By STELARC (This text is composed of descriptive extracts from a lecture Stelarc gave, referring to images and video documentation of his work.)

The Body is seen as an evolutionary construct that tends to extend and augment its operation in the world enabling it to perform remotely, enabling it to extend its presence to other places in the world and some of these recent performances with internet muscle stimulation systems makes it possible to connect to other places and physically to interact with them.

In the performance here in a Tokyo gallery, the eyelids and lips are sewn shut surgically by needle and thread. The Body stayed there for three days. Another suspension event, the seaside suspension was a performance in Japan about 300 meters from shore. The only audience was a group of fisherman on an outcrop of rocks. In a performance in Copenhagen, the Body was suspended about 60 meters high using a large crane from street level. The body was hoisted up and suspended for about 30 minutes. Actually what was disconcerting was as I was being hoisted up from street level as I was looking down people were looking up. [SL] none of the parts of the body are touching everything is held together by the tension of the cables heartbeat and blood flow are amplified with multi sound sensors and the whole structure is vibrating with limbic pulses to the body, and as the condition of the Body deteriorated the heartbeat quickened, breath shortened and so on. The rock suspension of the body was counterbalance by the wreath of rocks, one rock for each insertion point. In fact the body was gently swaying from side to side, setting up random oscillations in the rocks. This performance was terminated when the telephone rang in the gallery.

Here, the Body was hooked up on the gallery floor and swung around and hoisted up. This was in a gallery in Shumir in Japan. Most of these suspension events were done in either private gallery spaces or remote locations.

It was done in a space four floors up. When everything was ready, the body was connected to the cable, which was stretched between two buildings over East Belinden St. The Body rolls out it, it was propped upright across the street, it could hear the sounds of the street below and had a view of the police cars arriving below and I was arrested and charged with being a danger to the public. Had I fallen on someone was the reason there.

This performance was done for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Brisbane Australia, one of the few performances in Australia. Near the Museum was an abandoned space. Using a control box it was possible for me to choreograph my own body’s movement through the space. I could hoist my body up and down travel in any direction. Also by starting and stopping the body suddenly I could get the Body to swing from side to side. A couple of embarrassing shots form the ground there. This performance was about 30 minutes. The performances were done to complete a particular movement choreography of the Body.

In the performance here in a Tokyo This performance was done at a monorail station in Japan. It was suspended beneath the tracks. This was an abandoned monorail station. This was the last suspension I did with the third hand attached. In this performance I could control the up and down movements of the Body using a control box. The Body was winched up and down so the chorography was only an up and down one. But the body could also control movements of the third hand using muscle signals. Again the only people who saw this performance were the people going past in the trains or just happened to go past in the streets below. [SL]

The Body was not suspended very high about 9-10 meters high. The body was gently swinging on its axis. The sounds of the third hand were amplified, as well as, the body signals.




The Third Hand initially was constructed as a visual attachment to the body. It is usually controlled by abdominal electrodes, that allow independent movements of the third hand.

Direct myograph control to each of the functions. The hand only has a few degrees of freedom. It has a pinch release, a grasp release, a 300 degree wrist rotation, and a tactile feedback system through a rudimentary sense of touch. This in fact is on its way to an exhibition in Vancouver. I haven’t worn it in three years so this is opportunistic. It was completed in fact in 1980, so it is quite dated. The new extended arm manipulator is a manipulator that is attached to the end of my arm. This arm has 11 degrees of freedom. It has wrist rotation, thumb rotation, individual finger flexion and each finger opens and closes. So each finger can be a gripper in itself. So its not like a human like manipulator, it does have some extra capabilities. In this performance, as well as the Body being sort of stretched in the suspension performances, it is extended with this new manipulator. This performance was in Avignon a year and half ago. This was a 4 hour performance. The right arm is extended by this manipulator, 11 degree freedom manipulator worn naked. The left arm though was actuated and moved involuntarily with eight channels of muscle stimulation, actuated deltoids, biceps, extenders, flexors and individual finger movements. You have to imagine that this was a continuous four hour extended performance installation. We also have constructed a VRML model to be manipulated manipulate the physical movements of the similar arm, The sound track on this would be heard as compressed air, relay clicks and also some synthesized sound generated by the velocity, position and orientation of the left arm.

