In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Extra Ear:Ear on the Arm BlenderStelarc Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Collaborator Nina Sellars stands with the Blender during an installation photograph. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Blender (3D Model). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Image: Adam Fiannaca. The installation itself stands at just over 1.6 meters high and is anthropomorphic (...) in scale and structure. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Every few minutes the Blender automatically circulates or "blends" its contents via a system of compressed air pumps and a pneumatic actuator. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Ear Scaffold. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. The preoperative scaffolding that was surgically placed below the skin's surface of performance artist Stelarc. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Blender (Biomaterial). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Cameron Jones. Both artists, Stelarc and Nina Sellars, undertook liposuction operations specifically for the purpose of this new work and have succeeded in securing the sanitized isolation and, most importantly, the legal ownership of the remnants of the procedures. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Hole Hooks Forceps. As a guest at Cornell University's conference "Digital Bodies" in 2001, Stelarc spoke of his desire to implant an ear that could pick up sound. His plans become a reality in the photograph taken during surgery. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Extra Ear: Ear on the Arm. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. Stelarc's future plans are to implant Bluetooth technology into the Ear on the Arm in a subsequent surgery so that the ear will pick up sound which will be transmitted via the Internet. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Blender (Sterile Hood). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. The biomaterials are now housed within the Blender's industrial casing, on exhibition at the Meat Market Gallery B in North Melbourne until August 18. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 118]Stelarc- Biographical NotesStelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe, and the USA—including new music, dance festivals, and experimental theater. He has 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 acoustically and visually probed the body—having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach, and colon, approximately two meters of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in private gallery spaces and in remote locations.For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis in 1995, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation, and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE (1996, 1997) probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended, and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. In 1998 for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON—a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures. During 2000, he completed an EXTENDED ARM—a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS—an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive, and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real time. In 2002, with the collaboration of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group, COGs, University of Sussex, and TNTU, the HEXAPOD robot prototype was developed. The six-legged MUSCLE MACHINE was constructed with the assistance of The Nottingham Trent University Engineering team, using fluidic rubber muscle actuators. The PROSTHETIC... (shrink)

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes for their apparent eugenicist (...) and fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

Postmodern culture is usually defined as an age of mechanical reproduction and mechanical degeneration characterized by the eradication of performative aura. This article argues that a crucial distinction should be made between the `anti-auratic' arguments of mainstream 20th-century cultural theory (discussed here in terms of the writings of Benjamin, Baudrillard and Virilio), and the regenerative auratic tradition in 20th-century avant-garde performance (discussed here in terms of the successive explorations of the multimediated body in the work of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, (...) the French sound poet Henri Chopin and the Australian cybernetic body artist, Stelarc). If Baudrillard's and Virilio's most extreme hypotheses argue that postmodern technology reduces the body to the condition of the handicapped, Marinetti, Chopin and Stelarc all demonstrate how technological modifications of the body reinforce the impact of installation art and performance art exploring (and manifesting) individual identity. Significantly, the most interesting subtexts in Benjamin's, Baudrillard's and Virilio's arguments all qualify their accounts of the alleged `death' of aura, and in Baudrillard's case now emphasize the ways in which photography `rediscovers' aura. (shrink)

Orlan and Stelarc both work with the body as the primary medium for their art and both, in their very different ways, are interested in redesigning the body. Their experiments depart radically from popular and traditional ways of imagining enhanced forms of human embodiment and, in a climate of intense speculation about the future of the body, their ideas offer some important provocations. As performance artists, Orlan and Stelarc explore embodiment through enactment in ways that evade the stock (...) formulations of cultural anxiety and open up fundamental questions about the nature and meanings of the human body, questions that are too easily foreclosed by over-heated imaginings about the `posthuman' condition. (shrink)

The events of performance artist Stelarc serve as a mediation between the discourses of cultural and social theory, science and the tropes of science fiction, translating theoretical and narrative models of the `posthuman' into performative parameters of corporeal actualization. His cultural and theoretical bricolage elides borders, creating a dialogue with numerous discourses surrounding bodies, sexual politics, `becomings', and the tension between Cartesian and phenomenological models of the body. Do his `events' offer empowered alternative bodies, or are they representative of (...) a reductionist objectification of the physical, psychical, political and social body to a l'art pour l'art sensibility; subordinating (hyper)reality, theory and ideology to the `pure' aesthetics of art, image and performance? While portrayed by some as an exemplary proponent of our putatively optimistic posthuman future, many see Stelarc's work as being indicative of the apocalyptic dangers of untheorized approaches to incorporating technology into the body. This interview with Stelarc attempts to clarify the artist's position on many such issues surrounding his work. (shrink)

This article examines the work of the Australian performance artist, Stelarc, in terms of philosophies of mind and body. It argues that Stelarc's work can profitably be seen as a kind of performative `research' into the body; Stelarc's actions take the form of a hypothetical or speculative ontology which does not operate in order to represent possibility but to enact possibilities in real time and space. His work is compared with and shown to have some resonances with (...) recent cybernetic and systems theories of cognition, in which cognition is figured as a form of `enaction'. This being so, Stelarc's performances suggest an exemplary mode in which `hypotheses' about alternative corporeal existences may be creatively entertained. (shrink)

