Markus Käch
«Institute for Media Diseases»

The «Institute for Media Diseases» is a fictional institute, a cross between a media art laboratory and a medical practice. It is the logical result of contemporary trends promulgating the digitisation of the body. In one succinct sense, this means scanning pictures of the human body, but in the final analysis it also means the complete digitisation of a living human being. This is a development which will certainly promote pathological deviations and lead to the outbreak of media diseases. As soon as one is able to perceive these manipulated bodies as (direct reproductions of) reality, that transformations that occur in bodies as a result of software programmes are in fact diseases, one can begin to commute back and forth between the normal and abnormal, reality and media reality. The laboratory as it appears in the internet contains information regarding the institute’s main credo; it provides a few case studies, serves to inform and alert and also maintains an «electronic hospital» for emergency media treatment.
Markus Käch

Source: http://www.khm.de/art2000/kaech.html