The fragmentariness of the experimental genre is visually enticing. 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 and limitlessness 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. In the CD-Rom version of Plötzlich und Unerwartet -- Eine Déjà-Revue, the user can construct his or her own death certificate while halting at hot spots in the film that present information on various burial practices. 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.

This collapse of distance and differences presupposes an exchange between what Brynntrup aligns as "Mensch/Maschine/Medium/Material." In a statement about Herzsofort-Setzung, Brynntrup explains his desire to study the perception of media itself. He speaks of its spirituality and the "Eigendynamik" of technology (the dynamics peculiar to it). In the cyborgesque exchange of man and machine, the media themselves are anthropomorphized as possessing senses and even spirituality. Brynntrup moreover eroticizes the tactility the apparatus imparts. In order to create the sense of the immediacy and spontaneity of the technological and in order to respond instantly to each retake, Brynntrup used in this multi-media project what he calls the most direct forms of reproduction -- those of videoprint, photocopies, and Polaroid shots. He simulates a permanent present. To the same effect and contrary to preconceived notions of technology, Brynntrup marvels not at its precision and calculability, but at its potential for chance and chaos. Conversely, he borrows from the hard, scientific discourse to refer to himself: he is the variable who is mathematized. He is the object of dislocation: "Ich bewege mich aus mich selbst heraus" (I move out of myself).

As this phrase suggests, despite the intense preoccupation Brynntrup has with his own visage, he rejects physiognomically reading the face for the expression of inwardness. Instead he displays the essence of the self today -- its posing and impostures. He performs Baudrillard's trenchant observation that "we have interiorized our own prosthetic image and become the professional show-men of our own lives."[6] Brynntrup reminds us that what we crave is another exposure, instantaneously, to be superimposed and layered upon ourselves. The more abstract the 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 -- hence Brynntrup's fascination with death and the camera in numerous films, including Testamento memori (1986), the Totentanz /Death Dances series (1988), and Plötzlich und Unerwartet (1993). 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 speed of digital transmission and the permanent present of our visual culture results in hyper-obsolescence. As R. L. Rutsky writes "technology has itself come to be seen as a mutational process or logic."[7]

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, in infinite regression. Cyborgesquely, Brynntrup presents himself as hybridized, -- he is both an animated sketch and pieces of a puzzle. He morphs with every click of the camera, like the click of the mouse, into a newly screened image. Brynntrup attributes this impossibility of perfect reproduction or reference to an original to the chaotic independence ("Eigenleistung") of the technological medium: he writes that the reproduction creates the new original. 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."[8] Brynntrup revels in the otherness of his own image -- with each retake into instantaneous distortion.

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 its user is to endow 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 contemporary "quick-change culture," Brynntrup decides to master the rapid morph 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.

Brynntrup referred to Herzsofort-Setzung as "autogenic manipulations," a phrase suggesting masturbatory pleasure. Digital cultural critic, Peter Lunenfeld, has referred to the "narcissism inherent in contemporary technology,"[9] meaning that the so-called interactivity between user and terminal screen is actually a self-absorption. He notes the "pleasure of vicarious agency,"[10] for instance in video games. Yet rather than moralizing on Brynntrup's vanity, I would prefer to speak of his authorialism, his faith in the agency of the artist/performer that would serve as an antidote to precisely the vicariousness of which Lunenfeld speaks. In discussing new media genres, cultural critic Andrew Darley suggests that "even in its 'de-centered' guise, the idea of authorial freedom has become so attenuated by the workings of the system itself, that quite simply it is no longer an issue."[11] Darley could hardly be more wrong in the case of Brynntrup. To be sure, the fact that the artist acts in his own films signifies how engulfed the subject is by technological culture. He refuses to disengage himself from the morphed spaces he creates yet that are representative of this culture: hence he lodges himself in these incarcerating spaces. Yet by virtue of his honesty in admitting his entanglement in the self-enclosed world of simulacra and cyberspace, he reflects critically on it, and, as in the modernist tradition, takes (self)-representation as his very subject matter. He unravels the fabric of the simulacra itself -- a singular accomplishment and intervention in an era of fake agency. Yet, at the same time, he delights in the games of fakeness and camouflage: through putting his life's opus and intimacies from his diary on the web, he plays not just with the anonymity and disguise of the internet but also with its users' puerile curiosity and hypocritical, anachronistic beliefs in privacy.[12]

In closing this section on Brynntrup, I want to add that, given his juxtaposition of the artificial reproduction of the self with its agency and independence, it is not surprising that he frequently uses flamboyant transvestite performers. In fact, whether citing from his diary in a voice-over or incarnating himself before the camera, Brynntrup himself is always performing in a kind of drag. His exploration of the simulacrum is brilliantly queer when one considers its transvestitic dimensions. Marjorie Garber writes, "the subversive secret of transvestism [is] that the body is not the ground, but the figure," an insight which leads her to observe that "the transvestite effect . . . underlies representation itself."[13] Transvestism complicates the dynamics between original and copy that so preoccupies Brynntrup.

