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 "... the leaky, unbound, uncontainable aspects of the body that women represent in the tradition of western dualistic thought" -- Diane Gromala |
Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies, con't ___by Diane Gromala Hypnerotomachia: Excretia In reconsidering issues raised by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, I explore the first subcomponent, Excretia, in our radically different context of technological change. Excretia is a responsive, interactive typeface, dataspace, and information system that morphs in response to a user's scientifically measurable physical states, in real-time. 
The "typeface" is not unified, but is a sampling of many typefaces. It elides both the early Renaissance typographers' desires to reveal the trace of the body in letterforms, and to ideas that arose later in the Renaissance that the bodily responses to, and the visual and material aspects of the text are "transparent" to meaning. The literal connection of Excretia to the body and to phatic pictorial images, and the transgressions of sense through metaphor and word play paradoxically reveal our distance from bodily and phenomenological awareness. Simultaneously, the textual and pictorial information that comprises the dataspace recontextualized "factoids," scientific visualizations and references are juxtaposed with aesthetically "beautiful" images of the abject. (9) Responsive to a user's body, these juxtapositions create slippages between scientific and poetic language, textual and pictorial language, cognitive understanding and bodily sense, and disrupt celebratory connections to a normative body. They reveal the ways in which the body is cataloged and regulated, and the extent to which we inculcate regulatory and disciplinary structures described by Michel Foucault. Striving for an embodied subjectivity, Excretia, in behavior, content, and form, is particularly concerned with and marks what Elizabeth Grosz (10) refers to as the obverse of the normative, masculine body: the "volatile bodies," the leaky, unbound, uncontainable aspects of the body that women represent in the tradition of western dualistic thought. Diane Gromala is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, where she teaches in the graduate program in Information Design and Technology. She is also a faculty member of GVU, the Graphics Visualization and Usability Center. Gromala's critical analyses of virtual media have appeared in numerous art and design journals, and her virtual reality artwork has been performed and presented in Canada, the US, Europe, the Middle East and aired on the Discovery Channel and the BBC. Gromala frequently lectures at international conferences and symposia, is on the Editorial Board of Postmodern Culture, Chair of SIGGRAPH's Art Gallery in the year 2000, and a recent recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship.
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