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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathNarration
 
Lorna (Hershman, Lynn), 1979Deep Contact; The First Interactive Sexual Fantasy Videodisc (Hershman, Lynn), 1984Imaginäre Bibliothek (PooL Processing), 1990
 
IO_dencies (Knowbotic Research), 1997Dialogue with the Knowbotic South (Knowbotic Research), 1994
 

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unstable identities, they are «shifting personalities» who have internalized the non-existence of borders between different levels of reality.

The subject blueprint on which her female personae in «Lorna,» «Deep Contact» and «CyberRoberta» are based is no longer the perspectivized subject as in Joyce, nor are they based on multiple personalities, but rather on the virtual subject—the subject as a form of possibility— whose identity is valid only in the moment and manifests itself anew from moment to moment through intervention by the observer/user. The virtual subject as identity blueprint also characterizes the users of network pieces such as «Die imaginäre Bibliothek» by PooL Processing, which was established as a discourse network in 1990. Its goal is to «assertively play out all metaphors of an ‹electronic library fantasy›.» The purpose of the application is to use branching associative reading and navigation to entangle the user in a network of texts, thereby simulating his/her participation in the imaginary library space. The PooL Processing group found its inspiration for the project not only in Jorge Luis Borges' «The Library of Babel and

 

Umberto Eco's «The Name of the Rose,» but also in the Minitel writing project conceived by Jean-François Lyotard for the «Les Immatériaux» exhibition that took place in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.[18]

Discursive fields

While these projects consciously make reference to the cultural practice of writing and storytelling, the Knowbotic Research group tries to avoid any borrowings from traditional representational systems. In their works they draft symbolically organized structures in which visual, textual, narrative and auditory elements are arranged without any hierarchical order. In web projects such as «I0_dencies» (1997–1999)[19] and interactive environments such as «Dialogue with the Knowbotic South» (1994–1997), moving, non-linear orders emerge that can be experienced in space and explored associatively. They form discursive fields or «action spaces» that empower the users to get involved and to arrange the complexity according to their own criteria. It is precisely this ability to form one's own

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