Across the Nebraska Border and the virtual-material divide: contextualizing Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon, 1994–1999

ABSTRACT This paper situates Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon within its conditions of production, drawing from documents that place Cheang in dialogue with several key artists and critical thinkers who offered incisive early critiques of popular ideas and common anxieties about how embodied subjectivity, and the social formations through which it is assigned meaning, may or may not be transformed in the digital future. Through a close reading of the website and corollary programs, I suggest that the work itself reflects a crucial engagement with these theories – conceptually and technologically – in cyberspace. Indeed, contextualizing the production of Brandon reveals the various ways in which Cheang drew from the theories of her collaborators (among others) to test how they would function not as analyses of cyberspace but performances in cyberspace. Brandon, among many other things, is thus a space of praxis, in which the possibilities and limitations of early critical theories of digital embodiment and subjectivity were examined.