The Body w/o Organs by Gregory Little
(Click on the image to see the full presentation)

"There is a sound, the tight click of clamps fixing teeth into severed blood vessels the snuffle and gargle of the suction machine cleaning the field of blood for the next stroke, the litany of monosyllables with which one prays his way down and in: clamp, sponge, suture, tie, cut. And there is color. The green of the cloth, the white of the sponges, the red and yellow of the body. Beneath the fat lies the fascia, the tough fibrous sheet encasing the muscles. It must be sliced and the red beef of the muscles separated. Deeper still the peritoneum, pink and gleaming and membranous, bulges into the wound. It can be grasped with forceps and opened. For the first time we can see into the cavity. Such a primitive place. One expects to find drawings of bison on the walls."

from Moral Lesson: Notes on the Art of Surgery, by Richard Seltzer

The Body w/o Organs project exists in several instantiations, including immersive virtual environments, net art, 3-D modeling, and texts. The present iteration, a webwork, has been constructed as a gatherer of qualia. As a visitor to the website one will be presented with an interactive journey through a series of anatomical images. At times one will be prompted to submit, via direct keyboard input or e-mail attachment, a textual, visual, or sonic response or association. Please submit text files, word docs, jpegs, vrmls, 3ds, wav files, or flash animations. The collected submissions will be embedded back into the virtual walls tissues, and interstitial linings of the virtual anatomical web work in an ongoing fashion. Immersive, interactive technologies like CAVE environments will subsequently be used to create the context for a philosophical process of bottom-up restratification of collected experiences of consciousness and embodiment that is partial, local, and relative to the nature of participation and the momentary state of the technologies employed, not to prescribed notions of anatomy, history, or personality. More details of the project may be found at http://www.oberlin.net/~glittle