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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMonstrous Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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human and an animal—who turn up in Piccinini's digital photographs or even in the zoo. In the photograph «Waiting for Jennifer» a young man is sitting at the steering wheel of his car; crouching next to him and awkwardly lolling about is one of these naked monsters. There are no female creatures in the SO2 series: only monsters and men. In «Social Studies» three small boys with skateboards are crouching on the ground marveling at a monster running around the parking lot. In «Kick Flip Ollie» we see one of these animals scurrying unnoticed past the boys. What is precarious about this photoseries is that these monsters already appear to have gained ground and become a part of everyday life. Associations with swarms of mice and rats, with a non-ending formless mass of flesh and skin involuntarily come to mind. Not only because women in female form are so obviously absent, but above and beyond this also because these formlessly naked, seemingly obscene and potentially unendlessly swarming monster animals have a structural similarity to the proliferating-abject-maternal. The assumption involuntarily comes to mind that these ugly, but somehow nice little monsters have taken

 

‹Jennifer's› place.

For Piccinini and Bul the horror does not lie in the apparently female mutations and monsters, the gender confusion, or in the maternal reproductive power that has become uncontrollable. Rather the monstrous lies in the complete synthesization of the world and the total relativity between impermeable compactness on the one hand and complete openness and nakedness on the other hand. Thus these concepts are located within the context of the current fluidity fantasies of the digital age discussed above. However, in contrast to most of the works discussed, these concepts make the symptomatic shifts of femaleness, fluidity, digitality and monstrosity evident.

Summary

Referring to different media productions, the approach of this chapter was to get onto the trail of the fantasies about a dis-arranged and/or fluid artificial gender body and to read them as a juncture for the analysis of technologies and subject relations that have become monstrous. The productions discussed called attention to the overlapping of two apparently

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