to the body such as the questioning of its determinism by feminist theories, the exaltation of consumerist culture within which the body becomes a good and the main production and distribution means of the consumer society or the generalized population aging and the advances of modern medicine turned it into the target of several attentions, but also into a notion in transformation, whose nature should be rethought in the light of the new cultural situation.[endnoteRef:1] [1: About the cultural conceptions of the body and its evolution see, among others: Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, Bryan S. Turner, ed., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: sage, 1991) or Michael Feher, Ramona Naddaff, Nadia Tazi, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone, 1989). ]

Probably, the main effect over the redefinition of the body comes from the quick techno-scientific development in the second half of the 20th century, occurred especially in its last decades. That traditional division between nature and culture, now focused on the distinction between nature and technology, begins to blow into the air as technologies become increasingly important for our ways of doing and thinking and as they are incorporated to the body, contributing together with science and medicine to overcome its physical and biological limitations. The technologies become a rich set of conditions of possibility to explore the limits of the body and the mind, to experiment with its very nature and to reconfigure its relationships with the environment. However, as pointed out by Domingo Hernndez,

the body has found an enemy (or a friend, depending on the point of view) to its own measure. It is none other than its possible disappearance, at least as we knew it. Opposite to the body cult, now the body is obsolete. And thats why it has been modified, dissected, metamorphosed.[endnoteRef:2] [2: Domingo Hernndez Snchez, ed., Arte, Cuerpo y Tecnologa (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2003), 10. ]

Thus, in Cyberculture the body no longer is what it used to be and, therefore, needs to be re-interpreted within the new paradigms of the new Cyborg ontology, posthumanism or transhumanism

Although many of these issues have been raised throughout the book and will also be analyzed in this chapter, the aim of this text is to reflect about two opposed dynamics regarding to body transformations in Cybercultre: the bodys obsolescence linked to virtualization and the reappraisal of corporeal experience. To this scope, we will analyze these issues regarding to the very transformations of the notions of space and place, considering their intrinsic relationship with the body. And we will try to put forward these different ways of conceiving and constructing space, place and body from the point of view of the artistic practices, that is, considering the artistic uses of telepresence technologies and mobile communication systems, which are the material basis of the above-mentioned dynamics. I consider this approach essential because artistic practices, as symbolic constructions of society, are and have always been regulators of the world conceptions, as they propose critical points of view and practical and aesthetical experiences that, straying from the everyday life, allow new glances at reality. This becomes evident in our current technologically mediated environment, as the artistic practices using ICTs as creative means denaturalize our interactions with them. In this way they open new possibilities for reflection about their impact over culture and, in this case, over our conceptions of the body, the space, the place and their relationships.

2. Space, Place, Body and Technology

In her text Reconceptualizing Time and Space in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications, Panayiota Tsatsou gives an interesting definition of the notions of space and place according to certain approaches by authors as Yi-Fu Tuan or Edward Relph. Tsatsou says:

(Space) is amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analyzed. In relation to the often intermingled concept of place, there is nearly always some associated sense or concept of place in a way that it seems that space provides the context for places but derives its meaning from particular places. In this sense, place is a concretion of value it is an object in which one can dwell whilst space is given by the ability to move.[endnoteRef:3] [3: Panagiota Tsatsou, Reconceptualizing Time and Space in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 1 (July 2009): 12, accessed December 12, 2011, http://journals.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v1_tsatsou.html ]

We usually define space as the three-dimensional expanse in which all objects exist or as an interval of distance or time between two points, objects or events.[endnoteRef:4] Therefore, space is a dimension of reality to which we are linked trough the materiality of our own bodies. When space acquires symbolic meaning and concrete definition, it becomes place, marking up the whole spectrum of identity and sense of belonging. [4: Collins Dictionary Online, s.v. space, accessed December 14, 2011, http://www.collinslanguage.com]

However, we must consider also that space is not only the physical expanse that contains objects and subjects. This conception of space based on a notion of absolute space as an entity that is external to human being and that merges from Newtonian physics was widely accepted during the modernity. But, in the context of postmodernism and regarding to what Fredric Jameson called the Spatial Turn, this idea of space was replaced by a vision that considered it as a social construction that depends on experience and action, on how space and place are occupied and inhabited through action and mobility and, therefore, on the body as a field of experience.