Creations of many contemporary artists indicate the emergence of technoculture. Although artistic manifestations of technoculture may appear to be a provocation, they encourage fundamental ontological questions, such as whether a person has unchanging nature; what was and is our relationship to the Other, and what it should be; to what extent can body and mind be altered before they stop being “human”; what is the future of our species. To properly understand the works of technoculture artists, it appears necessary to (...) have a thorough grasp post- and transhumanism as their key sources of inspiration. As a result, the developed tools will be employed to indicate which aspects of technoculture are a manifestation of post- and transhumanist ideas. This analysis is based primarily on the works of Stelarc and Orlan – two widely commented artists of technoculture. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizan las relaciones entre arte, tecnología y cuerpo, teniendo como marco de análisis el pensamiento del filósofo español Félix Duque. En primer lugar, consideramos la concepción del cuerpo como máquina y su derivación actual en la noción de cyborg. En segundo lugar, mostramos cómo la concepción del cuerpo-máquina se hace parte del body art de Stelarc y del arte carnal de Orlan, quienes plantean el diseño del cuerpo dada su obsolescencia. En tercer lugar, presentamos las (...) críticas de Duque a estos ciberartistas y en general a los planteamientos transhumanistas y posthumanistas. Finalmente, comparamos la metáfora del «cyborg» en Broncano con la «filosofía de la técnica de la naturaleza» de Duque, poniendo de relieve la necesidad de plantear y explicitar la cuestión política implícita en el diseño del cuerpo y la «libre creación». (shrink)

The relation between “presence” and “representation” is an age-old topic in the arts, but it is further complicated in our time of advanced media conditions. Pierre Huyghe is one artist who has consistently addressed questions of presence and representation throughout his artistic oeuvre, including the role of the witness within it. Considering the sophistication of Huyghe’s work with regard to the riddle of presence in the realm of contemporary means of representation, the artist’s work is taken as a case study (...) for a broad range of artists exploring related topics within the arts and the media. This paper argues that art that interrogates the question of presence within the context of contemporary media culture—from Marina Abramović to Stelarc, Jeffrey Shaw to Julia Scher—asks for being interpreted through presence theories developed within the field of media studies in addition to methods of art theory and criticism. Accordingly, Huyghe’s work is productively related to one such theory, namely the YUTPA model by Caroline Nevejan, which theorizes the interrelated concepts of natural, mediated, and witnessed presence. (shrink)

In this essay I contest the view that evolution can be conceived as a cosmic entity working out a plan of increasing negentropic complexification. The problems associated with this view, characteristic of a great deal of contemporary speculation, are outlined in section I. In section II I go on to further problematise current constructions of technics and machines and provide an alternative ‘machinic’ model of the play of entropy and evolution. In section III I examine the aesthetic praxis of (...) class='Hi'>Stelarc as a site in which the ‘meaning’ of post‐human evolution can be productively contested and illuminated. (shrink)

Media art can be conceived as laboratory, at the edges of art. These technological experiments give priority to innovation and exploration by means of new media. In metaphorical terms, we could say that the emphasis is on creating new languages that allow us, in a later phase, to write prose or poetry with it.In my paper, I discuss why the common view on media art falls short. Media art is not just about mixing media but rather about mixing art. Several (...) different challenges are at stake that beget a hybrid post-medium condition. (1) The artistic practice of media art often concerns exercises in remediation (i.e. resonating visual narratives of old media in new media). Here, we encounter a repetition of historical themes and re-makes or re-enactments of classical art pieces. These experiments thus mix the history of art. (2) Media art is often also about immersion (i.e. interactively enclosing the spectactor in a audiovisual or virtual realm). In experiments with CAVE-installations or 3D-cinema using digital goggles, for instance, we notice a combination of an artistic interest with a phenomenologicaland a scientific one (cf. so-called postfenomenology, robotics, experimental psychology). Hence, these experiments mix art with science. (3) Media art is not just a friction between art an technoscience. It takes place at a junction between art, creative industry, design, sociology and politics. Concerning the latter, I willdiscuss the culture-critical potential of i.e. hacktivism, marx 2.0 and bio-performances like Stelarc and Orlan. (4) Media art is not simply a genre that aims for recognition as a part of or a completion of fine art. While democratizing new media technology, it actually blurs the idea of genre, altering and opening up the very canon of fine art, music art, live art, performance art, video art and cinema. (shrink)

What role do images play in philosophical persuasion? With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s, a new vista opened up for this age-old puzzle: the possibility of creating images through bioengineering of living matter. Here, I test the critical intentions of bio-artists by setting up a comparison between, on the one hand, bio-art, and on the other, bioethics, a philosophical discipline, which developed at around the same time as this new artform. I argue there is an aspect of ethics--'the (...) difficulty of reality' in Cora Diamond's coinage--which analytic bioethics obscures, and which art can help us come to terms with. I develop my argument by comparing the work of artists Eduardo Kac, Stelarc and Maja Smrekar, with utilitarian bioethics by philosophers like Julian Savulescu. Philosophical concepts of the living presence, the viral image and the pensive image are revisited through this inquiry. (shrink)

