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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathEditorial
 
 
 
 
 

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media art's digital images and the game culture adapt and further develop the history of the fascination with the artificial human. Yvonne Volkart's essay «Monstrous Bodies. The Dissaranged Gender Body as an Arena for Monstrous Subject Relations» starts out from the assertion that cyborgs ‹demonstrate› the monstrous circumstances that subjects are faced with in the neoliberal age of information and biotechnology on and with their monstrous bodies and genders. In «Unruly Bodies. The Effect Body As a Place of Resistance» she shows that cyborg figurations are resistantly conceived agents who embody the symptoms and effects of the information society and turn them inside out. In «Transgenic Bodies. Where Art and Science Meet: Genetic Engineering in Contemporary Art» Ingeborg Reichle deals with that art that wants to create life itself: Be it that artists either intervene in genes directly, as is the case with «transgenetic art,» or that they attempt to generate life using genetic algorithms, as is the case with «artificial life art.» In addition, for English readers the key word «Collective Bodies» includes an essay by Margeret Morse, «Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self.»

 

In her unconventional interpretation of Donna Haraway's cyborg as a narrative figure of collective embodiments, Morse introduces current American media art work and reads them as metaphors for collective (self-)conceptions and practices.

The initial situation is described in «Extensive Bodies,» an interview with the Australian media artist and theorist Jill Scott, who currently lives in Zurich: The changes with regard to the notions of an extended to a morphological and relational body are discussed based on different works.

In addition to these text-based contributions, the Croatian artist Andreja Kuluncic created a net art piece for «Cyborg Bodies» with the title «Cyborg Shop.» The ambivalent promises and ideologies of the new technologies and bodies can be experienced directly in this interdisciplinary and participative work. Users become shopping players who buy their prosthesis parts to have a competitive body.

Above and beyond this, «Cyborg Bodies» contains a series of source texts that provide the central theses and backgrounds of the topic. These include the following contributions in German: Barbara Becker,

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