This reconfiguration of the notion of space was first advocated, among others, by Henri Lefebvre, who set forward the idea of space both as a social product and a social producer in relation to the spatial practices (experience, lived space), representation of space (perceived, conceived) and space of representation (imagination).[endnoteRef:5] Pierre Bourdieu also developed this spatial vision of reality based on the concept of habitus. As we are inscribed in space due to the materiality of our own body, according to him, through the habitus defined as the practice of everyday life that is written on the body we determine our placement and generate spaces in social frameworks (gender or class).[endnoteRef:6] In this way, the habitus is embodied in the bodys own spatial condition, while simultaneously, the social construction of space exerts an influence on the habitus. [5: Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell, 1991).] [6: Peter Hubbard, ed., Key Thinkers of Space and Place (London: Sage, 2009).]

From these points of view, we can say that the reconfiguration of physical and social space implies a whole reconceptualizacin of the body, while the redefinition of the physical relations between space, place and body entails a new experience of space.

This is exactly what happens in the case of Cybercultre, a context in which ICTs have simultaneously altered both the dimensions of our bodies and of the spaces within we operate, radically transforming how we conceive the body, the space and the place.

Marchall McLuhan, for instance, considers that technologies and media are extensions of the senses or of any physical or psychic human faculty. Thus, according to him, the wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye Clothing, an extension of the skin Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.[endnoteRef:7] [7: Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, An Inventory of Effects, trans. Quentin Fiore (New York: Random House, 1989), 31. ]

In this sense, he stated:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies into space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.[endnoteRef:8] [8: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994 (1964), 3.]

If we go back to our previous considerations about how the redefinition of space entails redefining the body and vice versa, we can understand in which ways the extension of the body annihilates the space. But we can also understand how the annihilation of the space entails a virtual annihilation of the body. In fact, and paradoxically, the main consequence of the virtual extension of human capacities over space and time has led to a disembodiment and a dematerialization of the physical body and, therefore, to a loss of our sense of place.

But lets go deeper into this issue: What does it mean annihilation in this context and how is carried out this process of disembodiment, of Virtualization of the Body in Pierre Levys terms?

The transformation of our spatial perception was the result of the acceleration of communication processes. The mobility possibilities offered by mechanical means of transport, as well as the virtual mobility linked to physical immobility offered by remote communications, outlined a new spatial and corporal landscape.

As pointed out by Anthony Giddens, before the emergence of remote communications, space and place understood through the notion of local, referring to the physical settlements of geographically located social activity almost always coincided together, since social relations were ruled by physical presence. By fostering relations between the absentees set at a distance from any face-to-face interaction,[endnoteRef:9] the ICTs provoked a separation between space and place. This process results from the communications conquest of spatio-temporal barriers: ICTs eliminate the need to cover physical space, which as suggested by different marxist theorists is virtually annihilated in favour of real time; a fact that produced what Harvey calls the time-space compression.[endnoteRef:10] [9: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, (California: Standford University Press, 1990), 29-30.] [10: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell, 1991).]

Besides this compression and anihilation of phisical space, ICTs have given rise to the emergence of a new space, the Cyberspace, the virtual space of communication emerging from the global interconnection of computers. Cyberspace, according to Pierre Levy, is identified with the Network and can be defined as

the new communication media emerging from the global interconnection of computers. The term includes not only the physical infrastructure of digital communication, but also the large amount of information contained, as well as the human beings who navigate and fuel it. [endnoteRef:11] [11: Pierre Levy, Cyberculture, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), XVI. ]

