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Stelarc
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© Stelarc, Re-wired/Re-mixed (2016)
“You know we are increasingly expected to perform in mixed realities. People are becoming portals of internet experience.”
– Stelarc

mixed realities

generating contestable futures

technology and our concept of self

blurring ourselves with technology

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limits of human body

altering the human condition

parameters of body

the human architecture of the body

augmenting the biological body

connecting the body to the world

recolonise the human body with sensors

redefining the human existence

Artists website → http://stelarc.org/_.php

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Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou) is an artist known for extreme performances that take the human body to the limit and blur the lines between technology and ourselves. The framework of his works lies both within and beyond the boundaries between man/machine/technology. Interrogating and altering the human condition and its relationship with technology is at the core of his artistic practices. “He imagines that as technology becomes micro-miniaturised and nano in scale we will be able to recolonise the human body with sensors and robots that will augment our bacterial and viral population. He sees the artist as generating ‘contestable futures, possibilities that can be experienced, articulated and possibly appropriated’”(Criado). (Criado; Fernandez, 2018)

© Transhuman Artist Stelarc / The Feed

(0:31 – 0:32)

“I have always been interested in the human architecture of the body.”

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(0:53 – 1:20)

“I have performed with a third hand, an extended arm, a six-leged walking robot, I designed a sculpture to be inserted into my stomach and you have to imagine this sculpture once it´s inside the stomach cavity it is opening and closing extending and retracting, it had a flashing light and a beeping sound so it was a kind of machine choreography inside the human body.”

 

(1:55 – 2:06)

“My name is Stelarc and I am a performance artist but I have always been interested in using technology in my performances and how that technology adjusts your operation and awareness in the world.”

 

(2:07 – 2:42)

“I guess it is a general curiosity about whats possible, whats plausible, what pushes the boundaries - determining for example the psychological and physiological parameters of body or how one can augment the physical body the biological body with prosthetic attachments or robotic extensions or using instruments that enhance your sensory apparatus. Thats the kind of approach that this particular artist takes.”

 

(2:48 – 3:10)

“You know we are increasingly expected to perform in mixed realities. We are still biological bodies but increasingly we are accelerated by machines we are enhanced by our instruments, our computational capabilities are amplified with new technologies so the body can be seen as a construct of meat, metal and code.”

 

(3:18 – 3:39)

“There are already experiments done genetically meshing the DNA of plants, animals and humans so we are already doing experiments with that. Increasingly now there is going to be a blurring of whats human, whats animal, whats robot.”

 

(7:28 – 8:51)

“With new means of giving birth and ways of delaying death we can have a situation where in the future you will neither be born nor will you necessarily die. So for example the possibilities of engineering artificial wombs - now if you are brought to bare in an artificial womb then you wont be born as such and if we can replace malfunctioning organs with replaceable parts there is no necessity for you to die. So all of a sudden we have to redefine a human existence. Human existence does not necessarily begin in birth, does not necessarily end in death.”

Ear on Arm

ongoing

© Stelarc with ear on arm

“The ear is not for me. I’ve got two good ears to hear with. For example, someone in Venice could listen to what my ear is hearing in Melbourne.” – Stelarc

Ear on Arm is Stelarc’s longest performance, which so far has involved two surgeries. It took him 10 years to find surgeons that agreed to his surreal proposal. The second surgery introduced a biocompatible implant designed to induce the growth of cells, and a miniature microphone was positioned inside the ear. However, it had to be removed due to an infection. Stelarc is planning a final surgery that will transform the ear-in-progress into a functional organ. The final procedure will re-implant the microphone, which will be wirelessly connected to the Internet. The goal is to use it to listen in to what’s happening in other places of the world. If successful, Stelarc will have his third ear directly connected to the Internet — meaning his body can technically be hacked. But he seems rather excited about the possibility than scared of it. This concept of connecting the body to the rest of the world is present in many of Stelarc’s other artworks. He continues to explore the ever thinning limits of the human body and the separation between technology and our concept of self. (Fernandez, 2018)

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“The biological body is not well ‘organ-ized. The body needs to be internet-enabled in more intimate ways. The Ear on Arm project suggests an alternate anatomical architecture — the engineering of a new organ for the body: an available, accessible and mobile organ for other bodies in other places, enabling people to locate and listen in to another body elsewhere.”

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“The earlobe will be partly grown using my own adult stem cells. Such a procedure is not legal in the USA, so it will be done in Europe. It’s still somewhat experimental with no guarantee that the stem cells will grow evenly and smoothly, but it does provide the opportunity of sculpturally growing more parts of the ear — and possibly resulting in a cauliflower ear!”

Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body 

for the ‘Radical Ecologies’ exhibition

PICA, Australia (2016)

This was a five-day internet enabled performance that explores “the physiological and aesthetic experience of a fragmented, distributed, de-synchronized, distracted and involuntary body”. He wore a heads-up display (HUD) to enabled him to ‘see’ with the eyes of someone in London and to ‘hear’ with the ears of someone else in New York, whilst anyone, anywhere could generate involuntary movements of his right arm by accessing the exoskeleton using an online interface. Effectively, his vision was disconnected from his hearing and his arm was disconnected from his body. (Criado)

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“People are becoming portals of internet experience. In my Re-wired/Re-mixed performance I effectively outsourced my senses to people in other places. It was a gesture towards future bodies, where you would be able to incorporate vision, hearing, and haptic experiences of people in other places. Your body is not this locally operating, locally perceiving body, but rather a body that’s distributed and can form beyond the boundaries of its skin, beyond the local space that it inhabits.”

© Stelarc performing Re-wired/Re-mixed (2016)
Urban Screening 2021-22

2021 Curatorial Statement

Contradictions

 

In the current digital and anthropocentric times, cities have become increasingly complex and contradictory as disciplinary spaces of enclosure give way to networked and distributed systems of control. As a result of rapid, mostly unconstrained growth, spaces have multiplied in scale, while simultaneously being broken down into incomprehensible multitudes of components. Increasingly quantified, controlled, and surveilled bodies are ranked against each other in order to determine their degrees of access to cities and their resources.

 

We are now awash in a sea of images, ritually conditioned to be able to swipe from one contradictory idea to another as quickly and efficiently as possible. In contemporary cities our attention is increasingly commoditised and controlled in an algorithmically constructed public discourse which has normalised outrage and reduced debate to a form of recreation. While the excesses of contemporary cities have produced a spectacular array of personalised, overlapping experiences and interactions for those who have access to them, underlying social and material contradictions driven by corporate greed, and assisted by recommendation algorithms, present looming threats to the ‘stability’ of urban spaces. (Urban Screening, 2021)

Key Takeaways

Stelarc is very relevant to my research as he has made exploring the parameters of the human body his life's work. It enriches my understanding of the cyborg and of augmenting the biological body and provokes discussion about the limits and ethics of the body.

His work expands our understanding of the possible and challenges us to think about the future and the role of the human body in it. The rejection of or fascination with its extreme way of life reflects our own conflicted relationship to our body and the ways in which it operates online and offline.

References

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Criado, L (no date) STELARC, examining ideas around the obsolescence of the human body. Available at: https://www.clotmag.com/body-sculptures/stelarc (Accessed: 23.05.22)

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Fernandez, C (2018) Stelarc — Making Art out of the Human Body. Available at: https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/stelarc-ear-art-human-body/ (Accessed: 23.05.22)

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Urban Screening (2021) 2021 CURATORIAL STATEMENT. Available at: https://urbanscreening.org/catalogue/2021-22/ (Accessed: 23.05.22)

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