Week 4 Response

In Utopian Body Foucault describes the body as a null point, origin coordinates of (0,0,0) from where the world surrounding are localized. When the body’s position changes the position of surrounding objects shift in relation to it. In trying to gather spatial information one cannot help but disturb the existing spatial relation between the body and the object. Likewise, in Burga’s Structure of Air, one cannot sense the direction and pressure of the air without coming into the way of the air itself, which inevitably disturbs the position and momentum of the air particles. In such a translation of information from one medium to another, in this case, the movement of air to the bodily sensation upon one’s skin, the information is not retained but rather loses its form under this translation. This recalls aspects of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that the attempt to measure a particle’s velocity unpredictably displaces it to another position so that a simultaneous location of the particle’s position holds no validity. It brings up the notion that the act of perceiving information is also an act of interacting, and the receptor becomes an active agent within the system from which it attempted to extract information.