NeurXXtasis (2006–2007):
Ecstasy as the Protocol of Identity in the Post-Biological Era

A large-format composite image (250 × 250 cm, 60 layers), produced as a laser-exposed colour photograph on metallic paper, under acrylic glass on dibond. Created in 2006–2007, it reinterprets the ancient sculpture Laocoön Group, replacing the serpents with electric streams that symbolise the flow of data.

In NeurXXtasis, the body ceases to be a prison and becomes a communication node. Three naked figures, bound by electric currents instead of serpents, no longer fight fate; they negotiate existence itself within a network of data, energy, and affect. This is no longer ancient tragedy; this is the orgasm of protocol.

The double “XX” in the title is deliberate. It is a conscious affirmation of female chromosomes, not as biological destiny, but as the historically erased source code of digital civilisation. Sadie Plant, in Zeroes + Ones, demonstrates that from Jacquard’s looms (operated by women), through the ENIAC programmers, to Ada Lovelace, it was women’s hands and minds that wove the fabric of zeroes and ones. The “XX” in NeurXXtasis is therefore not only chromosomal; it is the code of matriarchal machines: the loom that became the computer, the weaver who became the hacker. Ecstasy (XXtasis) arises precisely when the female subject ceases to be an object and becomes the operator of her own dissolution and recomposition; woman does not “possess” a body, she hacks it, spins it, braids it, unravels it, and weaves it again in an endless loop.

The central figure, in the midst of transition, is the work’s key transhumanist manifesto. Her vagina, digitally borrowed from another woman, is neither theft nor fetish; it is an act of open-sourcing the body, a continuation of the same weaving logic of “XX”, a communal repository whose fragments can be forked, pull-requested, and merged. Identity is no longer property; it is a collective open-source project in which the female chromosome becomes the protocol of freedom.

The black figure, digitally transformed into the silhouette of an “other” man, performs an even more subversive gesture. This is not appropriation but radical empathy through transubstantiation, referencing among others Barbara Konopka’s cycle Moi le Noir. In a world where race, gender, and species become editable parameters, the only ethical act is the voluntary exit from one’s own boundaries. It is a kenotic gesture: emptying oneself of “I” in order to contain “you”.

The electric streams replacing the serpents are the literal infrastructure of posthuman affect. Laocoön’s serpents were divine punishment; here electricity is benediction. Data flows like ecstasy, not as information but as a state in which the boundaries between subjects dissolve into pure intensity of transmission.

The work explores the fluidity of identity in the digital environment: the body ceases to be a closed unit and becomes an active node in a perpetually flowing network. Ecstasy, understood primarily in neurobiological terms as the state of highest neuronal plasticity, plays the same role once attributed to “madness” (manía): the encounter of the human with that which exceeds the human. Just as, for Plato, philosophy was born from madness, today new consciousness and new forms of subjectivity are born from ecstasy induced by technology: immersion in artificial intelligence, the continuous flow of data, and the possibility of arbitrarily remixing one’s own biological and informational parameters. In an era in which the boundary between human and machine has become fully permeable, ecstasy is no longer a divine movement but the protocol of the greatest possible openness and reconfiguration of identity.

NeurXXtasis is one of the earliest and most radical manifestations of fluid ontology in Polish new-media art. In 2006, when transhumanism was still largely the discourse of Californian accelerationists, the artist demonstrated that the future would not arrive from Silicon Valley; it would arrive from the body that has known for centuries how to weave networks and that voluntarily opens its ports to become a node in the network of other bodies. The highest form of freedom is no longer “being oneself” but the capacity to be anyone, and everyone at once, in a single, unending act of protocol ecstasy that has carried the female code “XX” from the very beginning.