She Puppet

"Like earlier magical entertainment that generated new
notions of the body as a technology, such as late 19th century trick films
(magicians transforming women into butterflies, skeletons or angels, etc), Lara
Croft is the girl-doll of the late 20th century gaming world. What we like most
about her is that she is a collection of cones and cylinders - not a human at
all - most worthy as a repository for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure,
sex, and violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures
and the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by her
programmers, is a compulsive repetition of sorts, offering some kind of
cyber-agency and cyber-prowess for the player. As I played the game, I recorded
it live on tape, collecting hours of footage. Then I re-edited the material as
'found footage'. Ignoring the original drive of the action, I make Lara a
vehicle for my thoughts on what I see as the triad of her personae: the alien,
the orphan, and the clone. Quotations are from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando
Pessoa, The Female Man by Joanna Russ, and Afro-futurist and jazz mystic Sun
Ra." (Peggy Ahwesh)

With the permission from: Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Organisation: City of Women
In co-operation with: Kinodvor
With the
support of: The British Council