Performance Artist Stelarc Explores Our Prosthetically-Enhanced Future
November 8, 2004
ANN ARBOR, Mich---Cutting-edge Australian artist Stelarc discussed his ongoing investigations into the obsolescence of the human body in a performance entitled Augmented and Avatar Bodies: Muscle Machine, Prosthetic Head and 1/4 Scale Ear at Forum Hall in Palmer Commons on Thursday, December 9, 2004 at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.
Stelarc with Patricia Olynyk
For over 30 years, Stelarc has utilized his own body as a means to explore biological limitations and to extend and enhance the body through technology. "The body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created," Stelarc commented. "How can the body function within this landscape of machines? We can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body. Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match its machines."
Stelarc with Students
In creating a human-machine hybrid, Stelarc uses medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet. He performs with a third hand, a virtual arm, a virtual body, and a stomach sculpture.
Stelarc believes that "with the micro-miniaturization of technology there is the new perspective of the body perhaps colonized by synthetic micro-organisms." He envisions a thoroughly prosthetic body no longer subject to the limits of human life: "Thus life would no longer commence with birth and end with death! Life would become a digital experience and no longer a development, maturation and a decline as in an analog experience." By reorganizing the body prosthetically there is a "redefinition, not only of the significance of being human, but also of that which we call existence."
In his December 9th performance, Stelarc discussed his recent projects including a PROSTHETIC HEAD --an embodied conversational agent which responds to the person who interrogates it; a 1/4 scale replica of the artist's ear which was grown with human cells as a step towards constructing an EXTRA EAR on his arm; and the PARTIAL HEAD, which involves growing facial parts with living cells that will result in a partial portrait of the artist.
Stelarc has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the US. He has been awarded a Fellowship from the Visual Arts/Craft Board, the Australian Council, and appointed an Honorary Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2003 he was artist-in-residence at the Faculty of Art and Design at Ohio State University in Columbus. For the past three years he has been Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University, UK. His art is represented by the Sherman Galleries in Sydney.
Stelarc's performance at the University of Michigan's Palmer Commons, 100 Washtenaw Avenue, is free to the public and is supported by the Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Visitors Series at the University of Michigan's School of Art & Design and the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute. A reception will follow.
