Here's an excerpted chapter from The Old and The New and the New Old – a conceptual approach towards
performing the changing body , Franziska Schroeder:

2. The Split Body – the “New”
 
I want to put forward the idea that technology-mediated practices such as telematic arts,
interactive arts and particularly computer-gaming, which rely on a post-phenomenological usage
of the body, and in which bodily extensions and subversions of the body actual are the central
focus, can be regarded as “disembodied”, meaning becoming apart from one’s own body. Those
performance modes are nowadays often considered “new”. Here, an actual body features alongside
a virtual body, and experiences are built on illusionary identities and a detachment from one’s Self.
This becomes particularly visible in situations in which people communicate with a remote person.
The works of artists such as Paul Sermon rely on such distanced communication. His “Telematic
Dreaming” series connects two remote sites, and by superimposing images, people are able to see
each other sitting or lying down with a remote person. In environments such as those, the other
body is ghostlike, and as Baudrillard suggests the “Other is no longer an object of passion but an
object of production (Baudrillard, 1995) and “otherness [is] surreptitiously confiscated by the
machine" (Baudrillard, 1987). 
 
In relating to an absent Other that is nevertheless present, one’s own body is reconsidered from a
new perspective. We touch the Other, or an image of the Other, and at the same time our body is
transmitted to another location, for somebody else to touch. As Keith Roberson has noted: 
“… where once we saw ourselves as separate, enclosed, intact, we now become dissipated,
dispersed and vulnerable” (in Ascott, 2003). “We are physically present, but we have our “own
point of view at a remote location” (Kac in Ascott, p.72; 2003). A particular artist who has shown
the displacement of his own body is Stelarc in his work “Ping Body” (Stelarc, 1995). In this
performance, Stelarc wires his body and his robotic “third hand” to the internet which he considers
an “external nervous system”. Activity on the internet triggers involuntary responses on Stelarc’s
remote body - the split body.
In such performance environments, a detachment from the Self takes place; the physical body is
no longer a separate entity. The notion of a split Self, a dissipated and disembodied body become
the vehicle for being in the world, particular in a virtual world.
For example, in multi-user participatory games such as “EverQuest” or “Asheron’s Call”, an
avatar becomes the prosthesis of our Self. We move through the environment with the aid of our
other identity: an avatar that we design in advance; one that resembles us, or one that we are never
able to be in RL (real life), such as a cat.
A kind of feed-back takes place as the avatar looks back at us. Indeed, the other Self is often used
as a way of “improving” or reflecting upon one’s identity in RL. For some users, the avatar either
serves as a vehicle to see themselves, or to understand how others see them. In the first case, the
 
MUD (multiuser dungeons or dimension) user detaches himself from his own body and attempts
to merge with his virtual identity. He projects his own Self into his mimetic flesh in order to
explore his inner Self. And further, he expects to be made real via it. This is a kind of self-
exploration if not self-reconfiguration of their real life person, also called “Ratava” (Taylor, pp.15-
17; 2002). In the second case, users view their avatar from a third person perspective in order to be
able to understand how others see them in VL (virtual life), but are possibly able to infer how
others see them in RL. 
 
It is often argued that the virtual, or inorganic body, which performs in those environments,
grounds the user, that it links the user to themselves, as well as to others, and makes him “real”
(Taylor, p.2; 2002), at least “real” in the virtual world. However, although game designers like to
employ the term “embodied” when talking of the avatars in the VW, I see those performances as a
disembodied kind, one in which our body no longer serves as reference point for our Self.