Electric Body Manipulationas Performance Art: A Historical Perspective

Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha

lectric performance art can be dened as thetheatrical display of electrically manipulated human bodies.In this article, we trace the historical development of thisgenre, from its roots in the scientic/technological innova-tions of the 18th century to today’s most advanced computer-based muscle-control pieces.The body manipulations employed in electric performanceart are of three different types, all of which are equally validand interesting. They each involve essentially different con-ceptualizations of the human body and its relationship to theelectromagnetic realm, and deserve separate discussions.First, we discuss pieces that treat the human body as a merematerial object and demonstrate its electrical properties: itsability to carry an electrical charge and to conduct an electri-cal current.Secondly, we review pieces that deal with the vulnerabilityof the human body, with the boundaries of its integrity. If anelectrical current is too strong, it will effectively destroy thebody’s functional structure. Observing this phenomenon hasa very powerful, disturbing effect on most people. At the sametime, there are important practical applications that we alsodiscuss.Finally, we assume an information-theoretical, cyberneticstandpoint and view the human body as a kinematic system whose motions can be steered by means of electrical

control sig- nals.

This point of view was already implicit in Galvani’s 18th-century experiments with frogs’ legs—but it is particularlyrelevant today because it opens up the possibility of employ-ing the human body as a display device for algorithms that runon digital computers.

UMAN

ODYASA

HYSICAL

BJECT

The Electried Human Body

When the ancient Greeks discovered the power of amber toattract small particles, they called this phenomenon “electric-ity”; and for many centuries the word did not mean much morethan that. Many important electrical phenomena were rst in- vestigated in the 18th century. The pioneering work in this pe-riod was done in London by Stephen Gray, who in 1729announced his discovery that the electric power to attract smallparticles can be transferred from one object to another by sim-ply placing these objects close together. This is what we nowknow as “electrical induction.” To investigate this phenome-non, Gray carried out an extensive series of experiments involving different materials. In March 1730, for instance, hedemonstrated that an electriccharge, created in a glass tube byrubbing it with velvet, could betransferred to a soap bubble, whichcould then attract silver leaf over a vertical distance of 2 inches [1].This experiment was recently du-plicated by the Dutch performanceartist Dick Raaijmakers [2]. Almost immediately, Gray beganto investigate the electrical proper-ties of the human body in publicperformances. The rst piece of this sort premiered in Lon-don, on 8 April 1730. Its protagonist was an 8-year-old boy, sus-pended in mid-air on silk threads. The boy was subjected to afairly complex electrical situation: A positively charged glasstube was held close to the boy’s feet, inducing a negativecharge in them; because the boy was electrically isolated fromhis environment, this created an opposite (positive) charge inhis other extremities. In the demonstration, only his face andhis hands were exposed; these were then seen to inducecharges on small particles of brass leaf and to attract these par-ticles through the air. This experiment was duplicated inFrance by Charles François de Cisternay du Fay and in Ger-many by Christian Augustus Hausen, who employed a girlrather than a boy in his demonstration [3] (Fig. 1).Several variations on this piece were soon developed by Grayand others. The person to be electried need not be sus-pended, of course, but may be positioned on a pedestal madeout of nonconductive material; usually a cake of resin was usedfor this purpose. And the body’s electrication may be demon-strated in various different ways—for instance, by the mutualrepulsion between similarly charged objects, which causes thehair of an electried person to stand straight up [4] (Fig. 2).These performances employ the human body as a prop—as a static, passive object. They demonstrate basic physicalproperties that human tissues share with many other organicand inorganic materials. It is of course a deeply meaningfulexperience for a person to watch the body of a fellow humandisplayed in such a fashion. The suspension pieces are the

LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 12, pp. 17–28, 2002

ABSTRACT

he authors trace thehistory of electric performanceart. They begin with the roots ofthis art form in 18th-centuryexperiments with “animalelectricity” and “articial electric-ity,” which were often performedas public demonstrations inroyal courts and anatomicaltheaters. Next, the authorssketch the development ofincreasingly powerful techniquesfor the generation of electriccurrent and their applications indestructive body manipulation,culminating in the electric chair.Finally, they discuss the develop-ment of electric muscle-controltechnology, from its 18th-century beginnings throughDuchenne de Boulogne’s photosessions to the current work ofStelarc and Arthur Elsenaar.

