ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one aspect of the contemporary refiguration of urban space by focusing on how embodiment is reconfigured in digitally mediated cities. Many cities are now full of people looking at images of other people, on digital screens large and small, pictured in that city or another. Urban scholars have paid considerable attention to the immense streams of digital personal, environmental, and geospatial data flowing through and beyond cities, but less so to the data that are converted into images of various kinds. Yet, images matter. At the interface between digital images and their viewers, particular kinds of bodies coagulate: flesh is organised visually and spatially. The chapter assumes that corporeality is a process and that different embodiments are co-produced with different kinds of technologies. The chapter argues that long-established ways of seeing and constituting bodies in cities are being joined by other ways of seeing other forms of embodiment, which are caught up with the specific dynamics of urban data circulation. New forms of embodiment are emerging, organised through particular spatialities that are also part of new forms of urban spatial organisation. The chapter discusses representational ways of seeing cities and bodies, and then argues that animatic embodiment is also part of the digital refiguration of urban space. Seeing bodies in cities now is shifting between representational and animatic forms.
