Over the past few years I have somehow accumulated a collection of cards, images and prints above my desk. Some were given to me by students, or are copies of my own work, most are postcards and exhibition invites. As I sit and prepare to write this text three images stand out and demand their part in my discussion. One is an unidentified image of Cleopatra with an asp. Cleopatra gently holds the snake to her exposed breast, she seems to be caressing its head as she stares absently into its open mouth, it could be her child she is holding. Beside Cleopatra is a National Gallery bookmark of Saint Lucy. Eyelids blindly rolled to the sky, Lucy presents her extracted eyes on a platter. The third image is by Dunedin artist Teresa Andrew. Titled "Femininity as disease" (1997) the print shows three women bound by corsets and hooped skirts. In their midst is a forth figure; she is naked, bound to a stake, her face is covered, her flesh hurts. She disturbs me more than the images around her. Why is it that all these images stick in my mind? And why does the incongruity of this contemporary figure make me return to her again and again? I do not <I> like <I> this picture, but I will not take it down from the wall.

The images all hold my attention even though the women within them avert their gaze from my own. Cleopatra is far more interested in her snake than me, Saint Lucy has already had the pleasure of sight removed and Andrew's figure is too engrossed within her own torture to care. As I daydream I find the images stretching into the room, their bodies become part of my space. Joanna Frueh has also experienced the peculiar nature of this sort of entrapment by images, she sees herself trapped without captor. It is absurd, merely an image that holds her. As viewers caught by an image we tell ourselves we can turn away at any moment, but often we find that this sudden movement results in painful tears.

In this paper I suggest that entrapment by images occurs because of the mimetic nature of the relationship of viewer to viewed. I argue that the viewing experience is not simply one of looking with the eyes but involves a connected, corporeally engaged body. I see the viewer positioned amidst an "undemarcated terrain on which the distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred."(Crary, 1990, p.24)

Positioned both within and between multiple relationships, the question of seeing becomes also a question of the body. Avital Ronell (1989) approached a similar transformation in her discussion of Alexander Bell’s experiments with hearing devices that lead to the invention of the telephone. Once the voice could be transmitted and became distanced from the body, the boundaries that demarcated the body itself were questioned. Skin was no longer a decisive barrier.

At present it could be said that we are participating in a technosphere in which reproductive technologies and communications technologies enter the body on a molecular level as well as transport that body through many boundaries. The transformations that these technologies engender create a new sense of the corporeal body. If, as I suggest, the viewing body is similarly negotiated across objects and situations, then the subject’s viewing experience is not solely tied to his or her material body.

Elizabeth Grosz (1994) has reworked notions of corporeality to address the potential of the unbounded and multiple body. Grosz shows that if we accept the materiality of the object as distinct from the corporeality of the subject we limit the body's interface with the world. However, if when considering a subject position, we also look at the way in which the object position is occupied we might see that their respective boundaries overlap. Instead of being bounded and distant, both subject and object would have a shared view of each other. Visually we would appear together, tied by reflection, by our shared environment.

What are the implications of multiple viewing interfaces that are situated on connective boundaries? Roger Caillois (1987) argued that mimicry was the result of a subject being unable to distinguish themselves from their environment, it was a psychosis, a loss of distinction. It this very loss of distinction that I argue is central to our viewing practices, and in particular, I see mimesis as one explanation for the feeling of being captivated by images.

Michael Taussig (1993) presented a working definition of mimesis as copy or imitation resulting from direct sensory contact. Taussig argues that a mimetic faculty is engendered due to a combination of elements in imitation of something else. For Taussig mimesis is not necessarily an understanding derived from a single original or self, but is closely tied to alterity, to the way that we generate knowledge of the self through identifications of simularity.

Mimesis generates effective relationships; interleaving event, image and person. Through this mimetic faculty the body viewing the artwork becomes implicated in, and part of, the work that is being viewed. We reach a point at which we are not just looking at an object but we want to grasp it, to get hold of it, to touch it, and we desire for it to reach out at us. (2) Every act of viewing becomes an event in which the boundaries of our bodies are imbricated in relations with other bodies.

Desire moves across the surfaces of our bodies. Within a mimetic and undemarcated terrain, we bring the desires of the body onto the surfaces of both viewer and image. The image enters into the space of the viewer leaving the viewer both embodied and fragmented. The temptation is to similarly become space, rather than just inhabit it. Mimesis is always in between, it is a process and a movement. How is it possible to further articulate this sense of destabilised embodiment?

Science fiction films and books have for a long time created a visual space for us to imagine (if not enact) our body as it flies through today’s temporal and spatial matrix, "where subjectivity dis-connects and re-connects through various networks. While dissolving, the body’s limits literally delaminate into...multiple surfaces and interfaces." (Teyssot, 1994, p.10) Linda Dement’s "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" is an interactive CD-ROM created from body parts donated by a number of women and scanned by Dement during Artist’s week at the 1994 Adelaide Festival. (3) The body parts appear fragmented and monstrous. Limbs and organs are grafted improperly into seemingly familiar forms. The borders of the body and machine are merged and reconstructed, the body is dis-organ-ised, (4) and generated across the surfaces of multiple bodies and technologies.

