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My Dinner with Stelarc: A Review of Techno-flesh Hybridity in Art

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DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2013.825688

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My Dinner with Stelarc: A Review of Techno-flesh

Hybridity in Art
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Michael Filas
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PERSPECTIVE

My Dinner with Stelarc: A Review of Techno-flesh

Hybridity in Art

Michael Filas
Department of English, Westfield State University, Westfield, Massachusetts, USA

ontological shift in which the body is no longer considered

the singular indispensible seat for identity. Consciousness
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An interdisciplinary introduction to postevolutionary perfor-

mance artist Stelarc and aspects of some human-technology hybrid
tropes in which he works: Obsolete Body Suspensions with hooks
in the skin; an expanding, beeping, Stomach Sculpture, which he
ingested and filmed; the “Ping Body” event during which his limbs
(arm, leg) were controlled with electric stimulation by an Inter-
net audience, while simultaneously Stelarc controlled a prosthetic
robotic “Third Hand” with repurposed muscles in his abdomen
and leg; and a tissue-culture installment under the skin of his
forearm—his Third Ear—which is meant to contain a microphone
and relay audio to an online audience. The article reviews crit-
ical contexts such as cyberpunk literature, biological and data
networks, embodiment, scientific practices, electric body manip-
ulation, and aesthetic and interpretive concerns. It closes with an
account of the author’s personal encounter with Stelarc at a dinner
party, and the role of emotions, such as fear, in postevolution.
Keywords biological network, body art, cyberpunk, electric body
manipulation, hybridity, Obsolete Body Suspensions,
Ping Body, postevolution, Stelarc, Stomach Sculpture,
Third Ear
For a cross-pollination of art into information tech-
nology (IT), there is no more provocative example
than Stelarc, the international performance artist who
demonstrates in his work the contemporary possibilities
for postevolutionary connections between flesh and
machinery. As a messenger of hybridity, Stelarc embodies
the shift fictionalized in cyberpunk fiction and film, an

c Michael Filas
Received 15 March 2013; accepted 25 June 2013.
Address correspondence to Michael Filas, PhD, Professor of En-
glish, Westfield State University, 577 Western Avenue, Westfield, MA
01086, USA. E-mail: mfilas@westfield.ma.edu
resituates in extrabodily domains, such as those depicted
in the fictional Matrix films (1999–2003) or the grid in
Neuromancer, William Gibson’s seminal 1984 novel. In
these stories human characters distribute their conscious-
ness into some magical, electronic, fourth dimension in
which they live through their avatars while their bodies
lie stagnant, hooked to the network through a probe pene-
trating their central nervous system, providing a hardwire
between their consciousness and the virtual world. These
depictions usually imagine the electronic dimension to be
quite sublime in its ethereal strangeness—always depicted
as a fascinating and compelling virtual world—but also
frightening at the point of connection, which involves
some grotesque violation of the body, some probe or hook-
up that leaves the spectator squirming. These imagined
notions become far more powerful when acted out in real
time and three-dimensional space using contemporary
technology, and that’s where the inventive performance
art of Stelarc literally hangs, dances, bleeds, and rests.
The intellectual provocations in Stelarc’s work have
generated abundant criticism and theoretical discussion
in books and the specialized journals of theater, systems
technology, robotics, postmodern theory, and art criticism.
He has been exploring postevolution since the late 1960s,
and this article is meant to be an introduction to his milieu
for those readers of The Information Society who have not
yet heard of him. But this article will also go somewhat
beyond a typical review to the degree that I will be shar-
ing a portion of my personal intellectual and emotional
reaction and understanding. Particularly when our topic is
confrontational art and its implicit range of emotional and
philosophical responses, it is perhaps counterproductive
for me to leave out entirely my own experiences and re-
actions, especially since I’ll conclude with a discussion of
how my perceptions of Stelarc’s work changed when I had

