Touching the digital

eXistenZ and the body as interface

There is a persistent tendency to think of digital culture as something disembodied, and the language that we use around technology encourages this. We talk about virtual space as though it exists somewhere other than here, as though digital experience takes place in some abstract elsewhere detached from the physical world. The screen is often imagined as a threshold between material reality and immaterial simulation, a portal through which the body disappears.

But this has never really been true. If anything, our relationship to digital technologies has become increasingly intimate, tactile and deeply physical. We do not simply look at screens; we press, swipe, drag, tap, scroll and hold. Digital systems are not encountered at a distance but through repeated bodily contact, through habits of touch that have become so embedded in daily life that they now feel almost involuntary.

This is one of the things that makes David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ feel so prescient. Released in 1999, at a moment when much cultural discussion still imagined the digital future in terms of sleek abstraction and immaterial networks, Cronenberg offered something stranger and more unsettling. His interfaces were not clean or invisible. They were biological, damp, vulnerable and grotesquely tactile.

In the film, players connect to the gaming world through fleshy bio-ports implanted at the base of the spine. These openings are plugged into organic consoles that pulse and twitch like living organisms. The technology of eXistenZ does not promise transcendence or escape from the body. It insists on exactly the opposite. Connection requires penetration, contact and exposure. The interface is visceral.

What feels so compelling about this now is the way it dismantles the fantasy that digital experience somehow frees us from embodiment. Cronenberg understood that interface is never abstract and is always material. It always happens somewhere, through something, to someone. Even the word digital quietly reminds us of this. Its root lies in the Latin digitus, meaning finger. Before the term referred to electronic systems or computational processes, it referred to counting on the hand. The digital was always tactile before it became technological. It belonged first to the body.

This etymology feels worth remembering because it punctures one of the more persistent myths surrounding contemporary technology: the idea that digital systems represent a move away from physical experience. In practice, the opposite is true. These systems reorganise bodily experience rather than replacing it. They choreograph attention through gesture. They train the hand into new rhythms of movement. They recalibrate the relationship between eye and touch. The swipe of a thumb across glass, the instinctive pinch to enlarge an image, the almost unconscious flick of a finger to dismiss one thing and summon another: these are not metaphors. They are learned physical behaviours, repeated until they become second nature. The body has not disappeared into digital culture, it has been rewritten through it.

This is one of the reasons painting continues to matter to me. Painting is, among other things, a stubbornly physical form of thinking. It unfolds through pressure, drag, resistance and hesitation. It requires a continual negotiation between hand, eye, surface and material. There is nothing frictionless about it.

My work often references the synthetic visual languages that increasingly shape contemporary perception: images that feel engineered, simulated or computationally constructed, forms that hover somewhere between the mechanical and the organic, the recognisable and the uncanny. What interests me is what happens when these visual conditions are translated back into paint; when the logic of seamless circulation encounters the slower, more resistant temporality of the painted surface. Something shifts in that translation. The hand introduces friction into systems designed for immediacy. It slows the image down. It turns looking into a more sustained encounter and returns visual experience to the register of touch.

This is where eXistenZ still feels unexpectedly useful. Beneath its body horror and biological absurdity lies a remarkably clear insight into the future we now inhabit. Cronenberg understood that technology was never moving towards disembodiment. It was moving towards ever more intimate forms of bodily integration. The question was never whether the digital would replace the body. It was always how it would reshape the terms through which the body encounters the world.

Painting occupies that threshold for me. It is its own kind of interface, a site where contemporary forms of visual mediation meet the resistant physicality of making. In that collision between synthetic image culture and manual sensation, something important becomes visible. Not an escape from the digital, but a way of touching it differently.

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Image: still from eXistenZ (1999), dir. David Cronenberg