Arthur Elsenaar (artist), Institute of Articial Art Amsterdam, Department of ArtiFacialExpression, and Frank Mohr Institute, Radesingel 6, 9711 EJ Groningen, the Netherlands.E-mail:

arthur@iaaa.nl

.Remko Scha (artist), Institute of Articial Art Amsterdam, Theory Department, andUniversity of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Spreeuwenpark17, 1021 GS Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: <scha@iaaa.nl>.

most powerful ones in this respect: Theyshow the body in a helpless, passive state.That is why the exhibition of suspendedhuman bodies has always been an im-portant motif in performance art andcontinues to be practiced to this day. Well-known examples in the ancient world are the crucixions of criminals inseveral provinces of the Roman Empire,the most famous being the execution of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, in about 33

.Stephen Gray’s suspensions thus al-luded, in a rather implicit way, tomasochism and martyrdom. Explicit re-ligious denotations appeared in the next wave of electric demonstrations, in Ger-many around 1740. The “beatication”pieces of Georg Mathias Bose continuedGray’s involvement with the electriedhuman body, while employing a differ-ent method to visualize the body’s elec-tric eld. Bose would gradually electrifya person in a darkened room; when theperson’s surface voltage would get highenough, it would ionize the surroundingair, creating a bluish glow around theperson. In the words of an eyewitness:“Finally his entire body was bathed inlight and surrounded in the mannersometimes used to depict the glory of asaint by encircling him in rays of light”[5].By providing the charged person withpointed metal headgear, the light rayscould be concentrated on the head, re-sulting in an articial halo. In Bose’s own words: “A Chair being suspended byRopes of Silk, made perfectly dry, a Manplaced therein is render’d so much elec-trical ... that, in the dark, a continual Ra-diance, or

Corona

of Light, appearsencircling his Head, in the manner Saintsare painted” [6].

The Human Body as a Conductor

In 1732, Stephen Gray launched a seriesof variations on his original piece, intro-ducing a second theme: the capacity of the human body to function as a

conductor,

allowing an electrical charge to betransferred between two points. Graynow employed two boys holding hands,or two boys connected by a 4-foot metalruler, or two boys connected by a metal wire. In this setup, inducing an electricalcharge in one boy creates an electrostaticforce in the other. The pieces thus showthat the electricity passes from one boyto the other, offering a subtle parody onthe idea of “interpersonal communica-tion” [7]. Again, Georg Mathias Bose was theone to turn allusions into blatant signi-ers. His piece

Venus Electricata,

a.k.a.“the electric kiss,” is a truly interactivesalon performance. An attractive femaleperson is secretly electried; newly arriv-ing guests are hit by strong electric sparks when they touch or kiss her [8].

Electric Venus

is obviously a perfor-mance piece, set up for the entertain-ment of the onlookers. But from thepoint of view of the person receiving the“electric kiss” it is rst of all an instanceof what we may call “immediate art”: anart experience that does not involve theperception of an external object throughthe senses; instead, the end-user’s affer-

Elsenaar and Scha,

Electric Body Manipulation

Fig. 1. Stephen Gray, static electricity demonstration, London, 8 April 1730. The electriedhuman body: An electrically charged boy attracts small particles of brass leaf through electri-cal induction [56].Fig. 2. This plate shows some of the effects of static electricity on an electrically isolated person standing on a piece of resin: small metal particles are attracted; hair stands on end;combed ax attached to clothes moves in a similar way [57].

