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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
Involuntary Reception (Lucas, Kristin), 2000
 
 
 

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activities or destroying things. She can move around most inconspicuously in open-floor office spaces or crowds because there is always something going on and she can vanish among the masses of people. She talks about how she involuntarily killed somebody who had a pacemaker and her beloved cat. Moreover, she is afraid of swimming in water. «The scary part is that I can't predict—what I'm going to do … I'm like a freak, I don't know». It's her body, somehow mutated, that does all those things because she seems and tries to be a nice normal girl who refuses to be hired for‹terrorist acts› such as deliberately erasing hard disks. Due to her strong power field, she cannot be recorded on electronic media as all recordings are promptly erased again. This gives her a certain privacy which she hardly gets otherwise because she always comes to notice in a negative sense and because she is hunted by a lot of people who would like to explore her strange body. Of course, she is under constant surveillance by the FBI or CIA, and of course, she does not explain why the meta-reflexive position is not hers. She plays the symptom, the product of a thoroughly technology-pervaded (control) society where all traces

 

can be recorded and decoded, where the value of the body is solely based on its function as an information carrier, where there is no more privacy for anybody, where data protection and cryptography are political issues, and where there is no intimacy and little love. Lucas's protagonist is a female super-hero and recognized specialist looking for cover in inconspicuousness. Her own body embodies and perverts the ideologies and conditions of our times: «I'm my own sub-subculture.» Authenticity is suggested by constant noises and beeping sounds or picture breakdowns—with her picture being replaced by prerecorded video material—but at the same time, it is clear that «Involuntary Reception» is the artificial low-tech performance of a fictitious character. We only learn about her abilities from her narrative which is halting, sometimes confused and highly contradictory. Sometimes, we are no longer sure if it is really her talking. This contributes to the illusionary quality of the video while at the same time relativizing its claim to truth. Her origins seem mythical, all she can say about it is that it is surrounded by a lot of rumors and that there has always been great love

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