Can I Consider the Pong Racket as a Part of My Body?: Toward a Digital Body Literacy

Up to which point can people consider as part of their body the Pong racket, or an avatar on the screen, on which do people exert direct motor control as well? When individuals move in a virtual environment, do the proprioceptors convey information about the location of which body? In which environment? How will the information contaminate each other? How does the temperature felt on the real environment influence the interaction in the virtual environment? This paper is not intended to answer these questions, it is rather intended to raise fundamental questions of perception and phenomenology in a digital context in which bodies “are not born; they are made” (Haraway, 1991). The work should act as a positio quaestionis, with the aim of affirming the urgent need for a necessarily interdisciplinary reflection on the overall design of the body - perception - cognition - technology perimeter; it also identifies in the Berthoz simplexity and Ginzburg evidential paradigms, and in the Hansen concept of mixed reality, the building blocks of a theoretical framework aimed to the solution of these questions.