One of the characteristics attributed to it, precisely due to its intangible and virtual nature, is a disconnection from the physical coordinates of space and time. If, as pointed out by Castells, the importance of Cyberspace in our culture is rooted in the way that the Network absorbs all our cultural logics, including the spatial one, it seems natural that the emergence of Cyberspace had created a new sense of space, founded in the same logics of mobility that the information flows. That is how a space of flows has replaced the traditional space of places, the physical settlement of social activity located geographically.[endnoteRef:12] [12: Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000). ]

Thus, going back to the relation between the virtualization of the space and the virtualization of the body, if the former, as the material extension where our bodies exist, is virtually annihilated to become a virtual space, then the body should also have become a virtual body, which acts as a double of the physical one and that inhabits Cyberspace. Therefore, we become ubiquitous subjects, capable of being here and there (in the virtual space) at the same time. As Cyberspace gained more importance as a socializing sphere, we have also become deterritorialized subjects: given that subjects are no longer where they are, their social relationships in and with the physical space are weakened.

In this context of virtualization, where as highlighted by Negroponte bits have replaced atoms,[endnoteRef:13] apparently the body has become just a mind. The physical part of the body the Cartesian res extensa has remained obsolete, has been replaced by the virtual one, just as the physical space has been replaced by the virtual space. [13: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996).]

These ideas of obsolescence of all physical matters of life were very important in the social imaginaries of the 90s. Practices such as Virtual Reality nowadays increasingly replaced by Augmented Reality considerably helped to reinforce this images and ideas associated to the notions of space and body. We just need to think about Cyberpunk classics as Neuromance or films as ExistenZ (1999) or The Matrix (1999) to become aware of the deep links between the idea of the obsolescence of the physical body and the notion of Cyberspace.

However, these ideas, of course, can be discussed. We know that physical spaces and places have not disappeared, as we still have physical bodies that allow us to be in those physical spaces and places. Castells and Levy themselves have pointed out the importance of materiality, both for the configuration of the space of flows and for the access to Cyberspace, which is executed through an interface located in physical space.

In fact, the extension of human capacities by ICTs doesnt occur only over space and time, but also in space and time. Our technological devices become smaller and smaller, easier to carry, more and more adaptable to the body. This trend toward the development of mobile devices, that begun with the laptop and that has now became stronger thanks to smartphones, plays an important role in the configuration of our sense of placeness, our virtual ubiquity experiences and our ideas about the obsolescence of the body. But at the same time, the localization technologies integrated with this devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System), reinforce our sense of place and remember us the corporeal and material dimensions of our mobility through and within space, but also the importance of performativity and sensoriality to construct and inhabit it.

Besides, mobile technologies alter our relationship with space: if, as we have just seen, the emergence of Cyberspace created a sense of virtualized space according to which the space of places had been replaced by the space of flows, this mobile and location devices mark a new trend in our interaction with space and place. It seems that in the case of mobile technologies, the virtual information itself is attracted to local places. But besides, they dont just generate an imaginary overlap of virtual spaces over the real ones or vice versa, but a coexistence of both of them. This creates a new kind of space that Andr Lemos called Informative Territories, areas where the information flow at the intersection between Cyberspace and physical space is digitally controlled.[endnoteRef:14] And deals also with what Lev Manovich called Augmented Space which he defines as the physical space that is overlapped by dynamic and changing information.[endnoteRef:15] This technologies create a definitively a new type of space that we could refer as Hyperspace. The term reflects it complex nature, consisting of several real, virtual and subjective dimensions that convert it into a space in constant transformation, with which we interact by dwelling the real and the virtual world simultaneously. [14: Andr Lemos, Medios Locativos y Territorios Informativos. Comunicacin Mvil y Nuevo Sentido de los Lugares, Inclusiva-Net: Redes Digitales y Espacio Fsico, (March 2008), accessed November 16, 2011, http://medialab-prado.es/mmedia/1835 ] [15: Lev Manovich, The Poetics of Augmented Space, manovich.net, accessed November 24, 2011, http://manovich.net/articles/ ]

Going back, once again, to the intrinsic relationship between space, place and body, we can consider that the hyperspace affects the construction of the latter not only in terms of performativity or sensitivy, but also in terms of the construction of identity inscribed into the body by the habitus.

