Is the human body obsolete? With medical science reaching its peak, surely it’s about time technology gave evolution a bit of a kick up the arse. SinZine talks to Australian artist Stelarc about where we go next with meat and machinery.
A lot of your work is based around the theory of the human body being obsolete in design terms – can you expand on that theory a little?
Oh, I’ve always been interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body. But it is inadequate in the technological terrain that it now inhabits. In fact, not only is the body inadequate, it is also empty, absent of its own agency and often performing involuntarily.
By asserting the body is obsolete, I don’t mean it’s possible be without a body. To be an intelligent agent you need to be both embodied and embedded in the world. It’s the embodiment that needs to be interrogated. This particular body, with this form and these functions needs to be augmented and possibly redesigned. The body is not very robust, is susceptible to microbes and has a limited longevity. Its survival parameters are very slim.
Many would consider this a human intervention in evolution – do you believe that such intervention could be key to the development of the human form?
Stem cell growing organs or bioprinting body parts will initially be for medically repairing the body. But these biotechnologies will increasingly be used not only for cosmetic reasons but also for exploring alternate anatomical architectures. Why not a third hand or an extra ear? Why not an optical system that can slide from micro to macro perception? Why not be able to subjectively sense a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum?
Some of your most widely recognised projects are Third Hand and Exoskeleton, robotic devices controlled by the wearer, concepts which many people will recognise from science fiction. Tell us a little about the thinking behind those.
The Third Hand was completed in 1980. At the time it was enough of a state of the art prosthesis, that it was demonstrated to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and the Johnson Space Centre in Houston to the Extra Vehicular Activity Group. It was actuated by EMG signals from the abdominal and thigh muscles and had a tactile feedback system for a rudimentary sense of touch. Initially it was a visual attachment for performances but I did learn to draw and write using three hands simultaneously.
Exoskeleton was a project first performed with in 1997. It is a 6-legged insect like walking machine whose leg movements are actuated using the artist’s arm gestures. The robot could walk forwards and backwards with a ripple gait and sideways with a tripod gait. It could sit, stand and turn on the spot. The performances were about taking the robot for a walk, replacing human bipedal gait with an insect like machine locomotion. It was also a sound machine as well as a walking machine. Composing the machine sounds was done by choreographing Exoskeleton’s movements.
Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana 2003; Photographer- Igor Skafar
You’re currently working on the Extra Ear, or Ear On An Arm project, where you’ve had a third ear grafted to your own arm. What stage are you currently at with that?
More correctly, it should not be described as grafted, rather the ear on my arm is partly surgically constructed and partly cell grown. There were two surgeries, the first to insert a skin expander and the second to insert the scaffold. Once the skin is suctioned over the scaffold, cells grow into the porous biomaterial and in six months you have tissue in-growth and vascularisation occurring. So the ear is fused to my arm and it has grown its own blood supply.
We did test the system when a small microphone was inserted into the ear. It was there operational for several weeks before it had to be removed because of a serious infection. In fact I might have lost an arm for an ear!
Where do you ultimately hope to go with the Extra Ear project, what additional functionality do you hope to achieve, via digital implants or otherwise?
At present it is only a relief of an ear. We still need to surgically lift the helix to create an ear flap and grow a soft ear lobe using my extracted adult stem cells. Then we reinsert the small microphone that, when connected to a wireless transmitter, internet-enables the ear in any wifi hotspot. So people in other places will be able to listen to what the ear is hearing, wherever I am and wherever they are. So we’ve replicated a bodily structure, relocated it and will hopefully rewire it for additional capability.
London, Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006; Photographer- Nina Sellars
As I’m sure you anticipated when you started, there are some people who consider the Extra Ear project distasteful or offensive in one way or another, what is your message to them?
I guess when three plastic surgeons are required for several hours to construct the ear on my arm, one can argue that their time and skills could be better spent repairing traumatised and damaged bodies with life-threatening conditions. Should those surgeries take precedence? Yes, of course.
The practice of art has always been problematic. Yet contributing to human culture and probing the human condition has historically been justified - aesthetically, poetically and philosophically.
Some would also accuse you of merely using your work to shock – what is your response to that?
Oh, the strategy isn’t simply to provoke, but art should be surprising, sometimes shocking, often messy and perhaps pornographic. It should generate more questions than answers. It should amplify anxiety and uncertainty and incorporate the accident and the ambivalent. Art and technology is not enabling. It is highly destabilising and necessitates reconfiguring our paradigms of what a body is and how a body performs.
We are now in a time of Circulating Flesh, where organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs are amputated from dead bodies and reanimated on living bodies. The face from a donor body stitched onto the recipient becomes a third face, resembling neither. The body with the Internet as an external nervous system now performs as Fractal Flesh and, as an avatar, performs as Phantom Flesh. People can become portals for extended sensory experiences.
It will be possible to access and experience with other bodies in other places. Imagine being in London and seeing with the eyes of someone from NY, whilst simultaneously hearing with the ears of someone in Melbourne. And someone in Tokyo is accessing my arm and performing a task remotely. These are the kinds of ideas generated from doing the performances.
Where do you think there is left to go with your work?
I’ve always been interested in micro-sensors and machines. We are now engineering an insect like micro robot robust enough to climb up my tongue and into my mouth. I just have to remember not to swallow ha, ha.
Recently I’ve also been performing in Second Life and Open Sims with my avatar and its clones, with a Kinect gesture navigation and animation of the avatar. But imagine an inverse motion capture system where an autonomous and intelligent avatar might be able to access a surrogate body and perform in 3D space. With Augmented Reality, we’ll not only be able to superimpose metadata on what we are seeing, but also we’ll be able to virtually skin it.
It’s not a matter of where there’s left to go. Artists are always going somewhere other, experimenting with something else, becoming someone alien to themselves. Who you are and what you do is about contingency, rather than necessity. This body though has always been both a possessed and performing body. A body of split physiology that is increasingly expected to perform in Mixed Realities, sliding between the biological, the machinic and the virtual. The Post-human is a Chimera.
Links: http://stelarc.org/
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/arts/theatre/staff/professor-stelarc
