Jordan Crandall processes movement at the interface between humans and machines.

I want to consider exercise as a marker of rhythmic operations, in which the body is immersed as agent and incorporant, within general conditions of making processes, forms, circuits, and capacities adequate to emerging regimes of fitness. And lest one think that notions of fitness are not in keeping with the body's virtualization, and necessarily serve to privilege a singly corporealized entity, I would like to point out that in all cases of body-subject-interface encounters, no matter how virtual, we are speaking of a newly mobilized body, and a subjectivity constituted within formats of movement, across hybrid transport-transmission landscapes (landscapes traversed in terms of the transfer of weight over land and the transmission of embodied presence through the network). The body in motion, subject to notions of efficient and adequate movement, contours and sediments itself through circuits and cycles of repetition, in whatever degree of corporeality or virtuality. Even on the (arguably) fully physical side of the spectrum, the days when one's meatself is docked at the monitor are coming to an end, and emerging cultural practices would do well to take this mobilization into account. The formats and codes of the interface register and facilitate these cycles, and the movements and processes of embodiment to which they are attached.

The newly mobilized body, bedecked in gadgetry--portable arrays of devices, either attached externally or implanted internally. How sexy. Consider a simple, early gadget: the walkman, with which one powerwalks. Sitting next to the early mainframe radio or phonograph, to what extent did one forget about one's body, necessarily parked within range of the machine? The interface as it stands, as it makes one stand, as it arrests one and places one in a holding-pattern, always lays the seeds for mobilization. A preparatory state for new sites of embodiment, patterns of mobility, and formats of enunciation. It facilitates arrays of localizations that link together in new presences. It is a peculiar site of exercise. And not just in terms of the obvious hand-eye coordinations via the mouse, but in terms of the way its formats are internalized in larger patterns of movement. Here is where we can locate the emerging paradigm of the database, and consider its effects. But at the same time: the interface marks the site of the arrested body's integration into the machine, into machinic operations that have larger societal links and consequences--indeed, which rest upon entire social apparatuses of fitness, efficiency, adequacy.

Consider the finger-scanner, now available as an option on the purchase of a new computer--installed on the keyboard itself, to the left of the Shift key, or in some models, right on the mouse. A new form of fingering! But even more: one agent of an entire emerging economy of authentication, based on the incorporation of biological patterns into virtualized constructs, formatted according to emerging database conventions. The 'fingered' body is represented, is seen, its movements recorded and internalized, through the mechanisms of the database (even on the basic level of the 'cookie'). How do these formats augment traditional, cinematic norms of movement representation--that is, the set of conventions through which the world of movement has come to be known? For movement is no longer seen as much as processed --or rather, it is represented by way of its processing. On one hand, the format of the database floats above the cinematic image-field, combining with it to generate a new kind of moving image, a 'machine-image'. One can even revisit the history of the moving image in terms of movement processing: think of proto-powerwalker Charlie Chaplin in these terms, especially in his struggles to keep up with the demands of the machine in Modern Times. And, again, one can think movement in terms of the immobilizations that it locates. After all, it was Serge Daney who reminded us that the set of movement-conventions that is cinema only took hold via the public's immobilization in theaters, arrested and held in thrall by the screen.

Movement is inextricably bound up in technological capacities and imperatives. Wherever there is a movement, there is a machine. Exercise always happens in symbiosis with the machine, according to rhythms that it incorporates and emits. You don't relate signs when you exercise, as you do when you read and your body just (apparently) sits there immobilized. You coordinate your rhythms and movements to those you hear, feel, or sense proprioceptively, in order to 'get in shape'. The body configures as a locus of rhythmic operations, as an active process of incorporation and coordination with machines both technical and social. To think in terms of coordinations, as much as in relations, is to begin to understand emerging potentials for interventions within the field of the interface--the machine for moving. A logistics lurks in the most basic of routines.

  Jordan Crandall is director of the X Art Foundation, New York, founding editor of Blast ( http://www.blast.org ), and Visiting Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He is currently developing his first solo museum exhibition, to open in November 1999 in Graz, Austria, curated by Peter Weibel.