PROGRAM EIGHT: BODIES WITHOUT ORGANS
In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari coined the phrase, Body without Organs (BwO), to figure the zero matter of capitalism and schizophrenia. A zone of continuous variation, the BwO is the body’s virtual wish to discard or lose its organs. The possible variations of the BwO summarized by Deleuze and Guattarie seem to pervade the artwork in this sequence. The damage is already done for the hypochondriac body whose organs are destroyed. The paranoid body’s organs are continually under attack and restored by outside forces. Waging its own internal battle is the schizo body, whereas the drugged body is the experimental schizo and the masochist body is poorly understood by pain and fundamentally a question of the BwO. Just how the artists of Program 8 generate and perpetuate Bodies without Organs remains central to this perverse nature of this question and should generate debate among proponents of the sanctity of that glorified monument of cultural studies, the body performed as presence. Doubters should note that little is more exemplary of the BwO than the CD-Rom with its continuous regions of intensity. Like the CD-Rom, the BwO is also “full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance.... A BwO is made in such a way,” add Deleuze and Guattari, “that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities” that pass and circulate as matrices of production. So circulate cyberflesh and metabodies, anthropomorphic morphs, nurse houses, and information women.

Michele BARKER, Praeternatural, 2000 (Australia)
Linda DEMENT, Cyberflesh Girlmonster, 1995 (Australia)
Marcia LYONS, N2blak / aHa, 1998 (USA)
Job Ramos PERRAMON, The Nurse House, 1998 (Spain)
Gary ZEBINGTON, Metabody, 1997 (Australia)