The sci-fi thriller The Lawnmower Man climaxes with a scene in which the fleshy body of the protagonist, Jobe Smith, is spread-eagled like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man in a whirling sphere, while his electronic avatar courses through the network. The camera cuts back and forth between the two conditions. As an ideally proportioned body inscribed in a circle evokes the humanist subject for which Renaissance cities and the buildings of Alberti and Bramante were made, so the fragmented figure of Jobe neatly suggests the incipient role of cities in the digital, electronic era-to house and delight subjects who have become sites of intersection between physical space and cyberspace.
Vitruvian Man / Lawnmower Man
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