As well as the Body being extended and stretched, in 1993 for the Australia Sculpture Trienalle, we constructed a sculpture for the inside if my body. Here it is being tested opening and closing. I have a mouth guard to prevent me biting on the control cable. The sculpture is inserted approximately 30-40 centimeters inside the stomach cavity. The stomach cavity had to be inflated with air because it was an empty stomach. I had not eaten for a day. It took a period of two days to shoot this video so it wasn’t just an in and out job. The sculpture was in fact a very simple reliable mechanism driven by a plexidriver cable to a servo motor and a logitech circuit outside the Body. So the sculpture opened and closed extend and retract it had a flashing light and a beating sound. A Simple choreography of motion inside the Body. Closed it is about 15 mm in length and 15 millimeters in diameter and fully opened it is about 50 mm in diameter and about 75mm long, the size of a small fist The filming was done using a separate endoscope, so there is no camera in the sculpture itself. This sculpture was especially constructed with help of a jeweler, to construct the outer casing of titanium stainless steel and gold. And obviously materials that would not be affected by the hydrochloric acid, the contents of the stomach. And the microelectric instrument maker that had to construct some of these small components under magnification. This project was done because the Sculpture Trienalli was calling for “site specific” works. Instead of a sculpture for a public space this sculpture was made for a private physiological space. And here technology is not merely attached to the Body, technology effectively invades the body. Technology is inserted into the Body not for some medical necessity, but simply through some artistic choice. Sculpture then, in a sense, is an object where the skin is no longer a barrier to an internal and external. Here you probe and pierce the Body. You insert objects inside the Body. To me the Body is as much a hollow space as a kind of tissue structure, and in a lot of these performances that is how the Body is considered. Here the Body is not a site for the psyche, or social inscription, the Body is not a site for the Self, or Soul. The Body is simply a site and a host sculpture. The Body is seen not as an ego driven body or kind of Platonic Cartesian Freudian body with internal sorts of agencies and egos, but rather biologic structure, an evolutionary construct that operates and becomes aware in the world. And that awareness is heightened and that operation is extended and projected with the addition of its technologies. In fact, when you consider the Body it has always been a kind of cyborg. The Body has always been coupled to its technologies. Ever since we evolved as hominids developed locomotion humans become manipulators, we began to construct tools, instruments, machines. What determines out humanity is our technology. Civilization begins with the construction of artifacts. So I think what you can see is that the Body has always been a Cyborg Body. But it has also been a kind of Zombie Body. We feel what we have always been and what we have already become. We have always been kinds of zombie bodies, and we have already become kinds of cyborg bodies. The Body has never really had a mind of its own. The Body behavior is largely determined externally. The complexity of my behavior is not simply the complexity of some kind of internal machinery or internal mental capabilities. The complexity of my behavior is determined by the relationship to other peoples within the social institutions that I inhabit, and within the conscience I have been conditioned in this point in time, in our history, and so on. So we have, I think, to do away with outmoded notions of the Body as being psychologically driven.

When I started experimenting with involuntary body movements we quickly realized as well as the Body being locally controlled it might be possible with a touch screen interface to control the Body remotely. In fact we did a performance at Telepolis.. We constructed a touch screen interface that allowed people in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam to access my body in Luxembourg and by touching the muscles on the computer model you could effectively program the choreography of the remote body in Luxembourg. You could do this either by pressing the touch screen or by pasting together from a wide array of gesture icons and then press Play and the physical body would respond in Luxembourg. I could see the face of the person who was moving me, they could see my evolving body movements or their choreography. The body then became a kind of host for a remote agent. The idea that you could access part of my body from another place and physically actuate it. And in this performance those people in the three cities were able to access and move the Body over a period of three days.

We also used the ping internet protocol in a performance where the Body was moving through internet data. During the performance I would ping 40 global sites. The reverberating signals were measured in miliseconds mapped to the body muscles in a very crude way, but what was effectively happening was that the body was becoming a barometer of internet activity. The moved according to the internet activity from that global site.