An example of this engagement is Brynntrup's recent NY' NY 'n why not, a film shot on super-8 and trans-ferred digitally onto 35mm. It begins with the lyricism that super-8 as an old-fashioned medium creates, yet just as Kaspar Kamäleon, Brenda Sexual, and Glennda Orgasm transform gender signifiers, so too does super-8 metamorphose under the digital alteration to become jagged and syncopated to the techno score by Jay Ray. Like the title, the images stutter. The halting repetition, fast-forwarding, and freeze-framing of movement point to computerized modification, just as the m2f repeats but alters signs of feminine gender. Out on the streets, these women are in trans-it, experimental selves in an experimental medium. It is clearly not an issue of them passing as women, instead their artificiality matches the garish tint and frenetic pace of the image. Brynntrup's transgender characters move away from any nostalgia for the original, natural body and question claims to authenticity via gender. Even the names of his actresses -- BeV StroganoV, Tima die Göttliche, and Kaspar Kamäleon -- signify not a biological origin but an acquired singularity. If, in Herzsofort, Brynntrup presents a shifting constellation of fragmented selves and his grid reassembles multiple parts, then these include, as in NY' NY 'n why not, signifiers of gender which are substitutable and replaceable for each other. The transvestitic performer points to sexual difference as inherently obeying the economy of the simulacrum. Brynntrup thus instrumentalizes virtual gender to explore the virtual medium.

Yet despite the freneticism of the present moment -- the stop and go of high heels dodging cars -- the film alludes to a past, indeed, a specific history. The sign "Christopher Street" (where gay liberation in America began thanks to the courageous drag queens who resisted a police raid) appears at the top of two shots, and the film is dedicated to these veterans of the Stonewall uprising. Thus despite his acknowledgement of "the culture of quick change," Brynntrup is also at pains to locate a tradition within it. He sees the need to gesture to this crucial link for gays to the past.

**********

"The culture of quick change," as symptomatized in Brynntrup's cloning, fast-forwarding, and techno music, can also be seen in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run. In fact, NY' NY 'n why not, with its transvestites in brashly blonde wigs running haphazardly between cars waiting at a stoplight, seems to parody Run Lola Run. As I indicated at the start, Tykwer's work is truly a motion picture -- a movie about velocity in the era of the internet. The director has stated that the image of Lola running is that of cinema itself -- motion and emotion ("Dieses Bild ist Kino: Bewegung und Emotion, kein anderes Medium kann das so transportieren").[14] But the film has ties not only to cinema: with its loop-structure Run Lola Run resembles a video loop installation on the one hand and on the other an interactive CD-Rom where you have limited choices about the narrative path you can follow.[15] As in video games or chatrooms, you can create the character you play. And, as in video games, there is a time limit and each time you play the game you can carry over limited knowledge from the previous game and pick up extra time to improve your score. The film is related as well to the internet, insofar as the hypertext has accustomed us to the nonlinear progression that characterizes the parallel worlds Lola sequentially inhabits. As digital critic Peter Lunenfeld states: "[Because of t] he constant play between interlinked nodes of information . . . we can no longer know where a proposition will come in relation to other propositions."[16]

But despite its evocation of such diverse new media, Run Lola Run does not critically reflect on the postmodern technoterrain it inhabits. It is a popular film whose high art constructedness amuses and whose speed and throbbing music carry the viewer along in a trance, discouraging the piercing self-examination that characterized Brynntrup's performance in Herzsofort-Setzung. This slight of hand is enabled in Run Lola Run via the construction of its main character. Apart from her scream, Lola is quite ordinary, like the individuals she encounters on the streets whose atomized lives scroll by pixellated in arbitrary narratives before us. She is someone with whom the average spectator can safely identify, for, as Tykwer has stated, she comes from a normal middle class household.[17] Her life could be written this way or that, preferably with a happy end but with a modicum of agency. But mostly life is just a gamble, as the culminating scenes in the casino intimate. Lola's choices are restricted and conventional. It is not surprising that her life is cloned thrice over, each time erasing the past. In today's world, one's self is composed of a constellation of possibilities (like in a video game or Chuck Jones' cartoon) and does not follow one integral, unique path, linked to the past. In other words, such a self can be supplemented by multiple frames or narratives.

