Panel Statement

Panel: Embodiment: meat and machines

As avatars communicating in online Multi-user environments we exist both internally and externally to ourselves, operating simultaneously in hard world spaces and virtual soft electronically constructed spaces – so that while the body is seemingly dislocated, it is also physically gendered, located, grounded, present, somewhere. The physiological and cognitive processes still reside within the fixed subject, the localized self. We are not absent – but like the womb, the matrix, and the void, we are at once empty while containing all possibilities. Online we define ourselves in a hybridised way, as shifting nodes of communication, congruently self and other, alone and networked.

•  Melinda Rackham, College of Fine Arts , University of NSW, Australia

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