From this point, my purpose is to account for these conceptions of body, space and place and their own transformations thanks to the development of new technologies, by analyzing them through the lens of artistic practices and considering the creative and thoughtful use that those practices make of them.

3.Telepresence: Virtualized Space Obsolete Body?

Telepresence seems to be the maximum expression of the possibility of annihilating body and space. Literally, the term telepresence means presence-at a distance (Tele), where presence refers not to ones surroundings as they exist in the physical world, but to the perception of those surroundings as mediated by both automatic and controlled mental processes.[endnoteRef:16] [16: James J. Gibson, The ecological approach to visual perception. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), quoted in Jonathan Steuer, Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining Telepresence, in Frank Biocca, Mark R. Levy, ed., Communication in the age of virtual reality (Hillsdale, NJ : Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 35. ]

Thus by telepresence we understand not only the virtual presence in Cyberspace, but also the virtual presence in other physical spaces, with which we can interact and where our actions have visible and practical effects on subjects, objects and places geographically located far away from us.[endnoteRef:17] [17: Eduardo Kac, Ornitorrinco y Rara Avis. El Arte de la Telepresencia en Internet, in Claudia Gianetti, ed., Ars Telemtica. Telecomunicacin, Internet y Ciberespacio (Barcelona: LAngelot, 1998), 119-127. ]

Precisely, Jonathan Steuer has defined telepresence as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium; it is the mediated perception of a temporally or spatially distant real environment through the means of some sort of telecommunications technology.[endnoteRef:18] [18: Steuer, Defining Virtual Reality, 36. ]

According to Levy, Telepresence is mainly linked to the projection of the body image. But in fact, he says, its more. Thus

The telephone, for instance, works as a tele-presence device, because it does not carry and image or a representation of the voices: it carries the voices themselves. The telephone detaches the voices (or sonorous bodies) from the tangible body and delivers it at a distance. My tangible body is here, my sonorous body, split, is here and there. The telephone actualizes a partial form of ubiquity, and the same split also affects the sonorous body of my interlocutor. Although both of us are respectively here and there, a cross in the distribution of our tangible bodies takes place.[endnoteRef:19] [19: Pierre Levy, Qu es lo Virtual? (Becoming Virtual) (Barcelona: Paids, 1999), 28.]

And he continues:

Virtual Reality systems also carry more that just pictures: an almost presence, as the clones, visible agents, or virtual puppets can affect and modify other virtual puppets and visible agents, or even activate real devices at a distance and act in the ordinary world. Certain functions of the body, as the capacity of manipulation, linked to the sensory-motor connection in real time, are transferred, thus, at a distance, throughout a complex technical string used better and better in certain industrial environments.[endnoteRef:20] [20: Ibid.]

During the 1990s, coinciding with the expansion of new visions of space and place provoked by the emergence of Cyberspace, many artistic practices tried to explore the possibilities of interacting with remote spaces, setting out certain reflections on its consequences and even on its ethical connotations.

One of the best-known and pioneering projects in this field was Ken Goldbergs Telegarden (1995-2004, University of Southern California). It was a cooperative on-line gardening initiative that allowed users of the entire world to control trough the Internet a robotic arm that grew seeds or watered plants in a real garden situated, since 1996, in the Ars Electronica Center, Linz (Austria). The members of this gardening community could monitor all their actions, executed by the tender movements of the industrial robotic arm, trough a camera.[endnoteRef:21] This is a good example of a virtually extended body, where sight and touch can arrive to remote places; where our action barely depends on physical movement; were virtualized body annihilates the space and where the virtual elimination of space makes body action obsolete. [21: For more information about the work see: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/ Ars/]

