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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
The Internal Organs of a Cyborg (Prophet, Jane), 1998
 
 
 

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she is a deeply paradoxical figure, situated in an in-between space called «deep dollspace zero»—a space behind the closed eye through which the visitors have to enter in the beginning.

Doll Yoko's/the narrator's/the author's (the sentences are often articulated with ‹I›) wild feelings and emotions, circulating between activity and passivity, focus on the topic of losing boundaries in digital space: of sex, gender, subjectivity, agency, of the writer and the reader, of the figuration and the user. Who is this ‹I› in the end who says: «genderfuckmebaby»? This ‹I› is splitting into various agents and we, the readers, participate in this dissolution. What does this sentence and all the other sentences in this piece imply? They talk of experiences, of enjoying loss and the violation of boundaries. These sentences and their images become figurations of many voices and embodiments of Doll Yoko, gender dichotomies is completely deconstructed. It is far beyond any relief; it is «haunting» and allows us to fall into the depths of psychic streams and desires.

Doll Yoko is the other, whom one does not become

 

by way of sensitivity or projection, but rather because she—as do we—says ‹I›. And if one wants to immerse oneself in her marsh/cyberspace, then one has to drive the story on in the first person.

Death and Life in the Cyborg Society

In a laconically absurd way, the protagonists in Jane Prophet's CD-ROM « The Internal Organs of a Cyborg» embody the gender-specific and social power relations in a world of cyborgs. The CD-ROM plays two stories in the first person in parallel. The first story involves a woman who has been taking part in biotechnological experiments since her childhood. Someone shoots her, and in the hospital they find that she has no proper medial insurance and they let her die. Her heart is taken to be used for an organ transplant. This story plays in the upper sector. In the lower sector of the CD, you can read the story of a successful businessman who has a heart attack. A heart transplant is performed in the hospital, and he survives. Yet he has the feeling that he has ended up in a different life. In the upper sector, we read that the woman had an implantation done, which would load her personality

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