The Body (Politic) An exhibition view by Barbara Hunt The Virtual Collection offers a perfect model to consider the physical realities of digital communication and cyber-space. We no longer need to go to another geographic location - be it artist's studio, the gallery or the museum - to see the work of visual artists and to research images for exhibition, publishing or other opportunities. Our physical relationship to the work is entirely different, not simply because the work is presented as high resolution images on a pixellated computer screen, but literally because we may view the work entirely differently:sitting comfortably at home, in our bathrobes, in the nude, listening tomusic or with the TV in the background - in whatever idiosyncratic ways in which we surf the internet. In curating an exhibition of fourteen artists for, and from, The Virtual Collection, I was inspired by this foregrounded issue of my own physical relationship to the project to reconsider the representation of the body within the digital archive. It led to a questionning of the different ways in which artists living with HIV/AIDS are portraying the human body in their work. In the work I selected, the body is represented variously as a site of confrontation or control, a site of ambiguity, or as a sexualized or erotic vehicle - a repository for fantasy and desire. On undertaking my search, I was initially struck by the humor in many of the works - the playfulness with which many of the artists treat their own, and others', flesh, as well as a degree of self-mockery - a warning to "not take things too seriously". Conversely many of the works I finally selected display tremendous sadness, a moving recognition of pain, loss, absence, and death. The curatorial selection is not meant to be comprehensive - simply a personal selection of work which caused me to rethink notions of "The Body (Politic)"