Stelarc - Artist Research

Stelarc discusses that technological instruments that can enhance your sensory apparatus, we are still in biological bodies but are accelerated by our machines, we are enhanced by instruments of new technologies. 

"so the body can be see as a construct of meat, metal and code" . Soon there is going to be a blurring between what is human, what is animal and what is robot. In bio-art artists can now make moving sculpture, or semi-living / living sculptures. That idea of making a sculpture not from inanimate matter, but that has components of ourselves. 

I want my projects to explore these blurred boundaries, and explore fantasies and what we could become by creating a dystopian world. 

I watched a lecture that he gave on youtube of his works and how the relate to technological research and future hopes to enhance ourselves/our survival.

He discusses that we are in the "age of circulating flesh" , in the sense that we can transplant one part of living matter in to another living organism (organ transplants).

"Theres a blurring of not only what it means to be live, but what it means to be dead" - referring us to be able to reserve bodies forever

Development of flexible circuitry that can be attached to the human body. The circuits can pick up body functions and wirelessly send the information.

"In a future of augmented reality you'll be wearing virtual clothing as well as your physical clothing."

They have developed contact lenses that have LED's that can display simple data, such as arrows and text in your field of vision. - going to be difficult to detect if people are recording you ect because of implantable technology

Stelarc's third hand project which he could control and write 3 letters at the same time.
"The Third Hand has come to stand for a body of work that explored intimate interface of technology and prosthetic augmentation- not as a replacement but rather as an addition to the body. A prosthesis not as a sign of lack, but rather a symptom of excess."

In this project he used heartbeat to pulse lasers from his eyes, and eye movement controlled the direction in which the lazors moved, so the eyes are not passive receptors of light and images but rather activity generate images in the space.

In the project above he had an audience control and manipulate his body using muscle stimulators. 

Working on a project that allows a tiny robot to climb up his tongue and into his mouth, the performance will be video streamed (robot will have a webcam mounted) -  a crude gesture to our increasing intimacy with our machines and machines are no longer going to be external to our bodies ... nano sized machines will inhabit the internal spaces of the body... most technology of the future will be invisible because it will be inside the body.

Animal like robot -" ...whats rather uncanny is that it's obviously a machine, its even got a handle on it and yet, the locomotion is seductively real"

"With human robots we have the problem of the uncanny valley. As you make a robot more and more human- like it begins to sort of get somewhat more and more creepy, partly because it isn't quite successful in its asynchronous speech, in its metallic sounding voice, in its sort of non-recognition of its internal computer ... it's slightly out of sync with human behaviour so it seems a bit creepy."

What is so uncanny is how a simple set of facial expressions generates empathy resulting in a more seductive interactive agent - David Handson-Diego

3D print tissue in hopes that in the future they can print organs.


"...theres of course the concerns with ethics, if we're going to be attaching technology into the body we can now in fact do surgical procedures  on unborn foetus' and soon on embryos with micro miniaturised technologies... so what are the sort of not only the aesthetics involved in attachments or insertions inside our body but what are the ethics? so interrogating both the aesthetics and the ethics is the humanities side of things that we are doing here. And of course that interest in identity, embodiment and agency. You know what constitutes what it means to be a person, what it means to be human, and the realisation of what it means to be human is determined historically, culturally and by the technology that is available. "


"What is interesting for us is to consider engineering contestable futures. As artists we're not interested necessarily in doing methodical scientific research for immediate utilitarian use,  but rather generating contestable futures, constable possibilities that might be examined, possibly appropriated, often discarded but will it sort of contribute to that discussion and that interrogation of what it means to be human. "