Frida Kahlo...

would probably have enjoyed robbing Mexican banks in the early twentieth century with Penelope Cruz in order to prevent the theft of farmers' property -- especially in satin corsets and with a scruffy dog named Stinky.

When I see Salma Hayek, her portrayal of Kahlo gets in the way of my seeing Hayek as Hayek. And so I watched the movie Bandidas (over two days, while exercising, honest) in some confusion: the movie seemed credible as an alternative bio, what might have happened if Kahlo had never been in the tram accident, had been involved with leftist politics in the desert countryside instead of in cities, and had taken up with Cruz instead of Rivera -- and if Sam Shepard had been around to help the two women clarify their shooting, knife-throwing, and body strength, and if she had decided to ride horses in breast-up-pushing lingerie. If Kahlo hadn't had that accident, if she had been able to live more easily in her body, wouldn't she have enjoyed all this? (Or at least the not-so-explicitly exploiting parts of it?)

Cruz and Hayek were clearly having fun. Frida would have had some laughs.

It's an attitude that might give me good perspective for thinking on Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code. I'm re-reading the book, for all its arguments on bodies, digitality, and recent art -- and is anyone else weaving Stiegler, Varela, Merleau-Ponty, Massumi, and Deleuze? I worked back through Hansen's introduction this morning. It is continuing the work of undoing philosophy -- and aesthetics -- that are based in the west's workings of sight in the last centuries, arguing for us to be operational rather than observational: for Hansen, it is possible with current digital arts (significantly, little that is visually 2D) to "facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and [so] to expand the scope of its bodily agency."

What underlies this, ethically, is a recognition that the ways of seeing into which we have grown up shape in too limited a fashion our sense of our bodies and so our sense of embodiment, where embodiment means to have a world. Hansen, given the theories on which he draws, is arguing that if we "expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity" we transform the "agency of collective existence.... from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation": this is to "think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with."

The question becomes, then, how to provoke that expansion -- and the book is Hansen's look at various digital art works that, he claims, do this. But is it enough simply to hang around such art or to interact with it, or must one form some sort of discursive relation with it? It would seem from the basis for all of this that simply being around the art should do what Hansen wants: to touch the prepersonal sensory, the interaction should be non-discursive, non-visual or non-primarily visual, and should have visceral force, yes?

This is art, then, that is to be built by someone who knows who we all are to be together but it is art built for someone who isn't supposed to ask or think about that. (Shades of Brenda Laurel's programmers making their religious-like immersive experiences back in Computers as Theater.) So I need to read for that, to see if that really is an outcome of what Hansen argues.

I also need to consider the ongoing notion of transduction, of that movement across gaps and of conversion -- because it sends me back to the scale/level questions that arose for me most recently in Powers's Echo Maker.

But I want to think also of the place of bodily pleasure in this, of the energetic, non-discursive, delight of two beautiful women riding their horses into the sunset in Mexico a pretend century ago, converted into my laughing on a snowy Tuesday evening which has now turned into early Wednesday morning. Good night.