ABSTRACT
The ability to disappear is central to the experience of the body electric. According to media philosopher Mark Taylor, the 'power of erasure' reaches near perfection with computers, and the way the presence of a person or a text can be transformed into seamless absence is fundamentally unsettling (Taylor and Saarinen 1994). I could disappear by wrapping myself in the chroma-key sheet which covered the bed or by sliding off the bed and out of the line of the video camera. I could also make a part of my body disappear in order to leave another bit, like a foot, floating in digitalized space. This now-you-see-me-now-you-don't quality is central to the physicality of Telematic Dreaming since it implies a departure from and a return to the body as a whole. The unsettling quality is not merely, as Taylor suggests, the erasure of substance, but its reappearance.