Mexican artist Lozano-Hemmers projects in public spaces are also very representative of this kind of telepresence artistic practices. Vectorial Elevation was created to celebrate the year 2000 at the Zocalo Square of Mexico. The work consisted of a series of light beams that could be controlled trough the Internet by users from all over the world. Thus, the work reflected on the aesthetic possibilities of telepresence itself, but at the same time, it allowed an aesthetic re-definition and the transformation of the real place through the different combinations of the light beams and its movements.[endnoteRef:22] For this reason, in a certain way, this project was also challenging the idea of deterritorialization: we, who interact with the work, are virtually ubiquitous we are able to alter a distant space in real time but we cannot physically experience the effects of our action. However, other subjects inhabit that other physical space. And, by aesthetically reshaping it through our actions, we transform the practices of its inhabitants and we alter their perception of that space, generating a new sense of place and locality related with their embodied physical experience. [22: For more information about this work see: http://lozano-hemmer.com/vecorial_ elevation.php]

Although telepresence itself is a form of relation with the environment that highlights the obsolescence of the body in terms of communication, it has been also used by artists to reflect right on this phenomena for a critical point of view.

This is the case of the project Epizoo, by the Spanish artist Marcell Antnez, conceived as a Mechatronic performance and presented for the first time in 1994. Following other artistic experiments related with the Cyborg as objetictification of the body as those developed by Stelarc,[endnoteRef:23] Antnez connected several mechanic devices to his body. These mechatronic devices comprising a body robot, which is an exoskeleton worn by the performer, a computer and a mechanical body control device were remotely controlled by the users, who could manipulate artists flesh and skin in their own way. The orthopaedic robot mechanism was held to the body by two metal moulds, a belt and a helmet, into which the pneumatic mechanisms were fitted. These mechanisms could move Marcel.ls nose, buttocks, pectorals, mouth and ears while the artist remained standing upright on a rotating circular platform during the performance. The pneumatic devices were in turn connected to a system of computer controlled electro-valves and relays. The computer run an exclusive application with an interface similar to a videogame, with eleven interactive scenes of computer generated animated sequences that recreated the figure of the artist and indicated the position and movement of the mechanisms. In this way the user could control the artist's body by using the mouse.[endnoteRef:24] In this performance, the main idea was to explore the artists pain threshold, raising the question of the ethical consequences of our remote actions, but also stressing the idea that despite all kind of virtualizations or cyborgizations, our body is still a battlefield, in fact, a bloody battlefield.[endnoteRef:25] [23: See, for example, his Exoskeletons: http://stelarc.org/?catID=20227] [24: For more information about this work see: http://www.marceliantunez.com/ work/epizoo] [25: This idea can be traced also in other examples of the present volume, as in the case of corset-training in certain Steampunk communities. ]

4.Locative Media: Hybrid Space and Deterritorialez Body?

We have said that space and place are created through mobility and action, through an embodied experience of reality. The development of ubiquitous computing[endnoteRef:26] and mobile telephone technologies has allowed us to combine virtual presence and mobility with physical mobility in localized places. The relationship established between body and space becomes more and more complex and, as we have already seen, far from blurring, both notions seem to acquire new dimensions and to increase their importance for socio-cultural practices. [26: Martin Weiser, The Computer for the Twenty-first Century, Scientific American, 265 no.4 (September, 1991): 94104.]

Locative Media is a type of artistic practice based on the use of devices and location systems such as GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile phones etc., which are built to allow the exchange of information with the physical world. This term, coined by Karlis Kalinis in 2003, refers to the differences between the artistic use of these devices and its commercial use.[endnoteRef:27] Based on these new localization systems and combining them with other ICTs, the Locative Media create alternative and collaborative maps in order to reshape our worldview through new strategies of spatial representation beyond the imposition of an external geometry on physical geography.[endnoteRef:28] [27: Lemos, Medios Locativos. ] [28: Dimitris Charitos et al., Prcticas Artsticas basadas en la Localizacin que desafan la Nocin Tradicional de Cartografa, Artnodes 8, (November 2008), accessed June 10, 2011, http://www.uoc.edu/artonodes/8/dt/esp/presentacion.pdf]

