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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMythical Bodies II
 
Teknolust (Hershman, Lynn), 2001Ping Body (Stelarc), 1996Future Body (LaPorta, Tina), 1999
 
EvaSys (Wohlgemuth, Eva), 1997
 

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on the «Difference Engine,» [29] but who also dreams of discovering the formula for artificial life. Via the interface of Emmy's computer, they both succeed in making a connection through space and time—which extends so far that the daughter Emmy is pregnant with will carry Ada's genetic information. In «Tekknolust» (2002), on the other hand, the biogeneticist Rosetta Stone [30] secretly produces three clones out of her own genotype, which apparently only exist in ‹virtual space› as ‹avatars› or life forms endowed with artificial intelligence —in reality, however, they continuously transgress the boundary to human habitat. Hershman succeeds in crossing both the ‹imperative of anthropomorphism,› to which the clones are subjected, with that of ‹cyborgization,› whose mirror they are. [31]

Cyborg technologies

However, not only have the means of creation and self-creation been extended with the advent of the new technologies—Hershman's films also deal with this—but so have the means of their communication through media. And this not only applies to the media

 

which transport images of creation and self-creation, but also to the media spaces in which they can be generated and communicated.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Internet, which makes possible the interfacing of the basic generation medium for digital creations, i.e. the computer, has developed into one such communication space. If up to this point it has become clear which substantial impulses the theoretical, the artistic but also the popular cultural cyborg configurations have experienced through the examination and the use of the computer, then a whole number of them—for instance Stelarc's «Ping Body,» Lynn Hershman's «Telerobotic Dolls» or her film «Tekknolust,» but of course also Web-based works such as Tina LaPorta's «Future Body» or Eva Wohlgemuth's «EvaSys»—suggest asking about specific potentials that the computer as a generation space for, and the Internet as a communication space of cyborg configurations, have in store. Because the computer—as is already suggested in the term «personal computer»—as well as the Internet can be regarded as media not only due to their individual use but also their use in a collective

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