Tykwer's film, however, does not problematize this lack of self-determination in a mediatized, techno society. In fact, it tricks us into believing Lola does have effective will and agency, and in that sense allays our anxieties about performance and intervention in a posthumanist world. Tykwer plays upon the spectator's hackneyed fantasy of being able to save the beloved and get rich quick, as when he banally claims that "the most important statement is at the end: not everything is determined. There's a place for the realization of our desires."[18] Moreover the viewer is conned into believing that Lola is a model of a strong, inventive, and resolute young woman, despite the fact that her most effective resource is her primal scream. The director summarizes Lola's attitude as: "Ich mache mir die Welt, wie sie mir gefällt" ("I make the world to be what I want").[19] The universe according to Lola. Her uniqueness and individuality are signified, not surprisingly, by hair color, which instigated in turn a copy-cat fad.

Tykwer's claims to present an average, young woman -- hearty and natural in her resolve to fulfill her instinctive desires -- are belied by the constructedness that determines every aspect of the film, including Lola's body and character. At the most basic level, Lola's prosthetic life is engineered by cinematic narrative conventions -- bank heist, robbery, shoot-out, and happy end. Her story itself is mechanically re-produced in three versions. If in the virtual environment everything is a process of screening, then Run Lola Run literally flashes up new screen scenarios in its retelling of the plot. In his review for The Nation, Stuart Klawans writes: "Lola is most emphatically a creature of Cinemaland. Able to slip back and forth amid formats, Lola can exit a room and immediately reappear in it on TV, or change into a cartoon figure . . . or shrink herself to accommodate the demands of a triple-split-screen effect."[20] Tykwer also makes ample use of black-and white as well as color stock. All scenes without Lola or Manni are shot on video in order to indicate that "the world outside these two is artificial and unreal"![21] Tykwer also deploys fastforwarding, hand-held camera (in the bank scenes to show nervousness), and digital technology (in smoothing over transitions). As we see her body pumping along and breathing hard, we forget that Lola initially appeared during the credits as a cartoon character. Her heartbeat is cyborgesque as well, supplemented by the techno music which pulsates and punctuates her stride. If techno is an art performed by DJs who sample and splice fragments of pieces together, then Tom Tykwer is DJ, sampling films, such as Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. This cyborgesque-like composition of disjointed excerpts then mirrors the parceled form of the film.

As in Brynntrup's mosaic-like work, here too all views or elements of an individual's life are partial and contingent. Other components of Lola's character mark her as a creature from Sobchack's "quick-change culture." She embodies the generational fantasy of how to break out of old structures (she is literally not her father's daughter), even of how to break out of time. At the start, as a cartoon character, she smashes all obstacles with her fist. Unlike her bank-manager dad, she represents how money circulates today: as one critic observed,[22] she represents a new concept of agency and temporality in the late-nineties age of entrepreneurial, get-rich-quick internet startup companies. Her swiftness reflects the fetishization of speed in the computerized era. Like raves where the constant music and consumption of ecstasy transports one out of one's body, here too Lola is, despite her Berlin setting, a body of sheer kineticism, taken out of space. Her course was shot at disparate sites in the city. Moreover, the streets were purposely filmed empty and Tykwer proclaimed that Berlin was to function merely as a staged city ("eine inszenierte Stadt") and a stage set ("eine Kulisse").[23] And, indeed, the shots of Friedrichstraße and Gendarmenmarkt display the part of the former East Berlin most revitalized, sanitized, which is to say, Westernized at the time of the shooting. Lola tracks through city streets like someone navigating through a computer game she's played once before and whose coordinates vary slightly on each round. (In other words, pedestrians can be reduced to obstacles in a video game; moreover, Lola has no awareness of the effects she has on their lives!) Watching her, we too are in synch with the music and, through the beat of her footsteps, one with her experience. She makes us feel as if she brings our bodies, passive in high tech, back up to speed. In other words, Lola's very essence is patterned on the velocity of high tech communication and the prosthetic nature of our bodies today. If she runs rather than drives a motorcycle (like Tom Cruise) to accomplish her mission impossible in this fantasy action film, then it is because her body is already enhanced and cyborgized. Lola is, as Janet Maslin has observed, post-human.[24]

