Sinzine

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By asserting the body is obsolete, I don’t mean it’s possible be without a body.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

You’d have to search the UK underground pretty hard to find a band more dedicated than Obsessive Compulsive.  On the typical day SinZine caught up with them, the Manchester foursome were in Camden to play not one, but two, gigs. Fusing elements of punk, rock and metal, and going from opening for metal supergroup The Damned Things, to headlining an acoustic night in a matter of hours, they’re hard to tie down to any one genre or scene, but wherever they appear they never fail to impress.



You’re in London tonight for a bit of Download warm-up. The big show is of course, opening for The Damned Things at Dingwalls, what drew you to that band?
Kelii (vocals): We got asked to do it! But yeah, they’re a pretty cool upcoming band, but they also got some heavyweight names with Scott Ian from Anthrax and all the rest. We think we’ve got a similar heaviness to them and we think we’ll go down well with their crowd, so it should be good!

Not content with just one gig, you’re popping down the road for a stripped down acoustic set at The Worlds End after. Was one gig not enough for the night?
Kelii: No, we’re just greedy!
Giz (guitars): It probably would have been easier just to play one gig, but we’re not really known for doing things the easy way. So we’re going to leg it up the street with our acoustic guitars after this show and do some unplugged stuff.
Kelii: And depress everyone in the venue! They’re going to have some good time rock n roll with Heavens Basement and Skin (we’re quite gutted we’re going to miss that) and then we’re going to come on and do loads of morbid depressed songs about how rubbish life is.

Has it been hard to put together an acoustic set?
Kelii: It’s been a huge challenge. It’s not something we’ve every really considered doing before, but we got offered a slot on the acoustic stage at Download and we couldn’t pass up that kind of opportunity. So we’re rising to the challenge, as we always do.
Giz: It’s really good to be put in a different situation, it’s really healthy to do something we’re not used to doing, that you’ve got to adapt to. It’s really good for you and people should do it more often.
Kelii: We’re well out of our comfort zone on this one!
Giz: We got asked to do it and it was only about three hours later we realised we didn’t even have any acoustic guitars!

You’ve recently put together a video piece, Transmissions, about the band and made it available online. What was the thinking behind that?
Giz: When people see a video or hear a song, that’s great because that’s what it’s all about, but it’s also interesting to see what happens behind the scenes. Hopefully there’s going to be more of these to come.
Kelii: That’s the plan! Youtube and video in general is really big now, and it’s a really accessible way for people to discover a lot about a band really quickly, so we thought we’d better move with the times!

Obviously video is going more the way of the key promotion for a band than radio these days, is that something you’re going to start pushing more?
Kelii: We have loads of fun making videos. We’ve not got much money, so we’ve not had as much opportunity to make the videos we’d like to make, it’s very expensive to realise the ideas you want on video. We’re working a lot with smaller companies who are starting out, trying to get good deals, but also get their work seen too. It’s helped us a lot.

With the album Dreams Of Death And The Death Of Dreams having been out a while now, do you feel you’ve achieved what you hoped to with this record?
Kelii: In some ways yes, it’s been a really good vehicle to progress. But with downloads being so huge, and everyone being so skint (which we can relate to!), it has sold really well, but it’s not really been enough.
Giz: We’re DIY and we’ve put this together ourselves, we’re not rich people and we’re not making money out of putting an album out, but that was never the intention. But as far as getting our music out there, getting people to listen to it and hearing their responses, it’s been great. We’re really proud of the album and what we’ve achieved with it.

What ideas do you have floating around for the next record, and where are you going with them at the moment?
Kelii: We’ve started to write some songs, though we don’t tend to think in terms of an album, that’s not how we write really. Not doing many gigs early this year, we had a chance to do some creative thinking rather than constantly touring, so we’ve started doing a bit of writing and its sounding cool. It’s early days yet though.
Giz: We’ve not got any plans for definite of times to go in the studio, we’re going to take the next few months however they come and just keep writing. We’d like to get something out there really soon, but it would be really nice to get out on the road more soon, as we have had a few quiet months.

You’ve always been a very driven band, always pushing for the next thing, to do whatever you can to get out there to new people. Do you ever get tired of pushing yourselves so hard?
Giz: Sometimes it can be hard, and it would be nice to have a bit of help from people, because this is our life, this is what we do and this is us 24/7. We love what we do and it’s always going to be that way, but sometimes doing all this and having to pay the rent and survive, it can be really hard. At the end of the day though, I don’t think any of us would change it for the world.
Kelii: We have our moments of weakness, but it’s literally moments, we love what we do so much, we’ll always work as hard as it takes to get our music out there.

Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where this ceases to be important to you?
Giz: I don’t think music will ever cease to be important to us, it’s such a massive part of our lives. Whether there will be a point in time where we decide we’re not going to write songs together as Obsessive Compulsive I don’t know, I hope not, but music is such a big part of our lives I don’t think that will ever leave any of us.
Kelii: If we were going to quit, we would have quit by now. I think there’s a lot of bands that have got to the low points that we’ve had and called it a day, but for us whenever we feel like that, we just remember that there’s nothing in life we’d want to do more than this.
Dani (drums): I don’t think anything’s really going to change. I’ve been doing this since I was eleven or twelve and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Like Kelii says, if we’d wanted to quit, we’d have done it long ago.

