Romancing the Anti-body;
Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space

by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Many artists, have attempted to re-authenticate reality by dissolving the boundries between art and life. Their efforts effectively succeeded in reducing illusion into yet a shearer veil of enigmatic invisibility.

Prior to this decade, there has been no media available to render ideas about the "edge of life" as effectively and as instantly as cyberspace. Dissolutions related to time and space in Computer Mediated Communications (termed by Howard Rheingold as CMC ) not only erase social boundaries but irrevocably alter identity itself.

A precondition to electronic access is the pretention to being one or even several other people. There are many reasons for this. In his book The Virtual Community, Homesteading On The Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold notes that people seem to need to use depersonalized modes of communication in order to get personal with each other. It is a way to connect.

A requirement of being truly plugged in or grounded in cyberspace is to create a personal mask. It becomes a signature, a thumb print, a shadow, a means of recognition. The justification for this is similar to the one used to describe why primitive tribes also use coverings. Masks camouflage the body and in doing so liberate and give voice to virtual selves. As personal truth is released, the fragile and tenuous face of vulnerability is protected.

One of the more diabolical elements of entering CMC or Virtual Reality is that people can only recognize each other when they are electronically disguised. Truth is precisely based on the inauthentic!

Masks and self disclosures are part of the grammer of cyberspace. It is the syntax of the culture of computer mediated identity which, by the way, can include simultaneous multiple identities, or identities that abridge and dislocate gender and age.

Identity is the first thing you create when you log on to a computer service. By defining yourself in some way, whether it is through your name, a personal profile, an icon or mask, you also define your audience, space and territory. In the architecture of networks, geography shifts as readily as time. Communities are defined by software and hardware access. Anatomy can be readily reconstituted.

Masking through computer mediated communication is read differently than in real life. You can be anything you can imagine, instantly, with very few props or prompts. Self created alternate identities become guides with which to navigate deeper access of internetting. You do not need a body to do this.

Not only do you not need a body, but entering cyber space encourages a disembodied body language. Posing and emoting are some of the terms for phantom gestures that can be read through words, or seen in special video programs through simple movements such as waves. Codes of gestures can be read by attachments on the computer that articulate hidden meanings of voiceless and mute speech.

Actions are constantly under surveillance, tracked, traced, digitized and stored. Icons as masks are of particular importance because the disguises used today may determine an archetype of the present that will eventually reflect the ephemeral nature of a society geared towards image manipulation and self recreation.

In the search for contact, Computer Mediated Communications, solicit two way dialogues. These require mutual narrative s(t)imulations. While often subliminally fulfilling and inherently filled with amorous potential there have been some recent incidents that have caused disturbances.

Let me describe three famous case studies in the cyber world annals.

Case # 1
A classic example is "The Strange Case of The Electronic Lover" by Linsy Van Gelder, which was published in Ms. magazine in October 1985.

Van Gelder met "Joan" on Compu-serve, and began to chat. It was learned that Joan was a neuropsychologist in her late twenties, living in New York who had been disfigured--crippled in fact and left mute by an automobile accident at the hands of a drunken driver. (...)

Case # 2
In February, 1993, a housewife signed up for a computer service to access information and make friends. She found she was able to form on line relationships that quickly became intense. She could form close connections that were hard to do in the busy world of real life. However, very quickly "she found herself the target of an invisible high-tech predator who threatened to become an all-too-real menace to her children" (...)

Case # 3
About 1990, Tom Ray created a virtual computer that had evolved creatures. As Kevin Kelly notes, in his book Out of Control, Beginning with a single creature, programmed by hand, this 80 byte creature began to reproduce by finding empty RAM blocks 80 bytes big and then copying itself. Within minutes, the RAM was saturated with replicas. By allowing his program to occasionally scramble digital bits during copying, some had priority (...)

Body-less sex. In an Anti-Body eco system for co evolution. Cultured in the Digital Pool! What could be more appealing?

Getting back to the rational non reality we have learned to love and trust -- or, in other words the real world, it becomes all too clear that much that is considered ground breaking is not really new. And that each perspective we have today derives from a point originally placed many years earlier.

Consider, for example, the rules for one point perspective, written by Alberti, five hundred thousand years ago. His mathmatical metaphor was first applied to painting and drawing and promulgated an age of exquisite illusionism. Artists who used his theories could paint windows onto imagined vistas with such precision that viewers were impressively deceived.

Was this ethical? What implications did it have? Did Donatello or Vermeer question the vistas of voyeurism their windows would invite?

