Of course, beauty and ugliness are socially defined, and what one society or culture lusts after, another finds jejune or barbarous. There is no going back. Just as we cannot return to the instinctual life, to untutored seeing, or to the old private sphere, we cannot condemn ourselves to nostalgic yearnings for an integrated body and mind. Again, the new media arts work in the futurology of the material life. The fact is that the mind now is a distinct function, severed more and more from the bodily sensations that assail us.
Experience is as difficult a category of thought as it is possible to imagine.
And in the opposite direction, thinking feels increasingly irrelevant to the onrush of sensation, the extremities of sex, sport, spectacle. That separation is engineered into the very technologies of film and television, technologies of distance, of the objective viewer, of the representation. What object-oriented programs offer is a way of speaking in, through, with, the division of mind and body without falling into the fruitless dialectics of representation and its objects. But what Biggs undertakes is not an attempt at reconciling the seer and the seen, but to attract both into the same space, a space where what is important is not the production of bodies or representations as objects for the viewer, but where both the viewer and what she views are subjects, circling each other in anticipation of a communication which, though it may never come, can be hoped for. That hope creates a future into which it is possible to evolve.