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Stelarc
Conceptual Framework: World
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Stelarc is an Australian performance artist, born in Limassol, island of
Cyprus. After moving to Australia, he studied Arts and Craft at T.S.T.C.,
Art and Technology at CAUTECH and M.R.I.T., Melbourne University. He taught
Art and Sociology at Yokohama International School and Sculpture and Drawing
at Ballarat University College. Stelarc is one of the most high-profile
artists working within technology and the visual arts. He is both an artist
and a phenomenon, using his body as medium and exhibition space. His works
focus heavily on futurism and extending the capabilities of the human body.
As such, most of his pieces are centred around his concept that the human
body is obsolete.
Role of the artist
“I've always been uneasy about the artist as simply a craftsperson
who just simply makes or produces cultural artifacts that are considered
beautiful or sensitive or whatever. What's more intriguing is the artist
who works with ideas, who uses their art as a means of exploring the personal
and the public and who tries to get a sense of what it means to exist in
the world. And I'm much happier if the artist is seen as a poet or a philosopher
than as a craftsperson."
Conceptual Framework: Artworks
Stelarc has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA.
Suspensions
When Stelarc began his suspension experiments in the seventies, his skin
became the medium for experimentation. These mostly private performances
were quiet, and completed with surgical precision. Despite the austerity
of the performance, on a behavioural level, great excitement was generated.
The subject that was the spectacle was the artist who was to inflict bodily
harm on himself in his performance.
Stelarc was naked, his skin from shoulders to near his kneecaps, had hooks
inserted with wires that ran through mounted pulleys that tugged and stretched
his skin as he was raised up. A hook pulling the flesh is an action illustrating
form-stimulus interacting with the body. As the hook penetrates flesh it
becomes a very physical extension of the body, where the skin begins to
stretch as the force of gravity interacts with the mass that is Stelarc's
frame. He may feel numbness as he is first raised. The shock experience
when stimulated is a calming reaction; pulse is slowed, blood flow is diminished.
Pain follows the numbness as the body settles on a reaction to the hook's
new relationship with it.
On the one hand the artist was discovering the psychological and physical
limitations of the body. On the other he was developing strategies for extending
and enhancing it through technology. Stelarc’s later artworks used
medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and
the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with
the body.
He has performed with a Third Hand, a Virtual Arm, a Virtual
Body and a Stomach Sculpture. He has done twenty-five body
Suspensions with insertions into the skin.
For Fractal Flesh, he developed a touch-screen interfaced muscle
stimulation system, enabling remote choreography of the body.
In 1998 he completed Exoskeleton - a pneumatically powered 6-legged
walking machine. In 2000, he completed an Extended Arm - a manipulator
with eleven degrees-of-freedom and a Motion Prosthesis - an intelligent,
compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise and repetitive
prompting of the arms.
Stelarc's idiosyncratic performances often involve robotics or other relatively
modern technology integrated with his body somehow. In 25 different performances
he has hung himself in flesh hook suspension, often with one of his robotic
inventions integrated. In another performance he allowed his body to be
controlled remotely by electronic muscle stimulators connected to the Internet.
He has also performed with a robotic third hand, a robotic third arm, and
a pneumatic spider-like six-legged walking machine, which sits the user
in the centre of the legs and allows them to control the machine through
arm gestures.
Third Hand is a grasping and wrist rotating mechanism with a rudimentary
sense of touch that is attached to the artist and activated by EMG from
other body areas. Amplified Body, in which the artist performs
acoustically with his brainwaves, muscles, pulse, and blood flow signals.
Stomach Sculpture, a device -- or aesthetic adornmen - placed in
the artist's stomach and presented through video.
Extra Ear Project, a soft prosthesis of skin and cartilage, a ¼
scale replica of the artist’s ear was grown with human cells constructed
on the artist's.
Prosthetic Head - an embodied conversational agent which responds
to the person who interrogates it.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
Stelarc's work is based on the central idea that the human body has become
obsolete, or rather; "biologically inadequate." The objectification
of the body, a theory that informs Stelarc's cyborg experiments, is not
actually a modern idea. The body as a machine, is a theory that is tied
to the work of the seventeenth century thinker Rene Descartes. The body
is composed of only mechanical functioning, wrote Descartes.
