Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon was from the small town of Falls City in Nebraska (USA). He was still a female anatomically (although male in dress and behaviour) and was waiting for his sex-change operation. On Christmas Eve in 1993 he visited a bar, where several men learnt about his secret. They kidnapped and raped him, but when he tried to report the crime the local sheriff would not take him seriously and refused to write up a report of the incident. A week later he was murdered by two locals. In the years that followed Brandon became a symbol of transexuality. For Shu Lea Cheang this story was occasion to make Brandon a personage in cyberspace and use him as the protagonist in a project on the mixed borders between male and female gender in the real as well as the virtual world and the consequences of taking on another form (anonymously or not). Cheang, together with many others, worked for more than a year on the project developing various installations, gatherings and four interfaces in giving shape to the different aspects of the project. On the website the bigdoll interface gives a visual summary of the project. The journey through cyberspace is taken along a special road, where roadsigns from Nebraska and other signs crop up. These point to real or made-up stories from Brendon's life and are a part of the simulated biography. There is also a chance to meet Hercule/Herculine Barbin (a 19th century French hermaphrodite), there is a chat option (mooplay interface) where sexual fantasies from various personages can be written down and a prison (panopticum interface) where rapists and transexuals share the same space. The netizen can also click over to the installation in Theatrum Anatomicum, a room in De Waag in Amsterdam, where lessons were given on human dissection by the guild of surgeons in the 17th century using the bodies of executed criminals. This room is equipped with a suspended dissecting table – a metaphor for the study of the influence of gender on the social body (society) – upon which, among others, the website is projected. Three metal rings of different sizes hang above the dissecting table. A toy train with a camera is riding on one of them. Shots of what is going on in the room are taken with this camera and sent to the Net as well as to huge screens in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This also happens in the meeting of the virtual and real worlds, held in this room under the title 'Digi gender, social body: under the knife, under the spell of the anaesthetic'. Then live shots of a sex-change operation, like the one Brandon would have had, are projected onto the dissecting table. This anatomy lesson is being discussed by medical professionals, gender critics and artists, live and over the Net: what happens when someone takes on a different sexual form, in a real and/or virtual world? And what is the relationship between 'became and new' and 'born and bred'? In the court case (spring '99 in collaboration with Harvard University) a role-play of Brandon's confrontation with his murderers is followed. The Theatrum is then turned into a virtual court of justice, reopens the 'Brandon' case and uses cyberspace to tackle the issue of criminality. In all concepts of contraposition – man and woman, virtual and real – the line between the two is not only the place where the two worlds separate, it is also where they meet and undergo change. The influence of the virtual worlds – which are much more directed – on the real world will, with this, increase considerably.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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Shu Lea Cheang ° 1954, Tainan (Taiwan)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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