1. Ahmed, S. and J. Stacey (2001) ‘Thinking Through the Skin.’
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=juNDiyS01aUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
(accessed 14 March 2011)
In our acknowledgement, skin and body are something come with nature but the authors said, ‘Bodies are no longer assumed simply to be given in and to the world but are rather understood as both the locus of thinking as being already subject to interpretation and conceptualization.’ When the society is changing, things go different in some way; within recent feminist theory, ‘bodies’ have become a privileged focus of attention. The authors said this can partly be explained by the feminist recognition that women’s marginalization from philosophical discourses and the public sphere has been produced through the association between masculinity and reason and femininity and body. The feminist concern with revaluing the body, and bodies are not simply given (as ‘nature’), that bodies are differentiated and that subjectivity and identity cannot be separated from specific forms of embodiment ( Bordo 1993). By now, the meaning of skin seems to be undergoing a great change in different ways. At the same time, the authors are guiding us to think about the skin, but also with the skin or through the skin. Since skin is now and always one of our parts, we should first determine how we feel about and look at our skin.
2. Schick, L. and L. Malmborg (2010) ‘Bodies, embodiment and ubiquitous computing’
http://web.ebscohost.com.eproxy1.lib.hku.hk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=13&sid=1b0f7eee-9e86-46d9-8e8c-0a4782d9db83%40sessionmgr12&vid=1
(accessed 12 March 2011)
As the technology is improving in every single minute, people might worry about the doom day or what would happen to our body in the future; would our skin disappear? But the authors said it is in no danger of disappearing; rather it will unfold into the world. ‘The body and the skin will be the true protagonists in the emerging multi-sensory and reactive network of ubiquitous computing.’
A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity (Deleuze 1970/1988, p. 127).
The author said, undoubtedly, the interwoven technologies and the coexistence of nested multiplicities in Whisper[s] blur the borders between human and technology. So it is hard to cut oneself off from the environment as an autonomous. Since, in the concept of ‘the fold’ by Deleuze’s ‘a fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern’ (Deleuze 1988/1993, p. 6). The process of ‘folding’ repeats when the body is folding into the ubiquitous techno-sphere, and new technologies are refolding embodiment. The skin as border loses its significance and becomes an unfolded interface to the surroundings.
3. Biocca, F. (1997) ‘The Cyborg's Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments’
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/biocca2.html#Thinking (accessed 15 March 2011)
In the website, it has mentioned about when human ‘merged’ with technology , discussed about the design of how technologies extended our bodies and used a figure to indicate ‘how users are progressively embodied in virtual environment interfaces through evolving technologies of sensory engagement, motor engagement, and sensorimotor coordination.’ Especially we are living in a technology determined society; the progressive development of technologies of bodies and the development of new sensing and display devices would affect the future embodiment problems directly or indirectly.
But how would the embodiment be in the next century? The author thought there would be a dilemma in cyborg and stated that the more natural the interface the more "human" it is, the more it adapts to the human body and mind. The more the interface adapts to the human body and mind, the more the body and mind adapts to the non-human interface. Therefore, the more natural the interface, the more we become "unnatural," the more we become cyborgs. And it should be assumed that there is an escape of the dilemma, but it seems pretty difficult for someone not to connect to the technology when we are surrounded by hi-tech devices.
4. Wainer, J., et. al. (2002) ‘The role of physical embodiment in human-robot interaction’
http://cres.usc.edu/pubdb_html/files_upload/498.pdf (accessed 16 March 2011)
Robot has become part of human’s life but the role of embodiment within social robot interactions has not yet been the subject of direct investigation. In the paper, the authors stated that a number of reasons exist for this, but perhaps most significant is that the relationship between embodiment and situatedness has not been explicitly articulated within a social context.
The writers have carried out an experiment to see the interaction between human and machine. They follow two aspect to have the experiment, one is the difference between a physical robot and a simulated one; another is the effect of physical presence through a co-located robot versus a remote tele-present robot. In result of the test, they found that most subjects were experienced with computers and some were experienced with robots but they choose to leave the question of “embodiment without a physical ontology” as future work, therefore leaving the question of what makes “material embodiment” special as open end question. Nevertheless, they made a conclusion from their results that physical or “material” embodiment in a task-oriented setting can make a difference in perception of a social agent’s capabilities and the user’s enjoyment of a task.
5. Fernandez, M. (2002) ‘ Cyberfeminism, Racism, Embodiment’
http://www.refugia.net/domainerrors/DE1b_cyber.pdf
Since ‘black bodies are represented trapped in the web of nature while white bodies have freedom of movement. Such a freedom disembodies whiteness.’ (Mohanra, 1992) The future embodiment which affected or determined by technology may contribute to the race problem because in the theory of feminism, yet there should always assumed that no feminist can be racist because of her awareness of gender oppression. Many electronic media theorists and commercial entities are likely to maintain that “differences” of gender, race and class which do not exist in the Internet due to the disembodied nature of electronic communication. With the improving technology, the future embodiment may have some great changes though the embodiment stresses the interdependence of mind and body.
In addition, some feminist theorists stated their thoughts that an ideal feminist philosophy of the body should reveal articulations and dis-articulations between the biological and the psychological and include “a psychical representation of the subject’s lived body as well as of the relations between body gestures, posture and movements in the constitution of the processes of psychical representation.” Yet, by observing the ways our bodies behave in the presence of “difference, different interpretation of skin, embodiment and racism will comes out and can affect the future embodiment.
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