The Daily Slice: Stelarc

The world is overflowing with beautiful and interesting things competing for our attention, and if you live in the real world, it’s a tall task to include appreciating the hell out of art on a daily basis. Really, who can find the time? That’s why Guy.com offers a “daily slice.” It’s a small taste of what’s going on in the world of art and design–something we find beautiful or inspiring or worthy of a peek. We’re happy to serve it up.

Back in the day, when I was an impressionable and inexperienced young art student, I went to a lecture where the guest-speaker was some bloke called Stelarc. I had no idea what was in store for the next two hours of my life; I especially had no idea that within those two hours I would be touching a human ear that was growing on a man’s arm. It is an experience that one doesn’t forget in a jiffy.

Multiple Hands, Studio Roppongi, Tokyo 1982 Photograph T. Ike

In order to glean some sort of reasoning behind growing an ear on one’s own arm, we need to look at Stelarc and the themes that drive his artistic practice. The Cypriot-Australian performance artist is concerned with the body and its obsolescence, particularly in relation to technological developments within the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In an interview on Demiaux.com, Stelarc claims: “now, with nanotechnology, the man can swallow technology. The body must therefore be considered a structure. Only by changing the architecture of the body will it become possible to readjust our consciousness of the world.” Move over, natural selection, the machines are here!

And so, Stelarc has time and again transformed himself into various kinds of cyborg, some of the most renowned performances being listed below. Just don’t ask me how much of him is still human…

Third Hand, 1980-1988

In one of his earliest performances, Stelarc wore an aluminum and stainless steel right hand; powered by latex electronics, electrodes, cables and a battery pack, the hand could pinch, grasp and twist in response to the muscle activity of his original limb, and even had a “tactile feedback system for a sense of touch”. On his website Stelarc alludes to the hand as a kind of excessive augmentation of the human body.

The idea of having a functioning extra hand sounds awesome, right? Right, except it took the artist months to gain enough control over all three arms (simultaneously) in order to write the two words ‘evolution’ and ‘decadence’ on a wall. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think about it the guy must have had heaps of patience.

Exoskeleton, Stelarc © 1999 Photo by Dominik Landwehr

Exoskeleton is essentially a giant walking machine, with the exoskeleton itself placed amidst spider-like legs. When a person positions themselves on the turntable in the middle of all those mechanical limbs, their arms – via the exoskeleton – can control the movement of the entire contraption. This triggers sensor-prompted sounds and makes the whole thing jig about, be it forwards, backwards or sideways.

And just in case Third Hand and Exoskeleton don’t push the Fine Art boundaries enough for you, how about the ear that was mentioned earlier? You know, the one that’s growing on Stelarc’s arm.

Ear On Arm Photograph Nina Sellars

Stelarc’s Ear On Arm, or the Engineering Internet Organ, has been in the making for over twelve years, and on his website you can find all the projects that pre-empted its actual creation. After a couple of surgical procedures, the first of which prepped the skin with a kidney-shaped silicone implant, Stelarc had a porous, biocompatible ‘scaffold’ moulded to the shape of an ear and inserted into the skin on his forearm. Part of the ear will be grown from the artist’s own stem cells, although the USA apparently aren’t big on that kind of thing so it’s down to us Europeans to sort it out.

Whilst the ear was originally fitted with a microphone, it was removed due to serious infection. The artist’s next challenge is reinserting a miniature mic with a wireless connection to the internet, so that people worldwide can experience what he is hearing. As Stelarc himself claims: “This project has been about replicating a bodily structure, relocating it and now re-wiring it for alternate functions.”

Stelarc has done tons of similar (and slightly more gross) projects over the past few decades. Check out his website for an archive of all his artworks, collaborations and research.