The Digiarchitextual Body - or: Brandon's Corporeal Virtualities

Jeppe Ugelvig

What is a body? In both cybernetic theory and philosophies of sexual difference, there is a common preconception of the body as a physical, stable, material entity. However, the heterogenous experiences of corporeity on cyberspace challenges such preconceptions in that bodies are found to exist in changing, malleable states, produces by processes of writing. In this essay, I propose a reading of Shu Lea Cheang’s web-art work Brandon (1998) and its recent restoration, combined with a critical analysis of philosophical writing on bodies and virtuality by Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Grosz in order to demonstrate that how the malleable and unstable nature of cyberbodies may help us re-think such notions more generally. In doing so, I propose a reading of bodiliness or corporeity as always-already virtual, made up of local ‘artifactualities’ that produce local realities in and outside cyberspace. This, ultimately, allows us to begin to re-think and re-define an ethics of the body through the internet, one premised on survival instead of a life/death dichotomy.