Surely, the penetration of technology within the body and the socialization of simulated realities is more than a signifier of technological progress, it marks a radical transformation of knowledge, of biology, and of the cultural order in which knowledge is linked with ideology, biology, or identity in terms of a technological imperative not fundamentally connected with necessity. [...] This infological system - aimed at the mastery of being - is no longer focused only on systems (as in the definition of cognitive science) but on computation as apriori."1

"The use of metaphors from information technology has caused us to understand processes taking place inside the human cell in 'analogy to the copying, storage and character processing automaton, in short: to the computer', which is e.g. found in the statement that our metabolism is 'programmed' in our genes. What would thus be more natural than 're-programming' it by means of genetic engineering?"2

The human body has always been a construct, the product of notions from intellectual history and technology, a surface for fantasies, a functional vehicle that was not only described, supported, extended by technical models and devices but always also co-produced by them - its gestalt, the perception of its gestalt, the dissipation of its gestalt is a consequence of innumerable culturo-technical operations and projections to which the body has constantly been exposed, by which it has constantly been inscribed and re-written, so to speak. Perception, memory, thinking and feeling are not just defined historically and culturally, the body itself is a discursive product, or, as Donna Haraway says, the flesh itself is a discursive product at the join between materiality and semiosis.3 In a nutshell: the body is a medium, a media-based technology for the production of the world. Cultural techniques as collective practices of generating a(n initially) uniform and consensual horizon for an interpretation of the environment have always also been techniques of (initially ritual, magical, symbolic) manipulations of the body, its spiritual and physiological transformation; they created potential new designs of corporeality (shamanism, atavism), appeared as deformations, as technical conversions and upgrades (from canoe to glasses, circumcision to corset), operationalized the body as a model (right down to the basis of industrial production processes) until the potential of replacing parts of the body, correcting or removing them, lent its "processing" a dimension that led to the phrase of the post-cultural, even post-human body - not to mention the drastic reconstruction of the body at molecular level by genetic engineering. What, then, could the "body" still be? The question arises because, in analogy to post-modern theories of coding, no unambiguous reference can be identified in the field of medicine (qua genetic/bioengineering): in relation to what can we call something not yet or no longer a body? Is there still a "reference body" (which informs us of functionality, health, looks etc.)? Or is this reference body already the body of genetic theory acting as a reference: are we all post-human, then, or is it only the constructed, conceptual "body" - the one that is not longer a body at all?

The body as a cultural focus of current developments is not only in the centre of scientific attention but also - inter alia - a subject matter of the cinema, where it is also presented in techno-cultural and scientistic utopias. "Agentur Bilwet" have devoted several texts to the technological body, trying to approach it as it is shown in techno-body terms in James Cameron's "Terminator" movies. The "Terminator 2" character called "T-1000" cyborg even introduces a post-cyborg golem: "T-100 is no longer a metaphor, it works according to the principle of metamorphosis. It continuously borrows body shapes without associating these with sense or substance. [...] It dispossesses its human opponents of their interior foundations, their sureness of having a unique body. The internal structure of T-1000 no longer refers to an experience of the human body."4 For this post-machine creature any kind of body can become the referent of its own functionality and operationality. (What is it, then, that distinguishes "T-1000" from "Molly", the cloned sheep, which also refers to the utopian idea of any kind of DNA as the basic material for the production of bodies?) Composed of fluid material, "T-1000" is still a metaphor, in spite of its metamorphic character, a conspicuous and obvious metaphor for the body as it turns fluid under the influence of technology: technology comes to replace the body itself. Not only does the technological imperative transform flesh into information, through techno-semiosis it also turns flesh into signs/molecules which are not only representative thereof but also function as this flesh. Post-humanity is not only a question of perspective, it is first and foremost a question of power.5 Such power takes on almost mythical forms here, it basically causes the transubstantiation of the body, which then has nothing to do with nature any longer, little with culture, almost nothing with matter, the only things left are systems of signification, operational processes, functional curves, techniques of representation. Here, representation has nothing to do with images or surfaces, it uses bodies as the operative material of reproduction qua representation. It vanishes as a suture, as a rupture, as a fold in the cultural system, it become an increasingly symbolical figure of the total (technological) domination of existence: once genetic diseases, AIDS and cancer have been overcome, the "pure" - cloned? - body remains, a body under control, subject to control by technology, screened from all interventions that could jeopardize or disturb this control. If the body has always been a medium, the question is which medialization it is subject to: after the shamanistic, the religious and the modern body we talk about the techno-body today.

