ABSTRACT
Over 10 years ago, the author first encountered the work of ORLAN in the confined room of a French gallery. The piece was a wall-sized recorded video projection of Orland's face surgically altered. His interview with ORLAN attempts to explore the textures and implications of what he describe as an effacement of carnal and technical delineations of experience and the critical collapse of internal and external modalities of presentation of the body. Performance artists such as Stelarc, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Eduardo Kac and ORLAN have also been actively involved in outlining and enacting some alternative ways of being-with-technology. Simon Donger's interview with ORLAN explores the workings of the prosthetic logic in ORLAN's performances from her early projects, such as MesuRages and Kiss of the Artist, to the more recent ones, including Self-Hybridization and Harlequin's Coat. The interview traces the mutual co-constitution of technology, the body and the environment in ORLAN's artistic practice.
