The CD-ROM builds a story from photos and blocks of text. These are merged into a surface containing layers of images and sound in several places, adding a wider perspective to the story. True to the tradition of photo stories, it does not lack the accompanying narrative elements such as drama, chase and love. The story itself is about a cyborg and takes place – like so much of Prophet's work – in a sci-fi setting, at the borderline between the natural and the artificial, between male and female, between inside and outside, and between man and machine. A woman earns her living by acting as a subject for drug tests and implant experiments whilst enhancing her own body with nanotechnology devices. Then it turns out that she is being pursued by a man who is trying to get back the microchip containing her personality that she bought on credit. She gets shot and is flown to a hospital emergency room where at the same time a man is being brought in. Their stories become intertwined: she dies because she is uninsured and therefore unable to get life-saving treatment, so her heart is transplanted to him. Her heart though, contains the chip with her personality characteristics. Unknown to the man, this chip starts to take effect and causes the confusion of being a person who is at once himself and yet someone else. Prophet creates this confusion in order to re-examine concepts and play with ideas like voyeurism, looking, identification and motivation, and a person's individuality. With her knowledge of especially Lacan's interpretation of concepts from psychoanalysis, she tries to look beyond the current idea of mind and body. Through surgery, prosthetics, chemicals and chips, the line between cyborgs and humans is becoming more and more diffuse and affects our ideas of what a person is.
– Carla Hoekendijk |
Programming: Mongrel
with thanks to: Film & Video Umbrella, PhotoDisc
Jane Prophet, 1964, Birmingham (UK)
Lives and works in London (UK)
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