The installation "never age - never die - never live" is about the body as an object of cultural techniques, or to be precise: the body as an object as such, as the literal object of cultural techniques as these have been taken over by technology. First realised as a "parallel action" at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in the framework of "mak - medien, apparate, kunst" (1996)6, the installation was extended in September 1997 when Herwig Turk occupied a former operating theatre at the hospital of Wolfsberg: cold shelves for deep-frozen food containing a block of several hundred fish fingers; video loops showing an endless wave on two monitors; texts about cryonics retrieved from an Internet newsgroup; an adjacent room with washbasins gleaming in the dark due to phosphorescent paint; a monitor showing the words: "If you are immortal, how old are you?". Thus, "never age - never die - never live" is literally set in the medical context, a context not only concerned with the "salvation" of bodies from its very beginnings but also focused on the imposition of discipline on them, on regulating them, an actual "conquest of the body".7 Out of this context, the installation deals with techno-scientistic cultural techniques, or with a significant notion underlying these regulatory techniques, a fantasy, a myth: the myth of eternal life - beyond mortality, viz. in control and beyond both body and time. This fantasy requires a "new" body, one that has been completely mapped, described and is thus reconstructible, preservable by (bio-)engineering. However, the title of the work already speculates that this new construction of the body as a container (not a part) of the self could do away with precisely the "in-between state" that is (still) called life. Or, to read it differently: under the control of technology (cryonics) the "in-between state of life" could be suspended for an indeterminate period, fragmented, dispersed - which also causes to vanish what we are still used to calling life.8

At present, the ideas of how to preserve the body beyond time and space takes on two forms: on the one hand, there is the dream that we can transcend life in machines: "Let me confess the reason why I fell for artificial life. Just before I die I would like to be able to copy much of my knowledge, my intelligence, my entire consciousness onto a computer and thus be able to live inside the chips."9 These utopias of immortality have left the body behind as the desirable locus of immortality (never die - forever young), and are exclusively geared to technological or media-based systems (which have long oriented themselves on consciousness or the brain model exclusively, anyway, as in neuronal networks, with the duplication and preservation of the brain being the main perspective). The fantasy of life beyond the body completes the object/information polarity already exacerbated by technology and, in keeping with this, aims at moving on to an order behind the objects, behind language, behind desire, an order of pure information processing (which also functions as a metaphor of the mind) promising the subject an ability to exist in a "purely" mental sphere, far from all conditioning by the body, a sphere which, in a reversal of the self-generated assumption, can only be imagined and appear as an information-processing system: the ability to take on any shape at all, always and forever, to reach any place in the world and beyond without being forced by the body to stay in a certain spot (deep-frozen but without a sell-by date) at a given time. This myth can be described as a myth of liberation, a liberation from the "prison" of the body from where we proceed into a hallucinatory realm where all wishes are continuously and immediately fulfilled - and as a flow of data, this hooks up excellently with the media reality of the present as well as the future. "In the realm of the 'virtual,' they say, humans will become one with the morphology of their prostheses that supplement them. No longer imprisoned in the stifling narrowness of the 'flesh' of their bodies, human consciousness will rise to the cybernetic flow of information criss-crossing our world today."10

