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We were having such an interesting conversation on Wednesday about our reactions to Teknolust that I found myself hurrying through, @ the very end of class, some of the ties I wanted to show you, between what Leeson was up to in her film, and what we have been up to in this class all semester. So, for the record (and drawing from The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson) here’s a list of some of the ways that I think the film plays with the themes that we’ve concerned ourselves with: it

• explores the relation of spectatorship to identity

• expands the outcome of art work by opening to up to viewer participation

• illustrates how deceptive is the view from one-point perspective

• focuses on interactivity (Ruby’s intelligence increases, becomes more flexible with each encounter in the real world)

• is a feminist, digital-age Frankenstein tale (recreates world in female form; has an unambiguously happy ending )

• moves out of earlier idealist art work (independent of external reality) into image manipulation: not objective truth, but ambiguous, unreliable representations

• invites us to think about conditions of agency/the wherewithal to make something happen

• explores the tension between insularity and social discourse (with identity a fluid interaction between self & others, assigned BY others)

• is performance art (requires interaction, is HOSTILE to passive viewers)