From the Text to the Corporeal: The Issues of Body in Bouchardon’s and Volckaert’s Loss of Grasp

Abstract

Over the last decade we are witnessing the increasing interest in the issues of body and embodiment which has resulted in recognition of these topics as crucial for the understanding of many phenomena of contemporary society, culture, and art. In the 1980s and the 1990s it seemed that the cybercultural paradigm was focused only on the issues of mind (e.g. in cyberpunk literature), however, the notion of body has been recently addressed anew in the digital culture as well. The human-machine hybrids are much more complex and sophisticated today. Such novel bodies, shaped by new technologies and software-controlled, are explored also by several e-literary works. The paper examines the line coming from Shelley Jackson’s feminist hyperfiction and textual body art (e.g. My Body – a Wunderkammer, 1997 and Skin Project, 2003) to Serge Bouchardon’s and co-authors’ recent researches of interface. Primarily, it focuses on the e-literary piece Loss of Grasp (2010) that demands from the reader-user to be involved in reading by his complex (physical) activity or his bodily engagement. Loss of Grasp is analyzed also with the help of the phenomenological notions of body image and body schema (M. Merleau-Ponty). The latter one is very important for today’s discussions on body since the possible extensions of body schema lead into the integration of different tools and interfaces into user’s corporeality, which contributes to the understanding of contemporary culture as interface, software and algorithmic. Furthermore, the paper examines the question of the reader’s (as well as the author’s) control over Loss of Grasp, raised by the role of user’s gestures in this piece. Comparing the piece with several other examples from e-literature and new media art, it finds out that the possibilities of the narration in Loss of Grasp are limited.