In his review of the film, Tom Whalen says Maslin's term is hardly accurate "for the human moments evident in the desires and dilemmas of the characters."[25] What Whalen ignores is that these very desires are themselves late-20th century cultural constructs. What masks the techno body is the grounding of the narrative in the ideology of the heterosexual "fairy tale."[26] Tykwer can blithely call Run Lola Run "a romantic film, a true love story" and a "fairy tale."[27] Yet he also pretends to divorce the artificiality of his formal devices from the apparent truthfulness of the characters: "Die Künstlichkeit der Konstruktion muß verheiratet werden mit der Wahrhaftigkeit der Figuren."[28] Tykwer, like Whalen, downplays that, although the heterosexual romance endows the film with a sense of "naturalness," as in the interim sequences when the frenetic pace stops, the couple lounges in bed, and Lola is back to being a blonde, this romance itself is a cinematic convention. Lola, this creature of Cinemaland, is the postmodern citation of her namesake from Sternberg and Fassbinder. Like her boyfriend Manni, whose name represents his sex, so too her name cites her encoding as the cinematic woman par excellence. Like Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Sukowa before her, she is a cipher for today's woman. Ironically then, insofar as one can talk of heterosexual conventions, in Run Lola Run, as in NY' NY 'n why not, gender and sex are a virtual construct. The difference between them, clearly, is that Brynntrup acknowledges and plays with the construct instead of spuriously naturalizing it. Similarly, unlike Lola's pretense to individuality in her red hair and pumped-up body, Brynntrup interrogates where agency can exist in the virtual realm today, even as he dissolves his body into fragmented, metastasizing copies. As he peers curiously into the camera, this artist imparts an intensity to his search -- a search for honesty, integrity, and inventiveness -- for which Lola's speed is no match.

KUZNIAR, Alice A. (2003): The Problem of Agency in the Digital Era: From the New Media Artist Michael Brynntrup to Run Lola Run, Rutgers German Studies - Occasional Papers Series, New Brunswick, NJ.

[0] (http://www.brynntrup.de/nofilm/c_keinfilm_768x576.html)
[1] These include Handfest -- freiwillige Selbstkontrolle / Handfest -- Voluntary Self-Control (1984), Stummfilm für Gehörlose / Silent Movie for Deaf People (1984), Veronika (vera ikon) (1987), Höllensimulation: frei nach Platos Höhlengleichnis / Simulation of Hell: loosely based on Plato's parable of the cave (1987), Die Statik der Eselsbrücken / Engineering Memory Bridges (1990), and Herzsofort. Setzung / Heart. Instant(iation) (1994).
[2] See Narziss und Echo / Narcissus and Echo (1989), Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache / Love, Jealousy and Revenge (1991), and Plötzlich und Unerwartet -- eine Déjà Revue / Sudden and Unexpected (1993).
[3] I borrow the neologism from Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 120 ff. and 172.
[4] D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 213.
[5] Brynntrup's baroque, allegorical fascination with death and its requisites (skeletons, skulls, funerals, graveyards) can be witnessed in Testamento memori (1986), the Totentanz /Death Dances series (1988), and Plötzlich und Unerwartet(1993). Both Orpheus -- der Tragödie erster Theil / Orpheus -- first part of the tragedy (1983-84) and Narziss und Echo reenact Rococo metamorphoses of Ovid's tales, as well as scenes from Cocteau and Greenaway.
[6] Jean Baudrillard, "The virtual illusion: or the automatic writing of the world," Theory, Culture and Society 12:4 (1995), 97.
[7] R. L. Rutsky, High Techné: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 17.
[8] Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, and Identity (NY: Routledge, 1998), 3.
[9] Peter Lunenfeld,150.
[10] Lunenfeld, 164.
[11] Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London and NY: Routledge, 2000), 141.
[12] See Brynntrup's Loverfilm: an uncontrolled dispersion of information in which Brynntrup flashes up photos of all the lovers he has had in his life. At the start of the film he invites the spectator to leave the room before he or she is party to invading another's privacy.
[13] Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (NY: Routledge, 1992), 374.
[14] "Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimentalThriller: Tom Tykwer im Gespräch mit Michael Töteberg," Tykwer, Lola rennt (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998), 129.
[15] Brynntrup's versions of Plötzlich und Unerwartet are respectively that of a loop structure and an interactive CD-Rom.
[16] Lunenfeld, 51.
[17] Tykwer, 138.
[18] "Tom an die Lola-Mannschaft vor Beginn der Dreharbeiten," Tykwer, 117.
[19] Tykwer, 136.
[20] Stuart Klawans, "Born Cool," The Nation (July 12, 1999).
[21] Tykwer, 134.
[22] Ed Dimmenberg in discussion at the German Film Institute, hosted at Dartmouth College, August 2000.
[23] Tykwer, 135.
[24] Janet Maslin, New York Times (26 March 1999).
[25] Tom Whalen, "Run Lola Run," Film Quarterly 52.3 (Spring 2000): 39.
[26] "Fairy Tale" is Whalen's category p. 39.
[27] Tykwer, 129 and 130. The first voice that one hears is that of Hans Paetsch, known to generations of German children for his recordings of fairy tales.
[28] Tykwer, 136.