On the other hand, there exists a dream that is all about the comprehensive re-programming of the body as a vehicle of the self (as thought? as communication? as mind?) free from the constraints of time and space, and it is what we are focusing on here. In this context, we still find "ourselves" - whatever that may mean - inside bodies that look like the ones we know. However, the basis of these bodies has been changed dramatically - it is the result of re-programming. "Both movements try to reinforce the management of the reproduction process, to produce a well-administered body and to incorporate technology into reproduction itself."11 However, such re-programming can only work out if it is possible to identify the body's programme (the Human Genome Project "HUGO"), unravel the code and re-code it accordingly. Here, we find that the underlying notion is that of the body as a machine using a programme, a notion manifested in the current debate about genetic codes, genetic engineering and bio-engineering. While, in the liberation of the mind from body, the ideas of thinking, self-awareness, cognition, memory etc. equalled information, the term "information" now stands for the level at which we find the molecular and biochemical organization of the body. Thus, we do not have to look for the impact of technological systems on our selves for long, as e.g. in sociological studies on mass-media consumption, their dissemination of violence etc., they are primarily present in the predominant scientific metaphors, i.e. in the analogy between technological and biological metaphors. The body is not only upgraded by means of material prostheses, the technoid prostheses are inscribed in it at a discursive level. With this in mind, the body was presented as inscribed by cultural techniques the paragraphs above, and flesh was termed a discursive product.The second myth, which may be called a myth of manipulation, is about liberation, too: however, it is not about the liberation of the mind from the body, but about a liberation of the body from the constraints imposed on it by its natural programming. Defined as an informational (genetic) machine, the body itself becomes something like information, viz. cleansed from matter, precisely as it is considered to be an information-processing system and as its physiological limits and disorders can be removed from the programme - it approaches spiritualized quasi-matter so that life, dwelling in this body, will be forever worth while. Flesh is discursive - and the difference between matter and information is removed from these discourses, removed from the programme, we become "more human than human".12 In a strangely paradoxical symbiosis, media technology and bio-engineering outline the disappearance of the body by transcending "the chaotic, organic weight of live flesh"13 while at the same time reconfiguring the flesh as purified matter.

The work "never age - never die - never live" - and this is what I claim here - does not aim at putting an end to technology, avoiding the consequences of continuous changes in society and culture as defined by technology, by freezing a certain status quo of these changes or even be so much of a revisionist to demand an about-face (after all, where would such an about-face lead us, all that is awaiting us are other stages of cultural medialization of the body, the self and everything we are used to calling self-awareness). Eventually, the critical impetus of the installation is not directed at this kind of (superficial) critique, which neither seeks to "deny its own involvement in the cultural mediation of technologies and their attractions nor to turn them into something productive."14 Yet the point is to identify the technology-based index used to reformulate the body as the writing of culture and the cultural inscription that is tantamount to a permanent conquest of the body, to highlight aspects of the "grammar" that governs this inscription, the appropriation of the subject as an object of cultural - i.e. technological - semiosis. Such an artistic "grammatology", as it could be termed, aims at avoiding the shifts of paradigm which are rashly proclaimed again and again, drawing a distinction between utopias and fantasies. "One must again call into question precisely those syntheses, groupings completed in their entirety, which are usually accepted before any review, the validity of which is acknowledged without hesitation."15 The fact that the body and the self are to an increasing extent constituted artificially, that they are literally bio/technical hybrids with organs not their own, supported by electro-mechanical implants, psychologically manipulated by "smart drugs" and vitamin preparations, or medialized, networked and upgraded by the tele-media, thus constantly transcending their physiological horizons of perception - the fact that the constitution of the subject is split and produced that way, that transitoriness and coincidence within this production process determine every-day life instead of stability and predictability, all this technologically advanced fragmentation of originally homogeneous and orderly objects, connections and events does not mean that the fleeting and fluid constructions are entirely transparent, i.e. that they can be generated and synthesized under controlled conditions by the technologies in the creation of which they have a share. It is by no means coincidental that numerous disaster movies deal with the consequences of what appeared to be the mastery of technology. And first and foremost, the technological fragmentation of culture which the subject is subordinated to does not follow a uniform and/or ideology-free programme even though - or maybe just because - it is grounded in technology: it is not only about the production of knowledge, cognition and truth (and access) for all. "The representations of the world are always closely linked with a context of practices and apparatuses without which we could not relate to the world, and at the same time they depend on how power is distributed among the actors concerned."16 Thus, a number of questions is directed at the localization of knowledge, at the meanings that can be produced at all, at the bodies of rules or deregulated grammars which an apparently wild techno-semiosis follows to produce mechanisms excluding and narrowing down discursive formations such as technological research. Eventually, we are still concerned with checking forms of representation of the body within technical/ technological/ medialized discourses for their blanks, viz. to consider the body itself as the object of these newly formulated techno-fantasies as a representation, as a medium in which and through which "something" appears.

