conjures up our Internet connection on the monitor—these are those not always picture-perfect but current cliches of beings who virtually exceed femininity, such as those we otherwise encounter everywhere in the mass media. Appropriately, as early as 1997 the first issue of «Konr@d,» the glossy magazine published in conjunction with ex-hackers, presented Naomi Campbell on its cover as a sexy ‹cyborg›; on the inside of the magazine they had her pose with her knees turned inwards and eyes chastely lowered. [21] In other ways, too, digital technologies and their image carriers or image multiplication equipment prove to be true ‹bachelor machines.› [22] Whether one looks at the concepts for willing ‹avatars› and virtual film divas, such as those

meantime refuse to. And they are all copies without an original. This even applies to MIRAlab's «virtual Marilyn»: As similar as she may be in her outer contours, her facial expression and gestures to her model, the actress Marilyn Monroe, she is nothing more than the copy of an image consisting of data records—and strictly speaking even an artificial figure in which the image of another artificial figure is brought back to life.

In this sense, «future Eve» reanimates nothing more than an old image: Eva before or after the Fall of humanity. Although the biblical legend maintains that this Eve was the first «natural woman,» we know very well that she is nothing more than a phantasm.

Creators and their creatures

This myth of creation has something to do with art, yet it was the sculptor Pygmalion who first allowed man to emerge as the creator of an animated figure—as an artist, who like a lover worships his statue so enduringly that the gods take pity upon him and endow the image with life. In the «future Eve» this miraculous animation of art to life repeats itself—it is certainly not coincidental that it occurs in mirror correspondence