ent nerves are directly stimulated bymeans of electric current.The spark of the electric kiss was barely visible. But when the voltages used arehigh enough, electric discharges can beproduced that look like strokes of light-ning. The equipment that makes this pos-sible was developed by Nikola Tesla at theend of the 19th century. Tesla’s demon-strations are still in the repertoire of many science museums today [9]. Theyhave also been incorporated into recent performance pieces by Barry Schwartz[10]. An important step in this development was made in 1745, when the rst electri-cal condenser device was invented inde-pendently by Ewald Georg von Kleist inGermany, and by Pieter van Musschen-broek at the electrical engineering de-partment of Leyden University in theNetherlands; it was called the “Leyden jar” as a result of the P.R. of one of vanMusschenbroek’s most enthusiastic beta-testers, the French abbot Jean AntoineNollet [11].The Leyden jar is a glass bottle coatedon the outside with metal foil and lled with water. It is essentially a pair of par-allel conductors (metal foil and water),separated by a nonconductor (the glass)(Fig. 3). It can store (and release) muchlarger charges than could the glass rodsused in Gray’s early performances. Whenthe two conductors are connected witheach other, the bottle discharges, and theconnection (briey) carries a fairly largecurrent. When the connection is madethrough the human body, the current may be strong enough to produce a visi-ble effect: an involuntary convulsive con-traction of the muscles in the affectedbody parts.This phenomenon was noted in therst reports on the Leyden jar. Von Kleist himself received a shock that set his armand shoulders in motion; Johann Hein-rich Winkler felt a convulsion in his whole body, in particular in his lips and jaws; and Johann Carl Wilcke fell un-conscious on the oor [12].The Leyden jar created the techno-logical preconditions for electric per-formance art in the modern sense of the word: pieces in which electric currentsare used to affect the operation of thehuman body. In particular, they createdthe possibility of transposing Gray’s con-ductivity pieces to a more dramatic form.Performances involving several personsconnected together became very popu-lar. The Abbé Nollet, for instance, di-rected several pieces of this sort. One of them, performed for the king of France,involved a chain of 180 guards, who wereall made to jump into the air at the sametime when they were used to close thecircuit with a Leyden jar. Another pieceemployed an entire community of Carthusian monks, who were connectedby iron wires over a distance of morethan 1.5 km. Remember that Gray’schamber pieces focused on observingthe motions of very small metal parti-cles—with Nollet’s work we have clearlymoved to a very different scale of “socialsculpture” [13].Some of the connotations of this kindof work were made explicit in a piece di-rected in 1772 by Joseph-Aignan Sigaudde la Fond for the duke of Chartres, involving a chain of 20 persons. This piecemay seem more modest than Nollet’sgrandiose performances, but it had amore specic point. The chain containedthree castrati, in order to test whetherbodily uids with a sexual function might be essential for the electrical conductiv-ity of the human body; this turned out not to be the case [14].

RANSGRESSINGTHE

ODY

’

IMITS

: D

ESTRUCTIVE

ESTING

The electric shocks enabled by the Ley-den jar were in fact strong enough to vi-olate the integrity of the body and causeminor or major damage. This was rst discovered accidentally by brave scientistsexperimenting on their own bodies inthe solitude of their laboratories. JohannHeinrich Winkler, for instance, reporteda shock that caused his nose to bleed[15].

Animal Electrocutions

Almost immediately, experiments werecarried out to investigate this property of the electric current in a systematic way.Once more, the prolic Abbé Nollet wasone of the rst to do so. He realized that the amount of damage inicted on abody would very likely be inversely pro-portional to the size of that body. A cur-rent causing a bleeding nose in a humanmight have much more serious conse-quences for a smaller animal. With his well-known sense of theater, Nollet de-cided to go for the killer application. Heset out to investigate whether the Leyden jar could be used to terminate the life of suitably chosen higher animals. He soonsucceeded in killing a sparrow by meansof a Leyden jar discharge. He observedthat it appeared as if the bird had beenstruck by lightning; on dissection it wasfound that most of its blood vessels hadburst [16]. At the same time, Daniel Gralath, inDanzig, began small-scale experiments in which he killed beetles. In order to cre-ate stronger shocks, he then invented thecondenser battery: he linked several Ley-den jars in a series and used this setup tokill birds [17]. Gralath failed in hisattempt to electrocute a goose, but Ben- jamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, man-aged to dispose of guinea fowls and aturkey [18]. The enlightened Englishminister Joseph Priestley raised the deathcount further while writing the rst his-tory of the newly developing science of electricity; he found it useful to do someadditional experiments of his own, andin the process sacriced the lives of a rat,a shrew, a dog and some cats [19]. We all know where this would lead.The deadly experiments with animalspresage the deliberate electrocution of humans. But with 18th-century technol-ogy, this was not yet feasible; effectiveexperimentation with animals largerthan cats or chickens would have re-quired impractically large batteries of Leyden jars.

Elsenaar and Scha,

Electric Body Manipulation

Fig. 3. The Leyden jar, invented in 1745, was the rst electrical condenser device. Its im- proved storage capacity made it possible to produce much larger charges than before. Thisgave rise to new electrical performance pieces, which became very popular in the Europeancourts [58].