Find out more at www.obsessivecompulsiveband.com

YouTube links :  Autopsy
  TRANSMISSIONS - Part One 'A Brief History' (behind the scenes intro vid)

After 30 years at the forefront of modern electronic music, what you may wonder, do Front 242 have to say about where they’ve been, and where we are now? We ask Patrick Codeyns what he feels F242s legacy is, and how their philosophy has influenced the direction of industrial and EBM today.

Disguised as the Isle of Wight's finest industrial circus rock act, Shanklin Freak Show are actually, as might be expected, a powerful alien master race. In the first installment of a surreal series of interviews with performers appearing at Club Antichrist's 7th birthday bash, Mavis from the Women's Institute visited them to extract the truth.  And enjoy a spot of tea.

And so, it is with great trepidation that we accept an invitation to dinner with Shanklin Freak Show at their super super secret top secret base hidden cunningly in the town of Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. What unknown terrors could await us when singer and 'cult leader' Mr. Strange serves - torture, depravity, coarse language? Red wine with the fish course? Oh my.

Hello? Hello? Ah, hello Mr Strange! I've just off that funny little train at Shanklin. Can you send someone to pick me up?

Certainly! A legion of my robot monkeys are on their way to collect you. Just beware of their little robot cocks, they can get quite frisky around humans, and cold steel isn't very kind on the anus. See you in a few minutes my good man!

And so we arrive at the dark demonic lair of the nefarious outer-space demons. It looks remarkably like a charming village home, but the circus tent with burning virgins on gives it away a little. Not sure about those curtains though…

Ah good evening! Thank you for inviting me to your, ah, lovely home. Mr Strange, are you going to introduce me to your, erm, delightful friends?

Home? This is no home! If you look out of the window you can see we are now in orbit around your pathetic little planet. You are inside an ego-powered alien war machine! And no, I shall not introduce you to my "friends", they are merely my henchmen are not as important or as interesting as I am.

I hear that, as well as being our future alien overlords, you're also in a band. How's that going?

Indeed. Me and my minions create music with the aim of subverting the worlds youth, turning them into an army of great power. To be perfectly frank, it's not going amazingly well. It appears that you humans also like to form "bands" and create music, this is problematic, as these other bands vie for attention to fuel their gargantuan egos in much the same way we do. It would be much easier if we were the only band on planet earth.   . 

What kind of music do you play, I do hope it's not some of that dreadful RnB nonsense the children seem so keen on these days?

Fuck that shit! Much like Coldplay and their ilk, RnB is music made for (and by) kids and pedophiles, we don't approve. On our home planet of 'Shanklin' our musical style is known as 'Wanknugget' but on your shitty little planet we have to use words like; "Industrial" "Circus" and "Rock" ...and sometimes we use "Diesel-punk" but only depending if the context of using that phrase may result in more record sales for us, which is rarely.  More wine? 

Oh just a splash for me thank you. This band of yours does sound a little… unsavory. Wouldn't a few Cliff Richard's covers liven things up a bit?

Don't mock me, human! Your sarcasm makes my nipples hard.

As the monkey tailed gimp waiters bring out the main course, I suspect these gentlemen may have taken unkindly to my Cliff Richard suggestion. Perhaps it is time to change the subject a little…

I hear you sometimes have dancers and circus types with you when you play concerts? I do hope they're the tasteful kind…

Of course they are not! Watching our performers results in a deep feeling of disgust and/or sexual arousal (depending on how perverse you are) so they cannot be described as "tasteful" by any means. 

Ooh, now that was a fairly, uh, unique starter. What do we have for our main course?

Oh, we didn't think you be able to survive the 'penis and pube garnish' dish, so we haven't prepared a main course. We do have a few cans of Special Brew somewhere, would you like one? I hear that particular beverage is popular among people of your social standing.

Do you have clowns in your show? I do like a good clown show.

Yes, you could call us clowns. Not your traditional type of clowns though, I mean, I could probably do a cartwheel or something if you move the couch, but that's not what we're about. We did play a childerens party once, but the police were called after we shared some of our 'space-MDMA' with the children, apparently that's not considered acceptable on your planet?

Oh my! I don't think I like that. I'm sure that's not what people want to see these days.

Well the kids seemed pretty happy to me! 
 

This has been a strange evening, and I'm not sure what they've been serving really counts as fit for human consumption, but they have been very polite hosts so far. Dessert arrives rather unconventionally through the lounge window, but looks remarkably like plum duff. 

Will you be playing a concert in London some time soon? I'm sure everyone at the Bridge Club would like to come down.

We will be playing London soon, yes! We have a huge show coming up at Club Antichrist on the 24^th June, 2011. We suggest to anyone reading this that you should buy tickets immediately!

Thank you for a lovely evening gentlemen, it's been delightful but I think its time I… ARGH! What are you doing with that Giant Death Ray? Why do you even have a Giant Death Ray in your house!? It clashes with the wallpapargghhhh…

www.theshanklinfreakshow.com