Body and Internet: the anthropology of laboratory

The article explores the operation of an interdisciplinary laboratory which studies the issues of the body and corporeal representation on the Internet. The laboratory's work resulted in the implementation of eight individual research projects on the body and the Internet, as well as in collective reflection on the laboratory team's distance collaboration. The main focus was the form and methods of a collective research project studying bodies on the Internet by means of the Internet itself: studying the bodies of others, but also pondering one's own experience. Following the work of Latour on scientific laboratory life, the authors set the task to consider the new emerging form, drawing on empirical material: distributed interdisciplinary research projects which are seeking the status of alternative laboratories of the twenty first century. The use of the thematic field of the body and technologies of mediation of corporeal representation and bodily-sensor experiences pursues the goal of bringing the off- and on-line experience together, on the one hand, and gives the opportunity to see the distance emerging in online practices, on the other. The body acts not only as experience, here body, but also as form - individual, collective, multiple, distributed, and dynamic - while the need for technological mediation becomes a challenge to cooperation and collaboration, and, in a broader sense, to integration. New, 'connected to' the Internet reality of distributed research projects requires special skills and motivation of participants; without these interdisciplinarity stops being feasible. The increased complexity of the system, its accessibility to the participants and seeming proximity go along with the processes of atomisation - ontological, social and physical - which can be felt at the level of bodily-sensor experience and which can be overcome.

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