What have fish fingers got to do with this?

"To negate death or define the afterlife belongs to the cultural techniques most societies use to get over the pain of having to die, and the loss of loved ones. Death can also be negated by making it a taboo to the extent that it is in our western society. Death is an outrage against the belief in progress, which is supposed to make our lives more comfortable. [...] This has its origin in embryology, in specific intervention in the genetic code, and ends in re-animation or in brain transplants as a Fountain of Youth. The cycle of life is no longer cyclic-natural but progressive-artificial."17 The foodstuff industry has long been part of this progressive-artificial life the ending of which, in death, apparently causes a marked rift in this progress. The fish fingers are indicative of the perfection attained in foodstuff production which takes over our bodies in a way that is very different from genetic or reproductive engineering, causing metabolic disorders, gastritis and arthritis and what-have-you, supplies us with (too many) vitamins and hooks us up to the production mechanisms that determine our habits of eating and consumption as if we were a gadget. Of course, the fish fingers also point to the ubiquitous preservation and processing of our instant food, transcending and stopping decay, and eventually to the above-mentioned medical project that aims at putting a halt to the ageing of the human body (freezing and thawing fish fingers is presented as a prototype of cryonics). Naturally, the fish fingers also refer to the human heads frozen in the first commercial cryonics projects, waiting for the medico-technological developments of the next few decades that will/should enable their resurrection (as what? at what age? and with what history?). By the way it presents the fish fingers, "never age - never die - never live" addresses a number of cultural techniques concerned with the incorporation of the individual in cycles of technological production as an extension of cultural inscriptions, cycles that can all be described in terms of synthetization, automation and, first and foremost, manipulation and control. The synthetization and technologization of the processes and systems surrounding the body - nutrition, medicine, entertainment, consumption etc. - have long taken over the body itself. "From now on, you will be - infinitely more than you can imagine - the subject of gadgets or instruments which [...] will become elements of your existence."18

If we remember that, as early as in sixties, Marshall McLuhan called the "all-involving sensory" of the media extensions of the subject, which, however, do not remain out there but have a dramatic impact on the "in here" of the subject because we are confronted with the effect of the original amputation of our senses, his phrase about the subject as a servo- mechanism of the machine can be updated, too (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in view of the developments in genetic engineering outlined above. "By continuously taking over new techniques, we turn into their servo-mechanisms."19 This means no more and no less than the feedback mechanisms which have seized our selves and which literally have to be defined as a form of synthesis between human being and technology in case of molecular-level interventions in the body. The system space of technology and its gadgets already comprises the subject and its intrinsic processes as it forcefully creates synchronicity of technology and body/self. We are hooked up with ourselves (our bodies, our consciousness and our desire) via technology, and thus also linked with a certain logic of access to our body, notions and concepts addressed by "never age - never die - never live" which the installation marks and attempts to relativize at the same time. A formula for life beyond time and body, "never live" seems to revise a fantasy of scientific research, the utopia that total mastery of nature is possible, that it can be transformed into a better artificial nature, more natural than natural, predictable, to be manipulated, which will, however, eventually be the end of all nature, and for humankind, the end of all history.

