Stelarc – AUGMENTED, EXTRUDED AND AMPLIFIED BODIES: ALIVENESS, IDENTITY AND AGENCY

We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh, Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Hands from a cadaver can be attached to the arms of an amputee and be reanimated.

By Fractal Flesh is meant bodies, bits of bodies and brains spatially separated but electronically connected, generating recurring patterns of interactivity at varying scales.

Phantom Flesh proliferates. Phantom not as in phantasmatic but rather experienced as phantom limbs. We now simultaneously function as physical bodies offline and Phantom Flesh online.

The body in excess has become a contemporary chimera of meat, metal and code. Subjectively, the body experiences itself as an extruded system, rather than an enclosed structure. The self becomes situated beyond the skin, and the body is emptied. But this emptiness is not an emptiness of lack but rather a radical emptiness through excess — an emptiness from the extrusion and extension of its capabilities, its augmented sensory antennae and its increasingly remote functioning.

What becomes important is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity – not its mobility or location, but its interface.

What it means to be human is perhaps not to remain human at all. In this age of body hacking, gene mapping, prosthetic augmentation, organ swapping, face transplants and synthetic skin, what it means to be a body and what it means to be human and what generates aliveness and agency becomes problematic.

At the time when the individual body is threatened existentially by fatally being infected by biological viruses, the human species is confronted by the more pervasive and invasive ontological risk of infection by its techno-digital artifacts and entities.

Stelarc’s projects explore alternative anatomical architectures. He has performed with a Third Hand, a Stomach Sculpture and a 6-legged walking robot.

In Fractal Flesh his body was remotely choreographed using muscle stimulation. In 2006 an ear was surgically constructed on his arm. In 2016, for Re-Wired/Re-Mixed, for 6 hours every day for 5 days, he could only see with the eyes of someone in London, could only hear with the ears of someone in NY, but anyone, anywhere could access his right arm and remotely actuate it.

Commissioned for the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Reclining StickMan is a 9m long, 4m high robot that is algorithmically actuated and can be remotely controlled with online interactivity. He is currently completing a large ambidextrous arm at the ISIR robotics lab in Paris.

In 1996 he was made an Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University and in 2002 was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by Monash University. In 2010 he was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Hybrid Arts Prize. In 2015 he received the Australia Council’s Emerging and Experimental Arts Award. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Ionian University, Corfu. In 2024 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Art Academy, Krakow.

www.stelarc.org
Photo: Alexi Raynaud