Even though it has six legs it functions very differently the legs are sprung and stringed by cables from a main body and by shifting my body weight, I can either release one set of three legs, or restrain the other set of three legs. The three legs that are released and swing forward. So the machine will be a more intuitive control. I shift my body weight to step the legs of the machine and by quickening them I can vary the speed of the robot. The robot is also staying on a turntable and this robot will move in the direction I am facing. So there are sensors around the turntable that allow my rotation to be monitored, and so the robot can be rotated depending on the direction of the Body. This machine has already been constructed and now we are looking forward to doing tests we are making progress, because last week the robot lurched forward and bent two of its legs. It is a combination of mechanical architecture, some pneumatics and an electrical system that hinges the Body up and down. The first performance should be in the UK in May. At the moment it is for the NOT DANCE Festival in Nottingham.

The Extra Ear was initiated at the University of Memphis, Australia in Perth. When we did a head scan and the ear was attached to my head and we did this animation. Since that time I have learned a lot about the possibilities and the difficulties of doing this. Firstly I am not in the position of placing the ear in from of the actual ear because of the jawbone, the facial nerves. The idea here is to construct a lifelike ear using my skin cartilage taken from the thorax. This would involve a similar operation under anesthesia to harvest the cartilage reconstructive surgery and cosmetic surgery. The difficulty is finding the medical assistants to do it. It does go beyond cosmetic surgery, so it does not involve simply paying someone to do it. There are some alternatives, such as,to go south of the border, finding a dodgy practitioner. Or going to a place like Brazil, where they do more ankle operations altered with mangled sex change operations, although you would hate to wake up and find what organ was stitched to the side of your head. [SL] I have been called these names before you know. In fact this project was presented to the monthly meeting of orthopedic surgeons at Oxford University. In fact a physician friend sort of stuck me into that without knowing what I was actually going to present. Several doctors did speak to me out of 130 doctors that were there. I have gotten close. There have been a couple of medical practitioners, and one reconstructive surgeon agreed to meet with me agreed to help, but thought it unwise to go ahead with the project a couple of months later. So it is those sorts of problems that make this difficult. When I presented this, I think it was in Rotterdam, one of the girls in the audience stood up and said “Well, you know I have seen the ear on the back of a mouse, the one that was done at MIT”, and she said “its not so interesting to attaching an ear on the side of your head, what would be really interesting would be to attach the mouse with the ear on the side of your head”.

I am only interested in doing plausible things and to construct an ear is surgically done quite often. In fact, if I decided to have an ear on my arm it would be a lot easier to get assistance to do it, and in fact it may be the only way that I do get an extra ear on my body. The skin on the arm is very soft and flexible and you could insert a shaped cartilage or even use synthetic material, shape the ear and structure it , and insert it underneath the skin, suction it on. It would take a coupled of months to settle you would then slice it on the back, because there would still be a relief under the skin, insert some more cartilage, prop it up, giving you the three-d ear shape and then, graft an extra bit of skin over that. This could be completed within 6 to 8 months with a couple, maybe, two or three operations. This ear would not be able to hear. There are two possible ways that it might make sound. With a sound chip implanted when you came close to my extra ear, would trigger a sound. In other words the extra ear would speak to the person who comes close to it. If no one comes close to the extra ear, you might simply program it to randomly whisper sweet nothings to the other ear anyway. You could connect the ear to a modem and turn the ear into a kind of internet antenna that would be able to scan and transmit real audio sounds to the actual ear, augmenting the life of sounds that you normally hear. So you would be able to telematically style the body, acoustically at least, with this sort of internet ear.

So in all of these projects there have been different ways the body has been extended with prosthetic devices or attachments, implants. The idea is really to explore intimate, alternative and involuntary experiences. In this way one becomes aware of the body architecture, sees the body as a hollow body, sees the body as a body that can be redesigned, reengineered. Well, what is the alternative? That we expect the Body in its biological status quo. Why should the Body have a longetivity of 70 years in its good health. It’s a problem if your already over 50, right. [SL] Why should the body survive and interact with the environment within such slim survival parameters. So the Body could conceivably be reengineered to become more durable with greater longevity, perhaps with extended sensory capabilities. But this is not about notions of social engineering and this is not about bigger and better, and more powerful bodies. I am not interested in those sorts of eugenic notions, rather in alternative and more intimate possibilities for the Body as such. If we can see the Body as an evolutionary construct then we don’t have to necessarily perform within a simply biological apparatus and, in fact, none of us do so anyway.