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FaceGen software is incredible. It has dramatically improved the production of heads for our latest game releas e[,] Agassi Tennis Generation 2002. The interface is a delight to use. Watching a face being created is a magical experience. The mere slide of a button can change [a] character from evil to nice, from black to white, from girl to boy. Fr ankly[,] using the software is an entertainment in its own right!
- Paul Ranson,Aqua Pacific Games
In an interview conducted by Gerard Raulet, Michel Foucault states, "In studying the rationality of dominations, I try to study the interconnections that are not isomorphisms" (qtd. in Faubion 1994, 451). He goes on to discuss the ways in which historical strains of power are interconnected through the specific forms of rationality they share. However, he warns that these relations themselves do not remain constant; rather, they adjust themselves in such a way as to preserve and even protect their rational underpinnings, even in the face of competing forces and the shifting demands of the cultural present. To use the vernacular of technology : they morph. In so doing they fit to the cultural present while retaining the familiar surface texture of history - the prerequisite to their intelligibility. Historically, when these forms have applied their rationality to the body, they have exerted a method of control or discipline that combines normative judgments with hierarchical observation to produce power. When we look in the right places, we find this same phenomenon playing out again in and through the technovisual present in the interests of contemporary deployments of race, criminality, and the global geopolitical proliferation of "terror." Technology, as a formalized organization of cultural, ideological, and material/physical impulses into specialized modes of thinking and doing, seems de facto to offer us ourselves anew and is commonly imagined as inherently ideological - always both progress and progressive. Technology may, however, inaugurate a regressive and even violent return. This essay examines one form of technological (irrationality as it is produced through the visible body with a focus on the way in which it has come to fit again within the technovisual present - to return by way of nascent digital imaging technologies.
SURFACES VERSUS INTERIORS: MAKING THE BODY INTELLIGIBLE
Cultural understandings...