I’ve never actually seen Stelarc perform a body suspension. I’m not sure I’d want to. The stretched landscape of his skin as he hangs from hooks through his flesh is difficult to look at even in a book.
Yet images of Stelarc hanging — above water, surrounded by rocks, from granite slabs, or from wooden poles — have floated in my mind’s eye ever since seeing his book. As I stare into my computer, delving into the mindspace of the networks and electronic drawers where I store and manipulate my ideas, Stelarc haunts me. Disembodiment has for me become one of the resounding themes
of the information age; his images reharness mind to body with the fierceness of a whip cracking in slow motion. And then slice
them apart. The body is left suspended somewhere in mind, an
