TEL AVIV.- In Ann Lislegaard’s work, experiences of simulated spheres are created by means of interdisciplinary hybrids and connections — between architecture and cinema, between fictional narratives, and between human beings, machines, and animals. In this context, which draws on the historical residues of culture and technology while building on feminist gender theories, the boundaries between the real and the imagined are blurred. Concrete and simulated worlds interpenetrate and are reorganized within one another, a world within a world within a world.

Lislegaard’s simulations and animated works create a centrifugal effect by means of sound, light, and image — for, as Maurice Merleau- Ponty states, “To conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body.”

Science fiction writers, and in particular Samuel R. Delany, J.G.Ballard, and Ursula K. Le Guin, may be viewed as a sort of generator or catalyst for creating simulated worlds, and different identities as well as dystopian representations of a world that exists beyond “place.” The exploration of these simulated worlds provokes a sense of esrangement, as well as a new reading of our own present. In conversation, Lislegaard pursues twisting and multilayered trajectories, which unfold in the space between dreams and descriptions of reality. She talks about the avant-garde American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917–1961) — a dancer, choreographer, and photographer who created poetic, spiraling psychodramas that exceed familiar hierarchies of narrative and editing; the Italian-Brazilian revolutionary architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1922); the Cuban-Mexican interior designer Clara Porset (1895–1981); as well as women artists such as Kay Sage (1898–1963) or Eva Hesse (1936–1970), who studied (among other things) crystals and organic structures as a means for defining non-linear time. Lislegaard’s world is rooted in techno-sexual and gender evolutions, unfolding in the space between body and bio-technology, in the spirit of the “Cyborg Manifesto” published in 1985 by the scholar and critical thinker Donna Haraway — a feminist reading of technology in a world that blurs the boundaries between living creatures and machines. New technologies, Haraway argues, provide a theoretical and practical advantage in the context of gendered power relations, since the politics of the cyborg present technological symbiosis as a dynamic exploration, rather than merely as a male fantasy about “natural control” and the submission of nature, technology, and “the others."