Daniel Black

Monash University, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Faculty Member

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Phone: +61 3 9905 4215
Address: School of Media, Film and Journalism
Monash University
Caulfield
Victoria 3145
Australia

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Papers by Daniel Black

Enma's eye: Race, Observation, and The Oriental(ist) Gaze

The statue of one-eyed Enma (judge of hell) enshrined at the Genkakuji Temple...is renowned for i... more The statue of one-eyed Enma (judge of hell) enshrined at the Genkakuji Temple...is renowned for its power to cure eye diseases and has many worshipers…The Enma became famous as it lost one eye. The following story is told about it. An old woman was seen daily coming to worship the Enma...She explained that her eyes...[had once been]...weak and all medicines had failed. So she had come to the Enma to pray for his help. One day as she was kneeling before the statue and praying fervently, she heard the Enma speak to her, 'I will gouge out one of my eyes and give it to you.' Upon hearing these words, she woke up from her trance and looked up at the Enma's face. To her utter surprise, one of his eyes was gone, and blood was streaking down from the empty socket. She looked around and she could see everything clearly. She had not dreamed the Enma's words and her prayer was heard. The Enma, pitying her, had sacrificed his eye for her.

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The virtual ideal: Virtual idols, cute technology and unclean biology

Continuum, 2008

... She does not take on the shape of the cute cartoon character designed to appear cute, but rat... more

Machines with Faces: Robot Bodies and the Problem of Cruelty

Body & Society, 2019

Even if it is never possible to create a sentient robot that might lay claim to the status of per... more Even if it is never possible to create a sentient robot that might lay claim to the status of personhood, a convincingly realistic robotic simulation of the human body could alter how human beings act towards one another. This article argues that the human face exerts a powerful influence over interpersonal interaction, creating empathetic connections that limit our capacity to engage in acts of cruelty; an ability to convincingly simulate the human face would detach it from the attribution of human personhood and so encourage a dismissal of its affective charge. This possibility can be understood in the context of existing attempts to inoculate individuals against the appeal of the face so as to facilitate organised killing.

An Aesthetics of the Invisible: Nanotechnology and Informatic Matter

The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, h... more The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, has been an object of fascination and admiration since the nineteenth century. However, the discourse surrounding nanotechnology – at least at its most optimistic – promises the possibility of human mastery over this domain and, as a result, over all matter. This belief carries forward the old idea of a division between a realm of the base, material and particular, on one hand, and a realm of the perfect, immaterial and abstract, on the other, one which today is most powerfully expressed in information discourse. Within this framework, nanotechnology promises the ability to negotiate and even dissolve this division, allowing matter itself to be treated as a kind of information. The most enthusiastic adherents of this idea believe that this will one day allow us to 'reprogram' material reality itself.

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What Is a Face?

The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most merc... more The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most mercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any one body. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggest that the differences separating each account are merely reflective of the multiplex nature of the face itself.

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Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin Tools, Machines and Interfaces

Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoveris... more Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to all living things, the closeness of this engagement making any account that seeks to draw a clear boundary between body and artefact problematic. By doing this I seek to clarify the nature of our embodied relationship with various kinds of artefacts; moving from tools to machines to digital interfaces, I consider their differing potentials to be gathered into the body schema, and thus change our embodied horizons of perception and action. While much research currently seeks to facilitate a more ‘natural’ mode of interacting with technology, I argue that such a mode of interaction does not exist outside the particularity of our relationships with specific objects. As a result, rather than trying to cater to supposedly more natural modes of action and perception, future technologies should aim to enrich our experience with new modes, inviting novel relationships that produce new kinds of sensory and other experience.

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Why Can I See My Avatar? Embodied visual engagement in the third-person video game

This essay seeks to answer two questions raised by the success of video games where the player lo... more This essay seeks to answer two questions raised by the success of video games where the player looks at the character she is playing rather than seeming to inhabit the same coordinates as the character within the game space. First, why is the experience of playing these games not innately inferior to that of playing games with a first-person point of view, given that the sense of being a character sensing and acting inside the game space could be expected to be much stronger when the character’s body seems to be one’s own rather than a separate entity in the game space? And second, if the first-person point of view is so “immersive” and provides such a sense of being “inside” the representational space as is sometimes claimed, why has it never been so prominent in other audiovisual entertainment media such as film and television?

Books by Daniel Black

Digital Interfacing: Action and Perception through Technology

This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object o... more This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.

Embodiment and Mechanisation: Reciprocal Understandings of Body and Machine from the Renaissance to the Present

Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a... more Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a body, this book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. At the same time, it draws upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought in order to highlight the limitations and inadequacies of such beliefs and suggest alternative perspectives. In so doing, it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies. Illustrated with examples from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, as well as the industrial age and the recent eras of informatics, gene science and nanotechnology, Embodiment and Mechanisation highlights the ways in which technological changes have led to shifts in the definition of machine and body, investigating their shared underlying belief that all matter can be reduced to a common substance. From clockwork and cadavers to engines and energy, this volume reveals our long-standing fascination with and enduring commitment to the idea that bodies are machines and that machines are in some sense bodies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in the sociology of science and technology, embodiment, cultural studies and the history of ideas.

Enma's eye: Race, Observation, and The Oriental(ist) Gaze

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The virtual ideal: Virtual idols, cute technology and unclean biology

Continuum, 2008

... She does not take on the shape of the cute cartoon character designed to appear cute, but rat... more

Machines with Faces: Robot Bodies and the Problem of Cruelty

Body & Society, 2019