Thus the Locative Media practices consist in adding information to the physical space to change the way we experience it. Therefore, they appear to challenge the discourse on space versus cyberspace, insisting on the idea of physical space as a territory, and on the production of spatial content defined by objects and places. That is, they seek to generate a reterritorialization process trough virtual space. In this sense, they are practices directly related to those proposed in the late 1950s by the Situationist International, which tried to create social and political transformations upon the recognition of territorial space and what they called psycho-geography. As we can deduce from this description, the notion of body and its natural linkage to space and place, have a great importance in this kind of socio-political mappings.

In the realm of Locative Media, one of the best-known projects is PacManhattan, developed in 2004 at the University of New York and performed in several cities since then. It consists of a mixture of location and display devices (mobile phones, Wi-Fi and a special software) aiming to enliven the well-known videogame of the 80s, PacMan, placing it on an urban physical environment. It sets a circuit of several streets along which the player (Pacman) runs, trying to collect virtual dots. These dots are depicted on a map of the city that the player displays on a mobile device. At the same time, four other players who represent the typical ghosts of the videogame pursue Pacman, being able to locate him through the same system.[endnoteRef:29] In this case, the urban space becomes an augmented space where the body is also an extended body. But due to the localized and territorialized nature of the performance, the body as a means of interaction with the environment recovers it corporeal and embodied nature, which predominates over the idea of its obsolescence. [29: For more information about this work, see: http://pacmanhattan.com/]

Locative Media involve a great range of different artistic typologies. Some of them, more critic and based in the writing of new narratives of place, combine the physical presence and mobility along it with personal and collective memories. This is the case of Rider Spoke (Blast Theory, 2007), which is an intervention in urban space consisting in recording messages in hidden places of the city by means of a computer mounted over a bicycle. Participants had to discover the messages of other people, which could be decoded only in the place where they were hidden. In this case, space and place where re-constructed by the personal experience of others, providing participants with new ways of engaging their daily environment.[endnoteRef:30] Again, the experience of a territorialized body, located in a particular place, takes priority over the virtual ubiquity: the physical presence is a necessary condition to interact with information. Besides, the body, in its dimensions of identity and subjectivity, is redefined by virtual information in particular contexts. [30: For more information about the project see: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/ work_rider_spoke.html]

Another example along these lines, but more specifically based on the idea of mapping is Christian Nolds Bio Mapping (2004). It involves the creation of emotional maps that represent areas of high and low emotionality. Such emotion is captured on the passers during their tours on a particular area using galvanic skin response devices. Then, this information displayed in constantly changing maps which can be viewed on the network both while doing the tour and later. Thus, its users are proposed to rescan the area in which they live according to these emotional maps and their subjective implications. Thanks to these emotional maps, users give a different interpretation to the urban environment and are more aware of the decisions they make and how they affect them. Besides, the project also allows social interaction from the pooling of data on the web.[endnoteRef:31] [31: For more information about the project see: http://biomapping.net BibliographyBiocca, Frank, Levy, Mark R., ed., Communication in the age of virtual reality. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1995.Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000.Charitos, Dimitris et al., Prcticas Artsticas basadas en la Localizacin que desafan la Nocin Tradicional de Cartografa, Artnodes 8, (November 2008). Accessed June 10, 2011, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/8/dt/esp/presentacion.pdf Featherstone, Mike, Hepworth, Myke, Turner, Bryan S., ed., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage, 1991.Feher, Michael, Naddaff, Ramona, Tazi, Madia, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body. New York: Zone, 1989. Gianetti, Claudia, ed., Ars Telemtica. Telecomunicacin, Internet y Ciberespacio. Barcelona: LAngelot, 1998Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Blackwell, 1991. Hernndez Snchez, Domingo, ed., Arte, Cuerpo y Tecnologa. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2003.Hubbard, Peter, ed., Key Thinkers of Space and Place. London: Sage, 2009.Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.Lefebvre, Henry, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Blackwell, 1991.Lemos, Andr , Medios Locativos y Territorios Informativos. Comunicacin Mvil y Nuevo Sentido de los Lugares, Inclusiva-Net: Redes Digitales y Espacio Fsico, (March 2008). Accessed November 16, 2011, http://medialab-prado.es/mmedia/1835Lev Manovich, The Poetics of Augmented Space. manovich.net. Accessed November 24, 2001, http://manovich.net/articles/ Levy, Pierre, Cyberculture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.Levy, Pierre, Qu es lo Virtual? (Becoming Virtual). Barcelona: Paids, 1999.McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium is the Massage, An Inventory of Effects, trans. Quentin Fiore. New York: Random House, 1989.McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994 (1964). Negroponte, Nicholas, El Mundo digital. Barcelona: Eds. B, 1995.Tsatsou, Panagiota, Reconceptualizing Time and Space in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 1 (July 2009): 11-32. Accessed December 12, 2011, http://journals.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v1_tsatsou.html Weiser, Martin, The Computer for the Twenty-first Century, Scientific American, 265 no.4 (September, 1991): 94104.Marisa Gmez Martnez is PhD student at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests are focused on social imaginaries, space-time transformations and audiovisual aesthetics in the context of the digital culture.]