I approach the subject of artistic interpretation through art, letting philosophical questions arise from the complexities of the individual cases and thus allowing a thornier but more interesting picture of interpretation to emerge. This dissertation consists of three essays, each of which explores interpretation via a work in a different artistic medium, and an afterword which treats interpretation more directly. "Bodies: Self-Mutilation, Interpretation, and Controversial Art" deals with the performance artist, Stelarc, who hung himself over a New York intersection (...) by fish hooks piercing his skin. To understand the response that there is something offensive about such art, I consider the notions of humiliation and demeaning treatment, starting with the work of Gabriele Taylor. I offer an interpretation of Stelarc's performance to show that it is not necessarily demeaning, and that how we judge a work morally is inextricably related to how we interpret it. In "Souls: Theatricality in Bouts' Last Supper Painting" I consider the intense theatricality of Dirk Bouts' Last Supper altarpiece. Contrasting my view of theatricality with that of Michael Fried, I present a reading of the Bouts painting that shows how we can learn from ahistorical interpretations of works of art. "Ordinary People: Trio A and How Dances Signify" takes up the pedestrian dances of the 1960's in order to ask how dances achieve signification. Building on the groundwork of Nelson Goodman, I conclude that works like Yvonne Rainer's Trio A signify through representation, not by straightforward exemplification. In my Afterword, I consider the stance we should have as interpreters of works of art, and contrast it with the stances with which we approach propaganda and pornography. In interpreting art, we navigate between freedom and constraint. (shrink)

Today, new artistic practices incorporate scientific techniques linked to medical research that modify the body’s biological performance in vivo, transforming it into a singular laboratory object. In this way, some artists are making works of their bodies by subjecting them to various biotechnological procedures, often invasive. Augmented, the biological body of these performance artists becomes a site for experimentation. DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts or accompanied by biologists and doctors, are these ‘bio-artists’ evidence of the changes brought about by a (...) new mechanisation of the human body, the complexity of which we are only just beginning to understand? Could there be, in the name of art, reasons that justify the creation of utopian bodies that are not eschatological, and that could make us believe in the worst or the best of all worlds? Based on performances by Stelarc, Yann Marussich, Marion Laval-Jeantet and the Quimera Rosa duo, our aim is to analyse what is at stake in this new fabrication of the body outside its biological limits. (shrink)

Virtual Futures explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between (...) humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, Virtual Futures provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology. (shrink)

_Virtual Futures_ explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between (...) humans and machines. _Virtual Futures_ brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa. The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, _Virtual Futures_ provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology. (shrink)

"Künstlerische Selbstverletzung - seit den 1960er Jahren international fester Bestandteil der Performance Art - polarisiert, verstört und wirft vor allem Fragen nach Handlungsmotivationen auf. Rosemarie Brucher deutet dieses radikale Phänomen als Bewältigungsversuch bedrohter Autonomie und damit in erster Linie als Ermächtigungsstrategie. In dieser Ambivalenz aus Subjektermächtigung und Naturunterwerfung lässt sich künstlerische Selbstverletzung vor dem Hintergrund von Immanuel Kants Ästhetik des Erhabenen lesen, was die Autorin exemplarisch an VALIE EXPORT und Stelarc darlegt. Eine solche Bezugsetzung eröffnet nicht nur einen innovativen (...) Zugang zu dieser Kunstform, sondern wirft zugleich auch ein neues Licht auf Kants Erhabenheitskonzeption"--Back cover. (shrink)

The relation between “presence” and “representation” is an age-old topic in the arts, but it is further complicated in our time of advanced media conditions. Pierre Huyghe is one artist who has consistently addressed questions of presence and representation throughout his artistic oeuvre, including the role of the witness within it. Considering the sophistication of Huyghe’s work with regard to the riddle of presence in the realm of contemporary means of representation, the artist’s work is taken as a case study (...) for a broad range of artists exploring related topics within the arts and the media. This paper argues that art that interrogates the question of presence within the context of contemporary media culture—from Marina Abramović to Stelarc, Jeffrey Shaw to Julia Scher—asks for being interpreted through presence theories developed within the field of media studies in addition to methods of art theory and criticism. Accordingly, Huyghe’s work is productively related to one such theory, namely the YUTPA model by Caroline Nevejan, which theorizes the interrelated concepts of natural, mediated, and witnessed presence. (shrink)

The feeling that one was ‘born in the wrong time’ we call malchronia. This is distinct from mere nostalgia, in that it may generate the longing to transcend the temporal present in favor of a time of which one has had no experience, or even a timeless state of being. Implicit in malchronetic longing is the rejection of one’s experience of one’s own time, making it a revolutionary and utopian inclination. In this article we examine two dominant strategies—primitive weapons in (...) the war on time, really—that have been developed in the hopes of delivering individuals to a future beyond the reach of their natural life spans: cryonics and bionics. (shrink)