n.b.k. Discourse Vol. 14

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König

VALIE EXPORT’s script The Virtual Body. From the Prosthetic to the Post-biological Body has been unearthed during the archival research for the exhibition VALIE EXPORT. Research – Archive – Oeuvre and has subsequently been carefully edited and richly annotated. Thanks to a joint effort by the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, this dense script, assembled from a universal collection of materials, can now be presented tot he public. VALIE EXPORT’s work was ahead of its time in its anticipation of the body’s emplacement in digital capitalism and the latter’s interactions with new media, artificial intelligence, and social media. One aspect of what makes The Virtual Body. From the Prosthetic to the Post-biological Body significant and worth studying is its insistence that, in the face of the symbolic instability of entertainment cinema, commercial TV, and digital broadcasting (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms) that cannot articulate more than their utter disconnect from reality, expanded cinema still has something important to say about the contemporary world.