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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.
-
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