Since the late 1960's, Stelarc has created a vast and impressive body of
work dedicated to the physical enhancement of the human body through technological
means. Stelarc suggests that like computers, our physical bodies must be
constantly upgraded to evolve and adapt to the highly technological culture
we have created.
“What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover
the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning
the body….I don't have a utopian perfect body I'm designing a blueprint
for, rather I'm speculating on ways that individuals are not forced to,
but may want to, redesign their bodies - given that the body has become
profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created.
It's had this mad, Aristotelian urge to accumulate more and more information.
An individual now cannot hope to absorb and creatively process all this
information. Humans have created technologies and machines which are much
more precise and powerful than the body. Perhaps it's now time to design
the body to match its machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant
and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network”.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
Performance artist Stelarc believes we can improve the human body. Take
out natural organs. Install improved artificial ones. Add a third hand.
Or virtual limbs.
Working in the interface between the body and the machine, employing virtual
reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, and the Internet, Stelarc's
art includes physical acts that don't always look survivable -- or, as science
fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, "sometimes
seem to include the possibility of terminality." He has used medical
instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet
to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.
"The only was I see is that the body is mass produced but at the moment
it doesn't have any replaceable parts. OK, we're making artificial organs.
But this is just a medical approach. What we really need is a design approach.
If you have a heart that wears out after 70 years, this to me is an engineering
problem. We should start to re-engineer the body."
Over the last 20 years, in performances involving sensory deprivation, suspending
himself in mid-air, wiring his body for sound, filming his insides and hooking
himself up to a robotic 'third hand' to stage performance/dramas which mix
up the 'natural' and the automated, Stelarc has made compelling use of body
art to bring into focus the possible fate of the body in a post-human age.
Stelarc himself talks about living in the last day of the human, a post-Frankensteinian
world, in which the boundary between humans and machines are already blurred.
With cosmetic surgery now almost an impulse purchase and people talking
seriously about leaving their bodies behind to enter the digital landscape
of a virtual world, to Stelarc this isn't depressing or frightening; its
exciting, something to celebrate.
In the suspensions, hooks were inserted into his body and he was suspended
naked over different landscapes and cities. The suspensions seem to slot
into a well-established tradition of body art, concerned with reinventing
religious details rituals of pain and endurance. Although he admits that
they were painful, Stelarc distances himself from what he sees as the outdated
fundamentalism of much body art. The suspensions are about exploring "the
primal image of the body in space. We dream of flying. There were lots if
primitive rituals which involve suspending the body and now we have astronauts
floating in zero g." His performances are attempts to rethink our current
attitudes to technology and to look beyond paranoid scenarios about machines
'taking over'.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
Through Stelarc's notion of the "obsolete body", the audience
can begin to understand the underlying themes surrounding the artist's 30+
years of production.
His ideas are extreme and therefore call for strong degrees of both positive
and negative feedback. His work can be considered as either an amplified
and satirical critique of contemporary technology or a radical step towards
human technological "advancement." Depending on how his work is
considered, people's reactions to it will vary drastically.
At his Suspension performances the audience physiologically reacts
as the hooks become visibly close to his body. As an anticipation of pain,
the audience member's skin crawls, or a lump amasses in their throats. These
are automatic responses of the body being stimulated by the performance.
Despite not being under direct threat, the audience continues to feel the
sensations associated with duress. On a physiological level the bodies of
the people in the audience react the same as Stelarc's and go through a
simulated physical response. To understand Stelarc's art-making process
and the Suspension performance itself, the audience must become
attuned to their own bodily experiences.
Stelarc’s performances using mechanical and bio-prostheses are not
as physically or psychologically hard on an audience. They don’t involve
pain or mutilation and have more in common with live theatre with a science-fiction
theme. Audiences find his work controversial and only a well-informed audience
cognizant of contemporary art practices and his ideas in relation to contemporary
science and medical practice will fully appreciate Stelarc’s artmaking
Suggested Websites
www.stelarc.va.com.au
Official explanation of the "Obsolete Body" is located at:
www.stelarc.va.com.au
www.levity.com