Cyberhuman - Article about Stelarc

Article 9649 of alt.cyberpunk:

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From: kafka@desert.hacktic.nl

Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk

Subject: Cyberhuman - Article about Stelarc (I-D feb 1992)

Message-ID: <071492151900kafka@desert.hacktic.nl>

Date: 15 Jul 92 05:49:34 GMT

Lines: 122

Organisation: innocent bystanders

from: I-D Magazine, Februari 1992

CYBERHUMAN

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. Is he a space cadet or a future

human ?

In these times of health fascism and body image disorder, even the most

toned-up can always find something that needs a little more work. But

hardly anyone can be prepared to take things as far as the Australian

performance artist Stelarc. When he looks in the mirror in the

morning, he sees a body that isn't so much out of condition as

obsolete, something that doesn't need a weekly workout so much a total

workover. "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 here recently to plan a performance for the EDGE'92 festival

which will take place in London and Madrid in May, Stelarc gave a

presentation on his work to the Blue Skies conference on art and

technology in Newcastle. Listening to him ponder his various plans to

hollow out the body and fill it full of useful high test machinery in

preparation for a life in space, you might have been forgiven for

thinking he'd already severed most of his links with the planet.

However, he can't just be written off as an art world space cadet.

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 odd

little test runs/dramas which mix up the 'natural' and the automated,

Stelard has made compelling use of body art to bring into focus the

possible fate of the body in post-human age.

Consequently he's becoming a big hit with critics like postmodern

panic theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Echoing their

fin-de-millenium terminology, Stelarc himself talks about living in

the last day of the human, a post-Frankensteinian world, in which the

boundary between humans and machines already blurred. With cosmetic

surgery anlmost an impulse purchase these days and people talking

seriously about leaving their bodies behind to enter the digital

landscape of a virtual world, it's easy to see his point.

What's challenging is the the upbeat spin he gives al this. We may

turn into weird technological hybrids of flesh and metal, we may even

become the aliens UFO spotters expect to appear from the skies, but

for Stelarc this isn't depressing or frightening, its exciting,

something to celebrate. At the Blue Skies conference, Stelarc's own

expanations of his work had an ecstatic, deliberately confrontational

edge, and contained mainly of snappy slogans and aphorisms ("The

important thing now isn't freedom of information, but freedom of form,

freedom to mutate and modify your body"; "Information, not gravity, is

the force field which will modify and shape the body of the future"),

the effect of which was heightened by his rumbling cartoon mad

scientist laugh.

He's good enough to suggest that he could carve out an alternative

career as a stand-up theorist (like the Krokers) or even a cyberpunk

SF author. Perhaps he could even cut it as a research boffin. Although

his jerky third hand may seem more then a primitive gesture, it

invited NASA enough for them to invite him over to lecture their

scientists about how it worked. Currently he's based at the advanced

Computer Graphics Centre, where he's experimenting with a 'third arm'

and virtual limbs. However, Stelarc says his work isn't about hard

science, that it's just a playful exploration of technological

possibilities. Playful isn't quite how you'd describe his suspensions.

Here hooks were inserted into his body and he was suspended naked over

different landscapes and cities (he was arrested when he tried it in

New York). At first sight, the supensions 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."

At the Blue Skies conference, Stelarc faced a similar set of

objections from feminist and Green critics who argued that he was just

a future jock hung up on techno-visions, another boy dangerously

obsessed with his toys.

Certainly, it could be argued that Stelarc has constructed his

blueprints for the body of the future in a social vacuum. Perhaps the

potential will exist in the future for people to redesign their

bodies. But it seems likely that this kind of thing will only be

available to the rich, and that it will be accompanied by a kind of

de-evolution amongst the poor. However, his performances are obviously

attempts to rethink our current attitudes to technology and to look

beyond paranoid scenarios about machines 'taking over'. If you think

about it, a few hundred years ago a persion with an rtificial hart

would have been burned at the stake. Overall, I think we're projecting

our rather obsolete emotions onto machines. There's no reason for

these machines to be imbued with agression like us. The problem is

really a human one. We're carrying around this evolutionary baggage of

agression and jealousy, this chemistry that generates survival

instincts, which we don't really need anymore. In fact, in a

technologically enhanced world, perhaps these emotional urges are

amplified to the point of being destructive, of threatening the whole

planet.

For Stelarc, the idea that we can turn back from technology is the

real fantasy. We will develop with it anyway so we might as well start

thinking about how to exert a measure of control over the whole

process. As he might put it, it's time for jacking your body for real.

Stelarc will be in Britain in May at the EDGE'92 festival. Call 071

377 0009 for more d-tails.

kafka@desert.hacktic.nl | VMB:+31 20 6001480 *109# | UTOPIA BBS: +31206273860

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