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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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into her heart when she died.

This story is laid out like a photo novel, where one can read the two stories simultaneously or one after another. The scenario is like one from a cyberpunk novel: a dystopian, two-class high-tech society based on the exploitation of the poor. The crux of this story is that the supposed victim is the secret victor. She is ultimately able to profit from these biotech experiments, in which she has been a guinea pig. What remains open is how she will deal with the fact that she is now living in a strange, male body, how she will make it her own, how she will identify with it. These questions, which already occupy many people who have to go through transplants, do interest Prophet. Her work deals more with the disturbing attitudes produced by a society that does not use high-tech possibilities for the good of all. She shows that new technologies are not only utilized differently in a capitalist society, but also create different identities. The young woman, for example, was already subjected to these tests as a child, without having a choice. Her presumed foresight in investing in black market implants as an escape form her controlled situation,

 

has possibly made her even more dependent (the murderer is a trader). If we read the story like this, namely not as the success story of an outcast, the she was not able to transform biotech and capitalist interests for her own freedom. She merely met the end that she was inevitably headed for from the beginning. Then her fate of having to identify with someone else's body is simply the next logical step in an unfree cyborg life, which she was able to perceive, at best, as an opportunity, rather than her destiny.

Mobile Bodies

The artistic conceptions of unruly cyborg bodies discussed up to this point are based on fiction. However, they always produce a reference to reality in the sense of: It could be like that. In conclusion, by example of the work by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, an aesthetic strategy will be discussed which proceeds in a semi-documentary or essayistic way. Biemann invariably deals with the question of what role territorial boundaries, new technologies and female bodies play within the context of the new international division of labor. In her videoessays

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