The fragmentariness of the experimental genre is erotic. Brynntrup fetishizes the partial object in its brevity, intensity, and obliqueness. In addition, he fetishizes the speed and oblivion of the techno-erotic. Disjointedness in turn creates a cult object: if the isolated image emits an air of mystery, then experimentalism turns its very products into auratic incarnations to behold, each film a body of tantalizing , mosaic-like glimpses. Profusion is represented, of course, not only optically but also acoustically in the techno soundtrack by Jay Ray. In other words, musical and visual seriality endows Herzsofort with an aura of transcendence or what Fredric Jameson terms the "technological sublime." As in virtual reality and the fantasy of the cyborg, there is no longer an exterior material boundary to the self. It is this proximity of this film to virtual environments that I want to explore further, for I think Brynntrup has cannily tapped into what Vivian Sobchack calls the "Culture of Quick-Change" or Celia Lury "Prosthetic Culture," theorists who argue that we already live inside technology, that we don't just use it as a tool, but are living within its fictional space (for instance, as we become agents in a video game or in virtual reality). In rephotographing himself, Brynntrup launches himself into this incarcerating space. He points to how our notion of subjectivity has entered into the camera, into the projection screen, and at one point, into the computer terminal. He underscores how we crave an identity from repeated association and identification with these instantaneous takes and manipulations. In the film Brynntrup leans into the camera in a kind of self-examination that would merge with the mirror: and he indeed does merge, dissolve, and multiply into doubles inside the medium. It is not surprising that Brynntrup has recently become one of Germany's leaders in cyber-art, including interactive CD-Rom. Herzsofort too is interactive, for by staring at us, Brynntrup reminds us that he is our mirror. As the image approaches us, we dissolve into it until we cannot see it anymore. We advance into the film.

By taking himself as the object of his films, Brynntrup upsets the bourgeois fetishization of character and its physiognomic reading of the face as expressing inwardness. Instead he displays the essence of the self today - its posing and impostures. He reminds us that what we crave is another exposure, instantaneously, to be superimposed and layered upon ourselves. The more abstract our image becomes, approximating the outlines of a cartoon or animated video game character, the more stylish it is. Insofar as the photographic and digitally morphed image fixes and freezes the self, the self becomes a matter of selective framing. Once in the matrix or mapped onto a grid, all views are partial and contingent. It is not that we want to dwell on or immerse ourselves in the self-portrait, but that we desire another snapshot as quickly as possible - we long to be reimaged as quickly as the camera shutter permits or to revel in the jouissance that the click on a new web site provides. Yet we are also well aware of the shock and disillusion that the photo of our self creates, how the photo transforms our body into a specter. Brynntrup takes to the limit the contingencies and disintegration of natural appearances that the camera accomplishes. And instead of the photo serving as a mnemonic trigger, consolidating memory in the close-up (photography's function in the past), here every rephotographing fosters amnesia of the previous image. The transmission of data in our high tech culture demands ever increasing acceleration and dissolving of the previous image. As in all our virtual environments (whether in virtual reality, on the internet, or in Intel commercials) everything is a process of ongoing, often enigmatic screening. As R. L. Rutsky writes "technology has itself come to be seen as a mutational process or logic." Furthermore, instead of the photo being the supplement to the self (an image representing the self), here the self is the supplement, for one cannot retrace, in the reconfiguration of each successive shot, the originating moment behind Brynntrup's serialization. He reminds us that there is nothing "real" behind each image, only another image which preceded it. Cyborgesquely, Brynntrup presents himself as hybridized, the sum of shifting, disassembled parts - he is both an animated sketch and pieces of a puzzle. As Celia Lury writes, the subject has moved beyond the mirror stage (of reflection) to the stage of self-extension, to "the advent of myself as other."

And yet, as if to compensate for the ego dislocation, Brynntrup engages in autopoesis: he recreates the self with confidence and artistic dexterity. What, of course, the cybernetic world does for us is give us the fantasy of armored techno invincibility: whether this fantasy be incorporated in Robocop or in the game player in virtual reality. Brynntrup, too, is imperious and inviolable. For him technology acts out and transforms the self in unpredictable, exciting ways. And yet at the same time, motivating this protean self-erasure is the contrary desire to engineer and orchestrate oneself. As if challenged by our "quick-change culture," Brynntrup decides to master this rapid change by performing it. He controls the momentum that is seemingly beyond his command. He inserts the pauses when his naked body appears before our eyes, and he arbitrarily ends the film that could go on indefinitely. The film foregrounds its constructedness, artistry, and performance, so that we sense the individual who has left traces of himself in what he has created. The paradox is that this self-staging is driven by the paranoia of being overwhelmed by the unlimited capacities and the self-generating dynamic of the apparatus.