Materializing Cyberbodies since the 1980s

This panel is dedicated to the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which bodily boundaries were pushed by prosthetic augmentations, the postulated networking in “cyberspace,” and biotechnological modifications and mutations—also towards non-human artefacts and species. Artists and theorists questioned the social and political narratives of body and identity. They recast the understanding of the perceiving body as a sentient one. The expansive practices of visual simulation affected notions of corporeality. Sculpture’s relationship to analog and virtual space also changed, with the former threatening to merge into the latter. Against this background, the sculptural examination of the body in its mutable, fragmentary, and commodified forms took on renewed significance.

Fig.: Tishan Hsu, Autopsy, 1988, Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2019, Private collection

Speakers Marie-Luise Angerer | “Body Options Revised”: From Cyborg Enhancement to Sensitive Entanglement Jeannine Tang | Subject to Security: Tishan Hsu and Julia Scher