hooked up to a network, enabling it to be stimulated and moved by users from all over the world. Integrated into complex technological feedback structures, whose interfaces enable them to become agents of other human and non-human systems, humans are no longer merely network users, rather they have literally become part of the network. As do so many science fiction fantasies, at first glance Stelarc's works seem to thrive on the same culture medium that science and art have produced in the wake of what Donna Haraway calls the «C3I metaphor»: «command-control-communication-intelligence,» the credo of a colonialist cyborg mythology of white, western, patriarchal coinage. [13] However, one of the crucial characteristics of this mythology is that it is in service to the subject position, who continues to consider itself as the crowning glory of creation and man as the great creator, who competes with the ‹deus artifex.› Stelarc's radical identification with cyborgization, which implies a dissolution of the subject's boundaries, is in its own way closer to that of Haraway, who stresses: «I'd rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess.» [14] It is not a third eye that Stelarc imagines

as an extension of his body, which can hardly be brought into concurrence with the phantasm of a whole, god-like, white, western male body. It is a third ear, an «Extra Ear,» that is able to function as a broadcasting and receiving station with an interface to the Internet, «[a]nd when no sound is being transmitted, ‹the Extra Ear might whisper sweet nothings to the other ear anyway.› Or maybe a good night lullaby. » [15]

As the credo of his work on the cyborgization of his body, however, Stelarc cites a motif that we already encountered at the interface of the old and the new stories of (self-)creation: Endowing images with life. «IMAGES ARE IMMORTAL, BODIES ARE EPHEMERAL. The body finds it increasingly difficult to match the expectations of its images. In the realm of multiplying and morphing images, the physical body's impotence is apparent. THE BODY NOW PERFORMS BEST AS ITS IMAGE. Virtual Reality technology allows a transgression of boundaries between male/female, human/machine, time/space. The self becomes situated beyond the skin. This is not a discon- necting or a splitting, but an EXTRUDING OF AWARENESS. What it means to be human