technologically upgraded human body and its functions, rather her interest is directed towards a particular aspect of the ‹monstrous promises› of the new technologies, i.e. liberating the body from its bond to the materiality of the organic. Instead of translating these promises into a technoid materiality, the body is to be regarded as a system of data records that can be represented in its entirety in cyberspace—a concept we not only encounter in the science fiction and cyberpunk literature from Philipp K. Dick to William Gibson, [4] but which is also related to the visions of enthusiastic representatives of robotics, who, like Hans Moravec, speak of humans one day being in a position to transfer intelligence and consciousness to a silicon chip. [5]

LaPorta, however, intentionally leaves the promise unfulfilled—which in this case again refers to the problematic analogization of the genetic and the digital code—of being able to make the concealed structures of a system visible, of communicating them or, if necessary, even manipulating them: Despite its complete transparency, its ubiquitous availability and the accessibility of the codes, which appear directly

next to their graphic conversion on the web site, the «Future Body» behaves hermetically. The matrix allows neither the locating of the body, nor do the data records convey contributive information. Although it has been placed into the Net, it is impossible to establish communication with it. Movement and voice are held captive in loops. And finally, the invitation to penetrate it also literally leads into thin air: Every zoom leads back to the whole figure, which for its parts goes away and disintegrates into separate parts. The cartographed, idealized body is nothing more than a shell—and as such it is to a large extent uninteresting.

The project «EvaSys» (1997 ff.) by the Austrian artist Eva Wohlgemuth [6] is not only optically, but also conceptionally related to LaPorta's «Future Body.» In «EvaSys» a 3-D scan of the artist's body, which appears to weightlessly propel through cyberspace as a data shell, constitutes the starting point. In the way the «Future Body» allows the projection of a technically and optically smoothed down, unclothed female body, which can be randomly circled, zoomed in on and ‹palpated,› at first «EvaSys» seems to offer nothing more than a further variation of IT-animated ‹dolls›