David Sudnow, “Eyeball”
One person “seemed unable to effect that transformation of sense needed to engage himself with big looking movements through little feeling ones. He couldn’t project a comfortable scale of being into the confining detachment of the interface, couldn’t trust the efficiency of a mere knob” (4)
“he refused to adopt the postural respect solicited by new embodied equipment” (4)
“There’s that world space over there, this one over here, and we traverse the wired gap with motions that make us nonetheless feel in a balanced extending touch with things” (5)
“A smooth gesture knows from the outset when it’ll get where it’s headed, as a little pulse is established that lays out the upcoming arrival time, a compressed ‘ready, set, go’ built into the start of the movement. The gesture then feels when to speed up and slow down to attain the target” (6)
“I began getting off on the action, building control and precision in these gentle little calibrations” (7)
“My glance took snapshots of the overall neighborhood, there was enough give in the tempo to allow for some instant geometry during play” (7)
“recurrent bleeps helped you gear into the overall rate of action. The sights helped. The more or less steady passage of the ball painted the action’s tempo in broad strokes, so when the eyes loosened there hold on it to take in a wider or different territory, that gently tracing light kept the fingers continuously alive to the whereabouts and pace of things” (7-8)
“At first it felt like my eyes told my fingers where to go. But in time I knew the smooth rotating hand motions were assiting the look in turn, eyes and fingers in a two-way partnership” (8)
“Walking a rainy street, you identify the dimensions of a puddle in relation to the size and rate of your gait, so the stride itself patterns the style of your looking, how you scan the field’s depth of focus and extent of coverage, what you see” (8)
“hands and gaze maintain a delicate rhythmic alignment” (8)
“you’d have to sustain a pulse to organize the simultaneous work of visually and tactiley grasping the ball, your hands helping your look help your hands make the shot” (8)
“The ball lobs up, then shoots down, my eyes inhabiting it all along the way, absorbing its speed as their own and pulling the fingers to the meeting place” (13-14)
“to grab a firm hold you must possess the game’s rates, and supply the ‘ready, set, go’ missing on screen” (15)
“Your eyes beckon you within range of the pace, but till you more thoroughly learn to feel how fast upcoming slams go in relation to how fast slow shots rise, there’s no way at all to ride on the wave” (15)
“I was learning to feel it go fast and go slow, to feel how fast fast is from this slow and that” (15)
David Sudnow, “Cathexis”
“I sometimes played sloppily, at other times well, and I couldn’t yet explain the inconsistency” (16)
“I started thinking about these so-called skills. They were odd, even scary. They took place a little too fast for comfort” (21)
“I look down at my piano keyboard hands, and a history of struggle lets me appreciate the natural accomplishment they now reveal, the result of a lifelong interaction between a biography and social settings that were frequented, yielding a particular path toward a unique style with its merits and deficiencies. Acquiring such a skill, I have an ongoing conversation with these hands, an elaborate interchange of advice, complaint, and cooperation born of years of collective effort” (21)
“Here I look down at a knob-holding hand and watch it go through what seem like altogether complex little calibrations … But two weeks? Take credit for that?” (21)
“What ‘effort’ had I made? … Give the folks a little consciousness so they’ll figure there’s more to them than just bundles of programmable nerve pathways” (21)
“I hadn’t forged a skill” (22)
“If you engage a human body through eyes and fingers in a precisely scripted interaction with various sorts of computer-generated events, what seem like quite complex skills are rapidly acquired by regular repetition” (22)
“The little skill routines reach a new degree of synchronization, a new stage is attained, and a new excitement seduces further incentive to play” (24)
“Maybe it all has to do with the fact that when interfaced on the TV screen, the human body is in an altogether unaccustomed setting, as holistic three-dimensional movements are graphed onto a two-dimensional plane” (24)
“The Breakout hand doesn’t move a paddle freely along all facets of bodily space and surroundings. It encircles the knob, to be sure, but all actions transmit back and forth between the mere surface of things” (24-25)
“I look down and watch my fingers quickly adjusting the control, the shot made to happen with super rapid, flexible-looking motion. But it’s as if the fullness of things, and of myself, has been strangely halved. I could even say that I wasn’t so much interfaced on screen as I was ‘interpictured’ there” (25)
“The potentials for bodily movement and the display lined up point for point as on a graph, eyes and hands in an altogether novel world of action” (25)
“So what if we’re claiming ownership to skills actually accrued quite independent of our conscious selves” (27)
Game
- A Mortician’s Tale