Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/

Project #3:

BRANDON
Shu Lea Cheang
http://brandon.guggenheim.org/

Brandon is an extrememly ambitious and far-reaching project about living
in one's skin (virtually, physically, or psychically). Over the course
of one year, Brandon will be constantly "processing": it has been
designed with holes and loops, and with events and venues that will
allow participants from all parts of the world and netspace to shape and
author the project.

Brandon's central themes, the complex ecologies of gender, sexuality,
are threads taken from the life of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, a (real)
woman who lived and loved as a man in Falls City, Nebraska, USA. Brandon
was raped and murdered in 1993 by two local men who discovered that "he"
was a "she." Brandon (the project) will explore a range of spaces, from
online multiple user spaces (like chatrooms or avatars) to offline
spaces like the Theatre Anatromicum, a Dutch new media performance venue
once used for experimental surgeries on prisoners.

Brandon also has a certain symbolic importance: as the first Web site to
be commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, its production might signal a
new point in the trajectory of internet art–internet art has reached a
stage when museums and established art spaces and sponsors are
interested in enough to invest time and resources.

This first installation of Brandon shows morphing gender signifiers,
images of artifical and transformed physicality, and suggests a sense of
impending violence and trouble.