"Cyberflesh Girlmonster" steps both towards and away from an abject identity. Her bodies are situated between and within the surfaces of CD-ROM, scanner, and viewer. Behaving as Donna Haraway’s cyborg might, these feminine monsters do no seek a singular nor unitary identity. (Haraway, 1991) And like the cyborg, Girlmonster does not stem from a single ancestor, she is seated and sourced upon a technology, a scanner. Hybrid and mutating, the constructed bodies of the Girlmonster echo Haraway’s text, becoming "us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment." (Haraway, 1991, p.180)

Girlmonster’s texts are embodied and activated through a viewer’s participation in the CD-ROM. Moving amidst and activating partial, fluid flesh, playing with sex and sexual embodiment a viewer can only grasp at the destabilised body. As participants we are invited to revel in the corporeal. The mouse caresses the screen, moving over bodies, occasionally sounds of pleasure are emitted. Clicking the mouse releases text fragments, stories ranging from rape to lust to friendship. Virginia Barrett and Zoe Sofoulis, occasional collaborators with Dement, describe viewing "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" as both a familiar and alienating experience. They write:

Heather Barton relates her experience of interacting with "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" to Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein". Barton comments that "in [Shelley’s] creation of a monster electricity was applied to randomly assembled body parts to activate Frankenstein - a bio-technology that creates technological artefacts." (Ashburn, 1996, p.33). Barton suggests that in interactive computer works such as "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" viewers provide the willing bodies of interactors and also "become ‘monsters’ by being ‘wedded’ to electricity through the machine." (Ashburn, 1996, p.33) The active participant is monstered by the experience of the interaction and as such realises her own hybrid body. Haraway has commented that mimetic figures such as Frankenstein and the vampire "make categories travel." (Haraway, 1997, p.80) Girlmonster is such a figure. The interface between the computer and the user is visual and visceral, categories of body, representation and technology are traversed by those interacting with the Girlmonster.

Girlmonster literally takes bodies within herself, whilst simultaneously spitting visceral remains back in the viewer's face. There is no in-between space, as a viewer you find yourself amidst it whilst it secretly burrows beneath your skin. Caillois's worst fears become realised. The viewing subject has no means to distinguish herself from the spaces of the image, screen or bodies that are before her.

My body has not entered any of the images on my wall, instead they have moved me, and I have drifted elsewhere. Cleopatra and Saint Lucy thrust their narratives toward me, asking for my participation, my view of their experience. The bound body in Andrew's print disturbs me most because the body mirrors my own, it demands that my view is active, that I become involved in a shared space of image and body. My viewing body cannot end at the skin because there is too much to see out there.

1. Throughout this text I invoke Donna Haraway's question "why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" (Haraway, 1991, p.178.)

2. Walter Benjamin commented that "every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction," (Benjamin, 1969, p.223.)

3. hyperlink <http://www.geekgirl.net/geekgirl/003broad/dement.html>

4. This is a reference to Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs. The body without organs is the body that exists prior to, and without, organising inscriptions such as social and biological determinants. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p.149ff.)

5. hyperlink <http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/high&low/j/14.html>

Ashburn, Elizabeth. <I>Lesbian Art. An Encounter With Power.<I> Sydney: Craftsman House, 1996.

Barrett, Virginia and Zoe Sofoulis, "Women Remapping Technospace," <I>High & Low, Gender/ Blender<I>: (1994) (1999) <http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/high&low/j/14.html>

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," <I>Illuminations.<I> Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969. pp.217-51.

Caillios, Roger. "Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia" Trans. John Shepley, <I> October <I> 31 (Winter, 1987), pp.17-33.

Crary, Jonothon. <I>Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Ninteenth Century. <I> Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, October Books. 1990.

Dement, Linda "Dot Matrix Interviews Linda Dement" <I> Geekgirl <I> 003 (1997) (2000) <http://www.geekgirl.net/geekgirl/003broad/dement.html>

Frueh, Joanna. <I>Erotic Faculties,<I> Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, p.122

Grosz, Elizabeth. <I> Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. <I> Bloomington and Indianapolis: Allen and Unwin, Indiana University Press, 1994.

Grosz, Elizabeth. <I> Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. <I> Bloomington and Indianapolis: Allen and Unwin, Indiana University Press, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," <I> Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, <I> New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

Haraway, Donna. <I> Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. <I> New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Ronell. Avital. <I> The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.<I> Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Taussig, Michael. <I> Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. <I> New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

Teyssot, George. "The Mutant Body of Architecture." <I> Flesh: Architectural Probes. <I> Ed. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofido. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. p.8-35.