In an effort to eschew illusion, Marcel Duchamp investigated the essentials of art production, including self hood and the uncontrolled idiosynchartic inner impulses. The sine qua non of art, according to Marcel Duchamp, is not some essence or quality residing in the final work, but rather an infinately subtle shifting of the intent of the artist. In works of Duchamp such as Rrose Selavy, the intent and body of the artist are the sine qua non of artistic practice. Rrose was a non body through which Duchamp could escape fixed identity, becaming an "other" in the process. Otherness refers in this case to something defined by what it is not.

There is a relationship between Duchamp and his contemporary, Heisenberg. The irrationality of Heisenberg's theories of the observer affecting what is observed in Quantum Mechanics found at the interior of extreme physics metaphorically reflects Duchamp's "experiments" regarding randomness and chance. They were traveling to the same place, but on different roads. Both were looking for the path not taken.

Don't byte off more than you can eschew

This pre(r)amble has been leading up to the development of my own body of non body and anti body work produced in the past three decades. I divide my work in two categlries, B.C. and A.D, or -- Before Computers and After Digital. One begets the other.

Early B.C. non body works From 1960-70, I created various wax masks that both talked to viewers through audiotapes, or dissolved, extinguished by fire.

A few years later, in 1972, I created my first non body work in an actual hotel room in The Dante Hotel. The identity of the person was defined by the objects that surrounded her taste and background. In painting, it might be called negative space. Books, glasses, cosmetics and clothing were selected to reflect the education, personality and socioeconomic background of the provisional identities. Pink and yellow light bulbs cast shadows and audiotapes of breathing emitted a persistant counterpoint to the local news playing on the radio.

Thus my path to non body works and interactivity began, not with technology, but with installations and performances. Visitors entered the hotel, signed in at the desk, and received keys to the rooms. Residents of the transient hotel became „curators" and cared for the exhibition. I intended to keep the room permanently accessable, gathering dust and being naturally changed through the shifting flow of viewers. But "real life" intervened. Nine months later, a man named Owen Moore came to see the room at 3 a.m. and phoned the police. They came to the hotel, confiscated the elements and took them to central headquarters where they are still waiting to be claimed. It was, I thought, an appropriate narrative closure.

Yet even in its tenuous and short lived existance , The Dante Hotel became one of first alternative space or public artworks produced in the United States and used a site specific space four years before the term was coined. The identity of the non bodies inside were formed by what was absent.

The drive to alter "found environments" that existed in real life persisted. Eventually temporary works were installed in such unlikely places as casinos of Las Vegas, store windows in New York, even walls of San Quentin Prison. In each the idea was the same; to transform what already existed through an interactive negotiation of simulated or "virtual" reality. And to define the "identity" of each context in terms of the "other", or what was not there.

Inside the Dante Hotel room # 47 was "essence" of an identity. When the room closed, it seemed important to liberate the essence of the person who might have lived there, to flesh out experience through real life. This led to a ten year project titled Roberta Breitmore; a private performance of a simulated persona. In an era of alternatives, she became an objectified non bodied alternative personality.

Roberta was at once artificial and real. A non person, the gene of the anti-body, Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

I wanted Roberta to extend beyond appearance into a symbol that used gesture and expression to reveal the basic truth of character. She had credit cards, checking accounts and more credit than I did (still do). Roberta was an interactive vehicle with which to analyze culture. Her profile was animated through cosmetics applied to her face as if it were a canvas, and her experience reflected the values of her society. Roberta participated in trends such as EST and Weight Watchers, saw a psychiatrist, had her own language, speech pattern, handwriting, apartment,clothing, gestures and moods. Most significantly, she witnessed and documented the resonant nuances of that culture's alienation.

Over time Roberta accumulated 43 letters from individuals answering her ads and she experienced 27 independent adventures. Her most difficult test was staying in character during psychiatric sessions, and her most dangerous was being asked to join a prostitution ring.

Roberta's manipulated reality became a model for a private system of interactive performances. Instead of being kept on a disc or hardware, her records were stored as photographs and texts that could be viewed without predetermined sequences. This allowed viewers to become voyeurs into RobertaÕs history. Their interpretations shifted, depending on the perspective and order of the sequences.

In her fifth year of life, Roberta's adventures became so architypically victimized that multiples were created. Even with four different characters assuming her identity, the pattern of her interactions remained constant and negative. After zipping themselves into Roberta's clothing, each multiple began to also have Roberta-like experiences. They were, perhaps like Tom Ray's computer viruses that filled the RAM space of real life, taking with them the genetic codes of Roberta's non embodiment.