"Like earlier magical entertainment that generated new notions of the body as a technology, such as late 19th century trick films (magicians transforming women into butterflies, skeletons or angels, etc), Lara Croft is the girl-doll of the late 20th century gaming world. What we like most about her is that she is a collection of cones and cylinders - not a human at all - most worthy as a repository for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure, sex, and violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures and the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by her programmers, is a compulsive repetition of sorts, offering some kind of cyber-agency and cyber-prowess for the player. As I played the game, I recorded it live on tape, collecting hours of footage. Then I re-edited the material as 'found footage'. Ignoring the original drive of the action, I make Lara a vehicle for my thoughts on what I see as the triad of her personae: the alien, the orphan, and the clone. Quotations are from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, The Female Man by Joanna Russ, and Afro-futurist and jazz mystic Sun Ra." (Peggy Ahwesh)