1 Timothy Druckrey, "Cn. command, control, communication, culture, consciousness, cognition, cybernetics, computing, cyberspace, cyborg [...]", in: Brigitte Felderer (ed.): Wunschmaschine Welterfindung. Eine Geschichte der Technikvisionen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, Vienna-New York 1996, pp. 222-235, 224 et seq.
2 "read me", in: BüroBert, minimal club, Susanne Schultz (ed.), geld.beat.synthetik. Abwerten bio/technologischer Annahmen, Berlin 1996, pp. 8-27, p. 25.
3 Cf. "How Like A Leaf. A Conversation with Donna Haraway", in: Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schöpf (eds.), fleshfactor. Informationsmaschine Mensch, Vienna - New York 1997, p. 55. As an aside: The theme of the 1997 Ars Electronica itself and the identification flesh/body and information machine evoked thereby confirm that the fantasies outlined here are extremely current and that critical engagement is needed.
4 Agentur Bilwet, "Verehrung des Technokörpers", in: Der Daten Dandy. Über Medien, New Age, Technokultur, Mannheim 1995, p.29.35, pp. 33 et seq.
5 Cultural techniques - social practices, hierarchies of values, but also patterns of interpreting the "world", which also encompass technological knowledge - always aim at positioning an individual person in a place within society/culture and fixing that position. This fixation, the anchoring of a certain pattern in which the individual interacts with his/her environment, always has to do with power and subordination. Present technological research and systems of knowledge also stand for the power to anchor the individual in a certain place within the discursive formations they themselves generate in society, time and space. This should not be overlooked, particularly because technology functions as a necessary supplement of progress while at the same time "rendering services" to the individual: promising the latter better health, more and better commodities and a more convenient and simpler life all around. For this reason - an improvement of our quality of life - and because of the mobility of the individual within society/culture which was (seemingly) made possible by technology, practices supported and initiated by technology often appear to be mainly oriented towards liberation. However, what happens is that the discourses claiming power over the individual merely trade places.
6 Cf. medien, apparate, kunst. projektionsräume. Beispiele apparativer Kunst in Österreich, exhibition catalogue, Vienna 1996.
7 As reflected in the German title of a Paul Virilio book, Die Eroberung des Körpers. Vom Übermenschen zum überreizten Menschen, Munich-Vienna 1994, which translates into English as "the conquest of the body".
8 In his "Sprawl" trilogy William Gibson describes a world-wide high-tech group (Tessier-Ashpool) managed by a dynasty that moves the company headquarters into orbit. The dynasty members produce clones and alternatingly freeze each other so that at a certain point nobody knows who is managing their business, who is "alive" and who embodies whom: individual, subject and history disintegrate entirely, become disposable - finally, an incarnation of T-A goes crazy and drives the family bankrupt. Apparently, it is not yet possible to survive "beside" history and "beside" the subject. Cf. William Gibson, Neuromancer, Biochips and Mona Lisa Overdrive, German version Munich 1987-89.
9 Larry Yeager in the abstract of his paper at the "Artificial Life" symposium at the Brucknerhaus Linz, June 16, 1993, published in the Ars Electronica 1993 programme folder, cf. also Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel (eds.), Genetic Art - Artificial Life, Vienna 1993, p. 122 et seq.
10 Douglas Fogle, "Virtuelle Hysterische", in: Jörg Huber, Alois Martin Müller (eds.), Die Wiederkehr des Anderen, Basel-Frankfurt 1996, pp. 245-263, p. 246 (translation here by EFG); right after this quote, Douglas Fogle starts to revise some of its underpinnings, especially the Cartesian mind/body split.
11 Linda Singer, "Biopolitik im Zeitalter der sexuellen Epidemie", in: geld.beat.synthetik., op.cit., pp. 182-186, p. 184.
12 Max More, "Beyond the Machine. Technology and Posthuman Freedom," in: fleshfactor, op.cit., pp.121-130, p. 121.
13 Douglas Fogle, op. cit., p. 248.
14 "Vorbemerkung", in: geld.beat.synthetik, op.cit., p.4.
15 Michel Foucault, Archäologie des Wissens, Frankfurt 1973, p. 34 (German version of L'Archéologie du savoir, 1969, translated here by EFG).
16 Carmen Hammer, Immanuel Stieß, "Einleitung", in: Donna Haraway. Die Neuerfindung der Natur. Primaten, Cyborgs und Frauen, Frankfurt-New York 1995, pp. 9-32, p. 23. [Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature]. Cf. also: Donna Haraway, "Situiertes Wissen. Die Wissenschaftsfrage im Feminismus und das Privileg einer partialien Perspektive", op. cit.
17 Gerhard Johann Lischka, "To Live Longer", in: Genetic Art - Artifical Life, op. cit. pp. 165-166, p. 165.
18 Jacques Lacan, quoted by Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften, Leipzig 1993, p. 15.
19 Marshall McLuhan, op.cit., p. 81.

Translated by Elly Frank-Grossebner