Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMythical Bodies II
 
Pathologien medialer Konstitutionstypen (Käch, Markus), 1994The Dystopia Series; Maria (Aziz, Anthony; Cucher, Sammy), 1994Faith, Honor and Beauty (Aziz, Anthony; Cucher, Sammy), 1992
 
Hautnah (D\'Urbano, Alba), 1994Final Fantasy (van Lamsweerde, Inez), 1993The Forest (van Lamsweerde, Inez), 1995
 

icon: previous page

surfaces that frequently become interfaces: They communicate the image of a human who under posthuman conditions is threatened by dissolution and who with the aid of techno- logical tricks now strives towards a ‹wholeness› that all too easily ends up as a patchwork. In the course of the nineteen-nineties, countless works were produced in which the suspended ambivalence of the utopias and realities of the new technologies found expression; cyborg configurations in which computeraided processes of image processing were used to lend shape to ideas and visions of future bodies.

For instance when in his «Pathologien medialer Konstitutionstypen» (1994) Markus Käch projects—with a wink—the entire range of options offered by contemporary graphic instruments into an image atlas of physical defects, [24] or when in their computer manipulated portraits in the «Dystopia Series» (1994) the artist duo Aziz & Cucher erase specifically those areas—the eyes, the nose, the mouth—that give facial features their identity and through which humans communicate with their environment. Their allegories on the virtues «Faith, Honor, and Beauty» (1992) also

 

appear to have paid a dear price as modern embodiments of these ideals: like mannequins, their well-modulated bodies lack genitals.

Alba d’Urbano's project «Hautnah» (1994 ff.), on the other hand, allows designing the image of a dream body through computer simulation. On the basis of one's real body mass, which one enters into the computer afterwards, it then produces paper patterns that one can use to make T-shirts, suits, blouses or skirts. If one prints out and sews together the finished cuts, one can wear them like a second skin over the first one. [25] Using digital image processing methods, the figures in Inez van Lamsweerde's series «Thank You Thighmaster» (1993), with which the professional fashion photographer gained notoriety in the art business, were also ‹cloned› out of the bodies of models and mannequins. If due to the almost artificial smoothness and perfection of their limbs and the smoothing out of their external genitalia there is something uncanny about them, this applies even more for the protagonists in the ensuing series: For «Final Fantasy» (1993), Lamsweerde combined childlike bodies with the facial features of adult models; for «The Forest» (1995)

icon: next page