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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathCollective Bodies
 
Teknolust (Hershman, Lynn), 2001
 
 
 

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grid provides a means of blowing an image up into a larger scale. The content of individual units are not decipherable, but as a whole the grid builds a more or less intelligible image of a person or scene when seen from a sufficient distance. (The paintings of Chuck Close would be an obvious example.) This abstracting process is also a way of making something more neutral and universal out of what is inevitably culturally and locally specific. [23] In Campbell’s «Motion and Rest» series, the viewer gradually realizes that each walker in motion uses difference postures and gaits and is in fact handicapped in some way. The LED matrix is at the edge of intelligibility between an abstraction that could stand as a signal and command for everyone who crosses the street and the individuation of the image as a particular walker who is impaired and perhaps slower than the walk cycle. Doubt is cast on the universality of the command to walk/don’t walk at some standard pace. What is at stake is not a movement study like those of Edward Muybridge, but rather a liminal state between individuality and collectivity and between the photographic analog and the digital image. [24]

 

Clones: Multiples, Copies, Individuals: Lynn Hershman

How does one become many? Farce, fantasy and science fiction combine in Lynn Hershman’s film «Teknolust» (2003), the second in a series on women and technology. [25] While the other two films treat specific historical figures, the middle film is altogether about clones and copies. This brief discussion of «Teknolust» leaves aside the biogender warfare and detective plot lines in favor of the theme of repetition. The magical relation between DNA, computer programming and cooking—«It’s like baking brownies.»—allows Tilda Swinton (playing scientist Rosetta Stone) to make three RBG copies of herself (red, blue and green)—Ruby, Marinne and Olive. Rosetta was at first as interested in making household slaves as in assuaging her loneliness. However, she discovers that her clones are separate individuals of flesh and blood, different personalities with autonomy and free will. Ruby is a seductress who hosts a dream portal on the web and entices men into sex with ‹no attachments› in order to gather the raw material necessary to reinvigorate herself and her fading

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