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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathDoll-Bodies
 
Dream of Beauty (Geisler, Kirsten), 1997
 
 
 

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Projections

Tony Oursler projects videos of people speaking e.g. onto objects and couch pillows in suitcases and boxes. «Uncannily» distorted, they nevertheless arouse the association of a living ‹thing.› His video installations are demonstrations of the human power of imagination, which ‹overlooks› the obvious apparatuses that have been placed into the respective settings and brings the carriers of the message (pillows, etc.) to life in his repetition of the childlike perspective. Frontal projections of life- size human images turn the observer into a direct addressee of the ‹dolls.› Kirsten Geisler has developed several interactive video installations, in which projections of virtual women who ‹converse› with the observer play a central role. The installations «Counting Beauty 2.1» from 1999 or « Dream of Beauty 2.0» (1997–2000) expose the ‹artificiality› of the new woman—she is the digitally calculated result of empirical data from behavioral research on ideals of beauty, whose construction is revealed.

 

Feasibilities

In her life-size digital photoprints Inez van Lamsweerde also produces artificial humans, who at first glance appear to be real, but at second glance are perceived as construed bodies with doll-like characteristics. Small ‹physical signs›—dead eyes, missing nipples and orifices, slightly altered proportions—point towards a slight deviation, a shift from traditional analog photography to a digital monster. They are indications of perfection and beauty mania, much like we encounter them in the mass media, whose potential feasibility is promised to us daily by plastic and non-invasive surgery and, not lastly, biotechnology. [28]

Perception games

Yves Netzhammer's digital, moving images and his installations using extensive projections—such as the multipart exhibition project «Die überraschende Verschiebung der Sollbruchstelle eines in optimalen Verhältnissen aufgewachsenen Astes» or «Große Spiegel werden verloren. Informationen von Abwesenheit, damit Anwesenheit entstehen kann—thematicize the endless possibilities of

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