Wireless Affections: Embodiment and Emotions in New Media/Theory and Art

Abstract

A central strategy in selling information technology has involved the appropriation of earlier historical notions of the ether: as an immersive environment, communicative medium and electronic presence. Just as telephony was connected to the ‘wireless ether’, virtual reality and cyberspace have been connected to the idea of a virtual, electronic sphere, represented as an informatic space, through which a mode of (digital) being is conducted. However, as this paper will argue, while the data trails generated through ‘dataveillance’ technologies, or the information collected by wearable computers, may indeed situate the individual within a digitally rendered ‘ether’, these technologies are based on the generation of knowledge more than the creation of a space, installing an epistemological, rather than an ontological framework for understanding telepresent agency. With reference to recent works by Canadian artist Catherine Richards, this paper will discuss both research into new ‘reality mining’ and ‘affective computing’ technologies and the discourse of posthumanism, as it elaborates the transformation from autonomous liberal subject to post-human hybrid currently underway, and the developing relationships between humans and embodied, emotionally intelligent machines.