ABSTRACT
The visible human project (VHP) is a dramatic and compelling visual object, a three-dimensional, photorealistic anatomical image of an entire body which can be rotated, dissected, animated and worked from the multiple points of view afforded by computer vision. Technical practices of animation are routinely posed as analogues for the processes of life but the attribution of vitality to the VHP figures takes a specific energy from the elaboration of virtual space as vital space currently underway in multiple sites of technoculture and the cybersciences. The deployment of Genesis rhetoric in the VHP summons up a cybernatural space, one which depends on a similar play and implosion of distinctions as those found in A-Life. Its resort to Genesis is nevertheless modified in particular ways, a rewriting motivated by the fact that it must negotiate a much more complex creation story than that found in A-Life.
