Proprioception is the sense (yet we are also largely unaware of it) ‘that gives us the feeling that we occupy our bodies’ and that our bodies exist within space (Hayles 2002). Proprioception projects through things such as footware, a blind person’s cane or the end of a hammer. In other words, a dancer senses the smoothness of a dance floor, a blind person feels the presence of a concrete embankment, or the carpenter measures his (human + hammer) exertion in relation to the depth of the nail not as a lone human but as a collective with this ‘sixth’ sense extending beyond the skin. Katherine Hayles offers an example pertaining to computer video game players who ‘testify to feeling that they are projecting their proprioceptive sense into the simulated space of the game world’ (2002, 300). This form of media haptics (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 19 and 120) associated with a collective and distributed human/material mixture (cf. Clark 1998; Hutchins 1996) is what we are pushing for in understanding
media (and the associated instruments) as
modes of engagement with the material world.
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