At the end of the millennium, the body has turned into a schizoid corpus. It is on the one hand a single, unitary, physical object with a life span of approximately 70 years, and on the other hand it has done the quantum jump into a transcendental, multiple self of mediated realities. The question is no longer what or who I am, but all that I can be.

The body of cyberspace is both an old and a new one. It is old with respect to the fantastical aspects projectable into the qualities of an ideal body - this we know from any kind of fantasy fiction. On the other hand it is radically new through its personification within the consensual reality of interactive, computer constructed environments.

In my work concerning the virtual body I wish to do the "tabula rasa", i.e., re_define and explore the body within the context of new media. I see the body Ð including personality Ð as a construction. The body as we have come to know it does not longer exist; new technologies allow us to perceive and experience it in radically new ways.

On the one hand I can not avoid being overwhelmed with a certain euphoria thinking of all one could possibly do in the brave, new world of cyberspace. On the other it is not hard to annihilate every optimism if one was to criticize the subject on an empirical basis. Except for text-based Virtual Reality (VR), the field of new media is more built on hype than on experiential realities, but then again, it does bring forth the cerebral pleasures Ð i.e., concepts and ideas Ð we all desire.

The works I describe below try to expand upon the present aesthetical and technical limits of computer-technology by combining "old" elements in new ways. They are neither the ultimate nor the final step, but they are important steps in the process of building the new_body.

WIRED FLESH #1: The cyberSM project

When first presented, the cyberSM project was the only functioning, explicit cybersex system available. It is a real-time, multi-sensory communication system for two participants. The project was a first attempt to solve the problem of how to establish tele-tactile communication. The first link took place in the fall of 1993, inter-connecting participants in Paris and Cologne. To this date, more than 100 participants have been involved in testing the devices. The goal of cyberSM has been twofold, initially it wanted to expand upon the narrow band-width of present communication/ VR systems, and secondly it wanted to create a particular kind of experiential environment uncommon to VR. As the title implies, the project was primarily concerned with fetishism and the ambient sensation of pleasure and pain. Its world-design was that of sado_masochism, incorporating elements such as digitized 3D objects of pierced, fetish-decorated bodies and heavy-duty rubber outfits with electrical stimulation Ð amongst others.

Tele-tactility

One of the main achievements of the project has resulted in allowing the participants to physically stimulate Ð i.e. touch Ð one another remotely. This was made possible through the use of sensoric suits, weared by the participants. In line with the world-desi