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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathExtensive Bodies
 
A Figurative History (Scott, Jill), 1996
 
 
 

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JS: The easiest way to answer this question might be to trace the reaction and growth of feminist discourse in the last 15 years. We women started to see technology as a way for us to reinvent ourselves; even so fundamentally as to choose one's gender and determine one's identity, as well as the environment in which it/they might appear. This has included women in the current discourse about mixed realities or integrated techno-zones: spaces that not only collapsed geographical boundaries and time zones, but incorporated women into the zone of technology. Perhaps these changes are related to our own shifting relationship to technology where the representation of bodies can easily incorporate more artificial, virtual and organic transformations. For me, artificial characters on the screen can reflect these changes. In addition virtual agents can be used as metaphors to illustrate the new idea of the body as an immersive and mediated body, layered with relational networks and techno-zones. In «A FIGURATIVE HISTORY» (1995), I tried to give the viewer an idea of feeling like a cyborg, by letting them control the screen characters bodies by using their own natural body electricity. If the

 

audience interacted here then they could -reflect about post-gendered perspectives, multiple personalities and experiment with combinations of immaterial and material surfaces. One of the main aims of media art is to melt these definitions of body together by using ambiguous spatial and temporal holistic perspectives as Gilles Deleuze once recommended. This Deleuzian definition of the body is very appealing today. He suggests that the body is floating between molar and molecular, in between being and becoming other, wavering on the edge of constant change. When fused with communicative technologies this in-between state could extend our definition of our bodies.

 

YV: Actually, these ideas relate to your «FUSION» net-event experiments don't they? Could you tell us more about them?

 

JS: At the Bauhaus University, we tried to combine some of these media-related shifts in perception with the influences of scientific discourse. Here I founded a series of on-line experiments called «FUSION» which

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