A Play of Bodies - Brendan Keogh
A Play Of Bodies by theorist Brendan Keogh is perhaps the most comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of the complex system of haptic and psychological interactions that occur while people are playing video games. Combining his historical interest in video art with deep and expansive readings in philosophy, phenomenology, identity, and cybernetic theory, Keogh probes how we construct a sense of self and body-hood in relationship with the digital spaces and devices. Despite the requisite academic style, this work is very much worth reading for an arts audience because of his earnest attempt to tease out our bodies’ sophisticated and multilayered relationship with technology. Part of the book is dedicated to showing how rich and complex human bodies’ interactions with computational technology can be, disassembling many essentialist binaries (including around gender) common in many colloquial and academic visions of technology. Keogh’s incredibly generous imagination for the variegated ways that our bodies can exist in relationship to technology is always coupled with rigorous attention to detail and with concrete examples that gives readers an incredibly rich understanding of the ways digital art produces meaning.
Author: Brendan Keogh
Link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/play-bodies
Connections:
Donna Haraway - A Cyborg Manifesto
Miltos Mateas - Paintings from Contemporary Life