In order to examine the specific contribution art makes to the discourses on future bodies and subjects, the point of departure of this topical focus are the artistic reflections on and realizations of cyborgs. Cyborgs here are not only cybernetic organisms, i.e. link-ups between humans and machines, as they are commonly defined. Rather they generally denote fantasies about hybrid, monstrous, machine-like, cloned, digital, networked, cellular or transgendered bodies. Thus «Cyborg Bodies» essentially encompasses all of those notions in which the body is considered to be something put together, artificial, and new.

«Cyborg Bodies» assumes that new (media) technologies influence our body and its perception (not only in the present, but also in the past), that the body and its rights are grossly at the disposal of others, and that media art is an important place at which these questions can be thought about using a variety of media. Although the end of the body and the human is no longer being blaringly postulated or feared today as it was in the course of the debates on the so-called «posthuman» at the beginning of the nineties, the issue has not yet come to a close. The discussions and