SummerFest 2005 Plenary Presenter

Stelarc, a Performance Artist, is a Visiting Professor in the School of Art and Design at The Nottingham Trent University and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Contemporary Art at Edith Cowan University.

FRACTAL FLESH/PHANTOM BODY

Bodies move and manipulate. The body resists containment and closure. Technology generates alternate information and experiences. It extrudes the body’s awareness and operation in the world. Subjectively, the body experiences itself as a more extruded system, rather than an enclosed structure. The self becomes situated beyond the skin. It is partly through this extrusion that the body becomes empty. But this emptiness is not through a lack but from the extrusion and extension of its capabilities, its new sensory antennae and its increasingly remote functioning. And this emptiness is increasingly matched by the body’s experience of extreme absence.

Technology is not merely affirming and enabling but rather posits the alternate. As such it deconstructs and destabilizes and the body is constantly immersed in anxiety and uncertainty. Technology allows the body to perform beyond the spaces of certainty. Operation and action occurs between biology and silicon-chip circuitry. And to function effectively, the body performs indifferently. Empty and indifferent it becomes its avatar.

The body now functions remotely, projecting its physical presence. The body can operate more precisely, with varying speeds in remote locations. Fractal flesh and split physiologies allow bodies to interact remotely- spatially separate but electronically connected. The body becomes a host for multiple and remote agents. This generates phantom presences- phantoms not as in the phantasm but as in phantom limb experiences. With haptics, tactile and force-feedback will produce more powerful phantoms. The body becomes both a possessed and a performing body. Can actions occur without expectations? Can a body perform with neither memory nor desire? A phantom is empty, absent and indifferent.

In the terrain of cyber-complexity that we now inhabit the inadequacy and obsolescence of the ego-driven biological body cannot be more apparent. A transition from the psycho body to a cyber-system becomes necessary to function effectively and intuitively in remote spaces and speeded-up situations and alien information beyond sensory experience. To be human is to be augmented, extended and enhanced. What becomes important is not merely the body’s identity, but rather its connectivity- no longer merely it’s mobility but rather its interface. And virtual-actual couplings construct alternate operational architectures. The realm of the post-human may not reside in the realm of bodies and machines but rather in the realm of phantoms- intelligent, autonomous and operational entities sustained on the net. The body is ponderous and mortal. An avatar has no organs.

Biography

Stelarc is a performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. He has made 3 films of the inside of his body- probing two metres of space into his lungs, stomach and colon. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. 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 STOMACH SCULPTURE and EXOSKELETON, a 6-legged walking robot. His FRACTAL FLESH, PING BODY and PARASITE performances explored involuntary, remote and internet choreography of the body with electrical stimulation of the muscles. MOVATAR is an inverse motion capture system where an avatar can perform in the physical world by accessing and actuating a host body. He is presently attempting to surgically construct an EXTRA EAR. His PROSTHETIC HEAD project involves an avatar which speaks to the person who interrogates it- an embodied conversational agent with real-time lip syncing and facial expression.

The MUSCLE MACHINE is a 6-legged walking machine completed in 2003, actuated by pneumatic rubber muscles. In 2005 he is working on the PARTIAL HEAD project in collaboration with TC&A.

He has been awarded a 3 year Australia Council Fellowship. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2002 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate and was artist-in-residence in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, Caulfield. In 2003 he was a Visiting Artist in the Art and Technology Department at Ohio State University. He has been Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University. Currently he is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Contemporary Arts at Edith Cowan University. Last year he was awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council. His art is represented by the Sherman Galleries in Sydney.

stelarc@va.com.au

http://www.stelarc.va.com.au