Apart from the features that this works shares with the previous examples in terms of questioning the obsolescence of the body within augmented spaces, Bio mapping has the particularity that uses the body as the measuring parameter to visualize peoples reaction to external world. Skin and emotions, the physical and mental dimensions of the body, are here contextualized in geographical location. Thus, the body, in its more biological and daily sense arises as a reality that, beyond its possible technological reconfiguration, still matters in its very essential nature.

In all these examples we can see how physical space and physical body interact with virtual information by means of electronic devices. Therefore, they become augmented and hybrid entities that merge from the superposition of virtual information over them. But actually, they are reciprocally constructed mainly by physical activities of real subjects, who by means of their own mobility, by means of their own physical presence in the shared space of the city reconstruct not only a new way of experiencing space itself, but also a new way of experiencing the materiality of their bodies in relation to space and place.

5.Conclusions

To sum up, we can say that the transformations of the notions of place, space and body are an empirically verifiable fact nowadays, and one of the most important effects of ICTs over social and cultural life. Regarding the nature of the body and space itself, these transformations involve processes that critically engage virtualization and actualization; mind, flesh and identity; place, territory and mobility. As each of these aspects acquire new dimensions and possible natures by means of technologies, our experience and perception of space and body are modified by a number of imaginary and subjective tensions depending on action and social practice over physical reality.

However, those transformations are far from being accomplished: they are still developing, just like our own technical and communicational systems. That is how in a few years, the predominant ideas that saw technological expansion as the overcome of physical space and thus, as the announced death of the body, have been challenged by new technologies that allow new ways of thinking about virtuality and coporeality, as well as about our spatial practices within and with them. But also, as we have seen, before the revolution of mobile technologies there was already certain suspicions dealing with this sense of the obsolescence of the body. Although in science fiction or in social imaginaries the more extended idea was that we could, someday, leave behind our bodies to free our minds an idea that is still based on the conception of the body as a container of the mind , we could consider, as suggested by Hernandez, that what the obsolescence of the body means, and has always meant, is just that the body is obsolete as we knew it.

Thus, the analysis of material practices in contemporary society in this case artistic practices, which have also revealed different aspects of the evolution of creativity and digital aesthetics opens a space to think about these processes linked to ICT development, and, sometimes, forces us to re-think such accepted contemporary concepts like deterritorialization. By means of this analysis, we can state that in the current technological era, we live in a spatiality in which the real and virtual spaces are getting more and more connected. This means that the body is also reconceptualized, but not as an immaterial reality, but as a complex expanded reality that is doubled in Cyberspace and thus resignified in real and physical space.

Notes