287
 288 M. FILAS
the chance to meet him personally at my “dinner with Ste-
larc.” This personal license notwithstanding, most of the
following discussion is not about me or my personal expe-
rience as Stelarc’s audience, but rather about how his work
provokes new perspectives on issues of postevolution.
Stelarc provokes both fear and fascination with
hybridity—the embodied combination of the human form
with technology in the form of electronic prosthetics, in-
gested equipment, and lab-grown tissue cultures—through
his “events” and performances. As an artist, he designs
systems to demonstrate connectivity between his body
and electronic hardware, and to isolate or highlight aspects
of the connection in order for us to see the combination
of humanity and technology differently. Where technol-
ogy otherwise enters our embodied world via treatments
for disease or prosthetics to replace lost functionality,
Stelarc’s projects intervene in bodily function for demon-
stration’s sake, to posit ideas and ideology, to promote and
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discover a different way of being human. We are used to
hearing about elective surgery and fancy hand-held elec-
tronics in the ways they are marketed to us based on indi-
vidual consumer desires. But Stelarc redeploys these tech-
nological and medical procedures with an emphasis on the
connections with machinery and technology. His purpose
with these medicalized procedures and bodily invasions
is not curative; rather, he means to promote his vision of
what postevolution requires of us, and the resulting im-
ages and ideas do not necessarily speak to any common
desire. Speaking of his purpose, Stelarc has emphasized
the concreteness of his demonstrations as of paramount
importance, along with discovering what it means as he
experiences it. In an interview with Marquard Smith,
Stelarc said: “To make three films of the inside of my
body, to suspend the body with steel hooks, to extend the
body with a third hand: it was not enough to imagine and
speculate. Rather the approach was to actualize the idea, to
experience it directly, and then try to articulate what hap-
pened. The resulting ideas are authenticated only by the
action” (2005, 215–16). It is perhaps work that can only
be done by a performance artist, someone with access to
the medium: first, his own body; and second, the tech-
nology and scientific collaborators to fuse that body with
machines, with manufactured mutations, and with com-
munications technologies. An artist also has the license,
and inspiration, to experiment for philosophical purposes,
whereas other applications of embodied technology or
hybridity may be pursued for corrective, restorative, or
capitalist research and development reasons.
Stelarc works in tropes—repeated artistic approaches
and forms—emphasizing the same themes recursively,
though the particulars of each event vary importantly. A
key theme is repurposing organs of the body for nonin-
tuitive purposes. Initially Stelarc focused on the skin as
a support organ through suspension with inserted hooks.
He has called these “obsolete body suspensions,” and in
related events repurposing organs other than his skin, he
has repurposed medical technology, using his body’s in-
terior as a site for art making, swallowing and filming
a stomach sculpture that expanded within his stomach
and beeped and lit up. In “Ping Body,” Stelarc repur-
posed his limbs, giving control of his voluntary muscles
to Internet-controlled electrodes on his arm and leg. The
macabre dance, while Stelarc wore and operated his pros-
thetic “Third Hand,” demonstrated how it might look when
bodily agency is ceded electronically to a separate agent.
During “Ping Body” Stelarc also repurposed different vol-
untary muscles in his abdomen and calf to control his
“Third Hand.” Simultaneously Stelarc’s body received di-
rect movements from the muscle stimulators, and at the
same time different voluntary muscles were redeployed
to control the prosthetic. He calls “Ping Body” and other
similar events “Involuntary Body/Third Hand” demon-
strations, frequently demonstrating this refiguring of his
body as an expression of multiple agencies, and as a driver
of multiple extensions of his subjectivity. To add another
layer in “Ping Body,” Stelarc controlled an Internet avatar,
which mimed his movements online (see Figure 1).
Repurposing gives way to a different level of prosthesis
in Stelarc’s “Extra Ear” project, in which he has had a
laboratory-grown tissue culture of a third ear inserted be-
neath the skin on his left forearm. The ear on his arm will
eventually, through microphone implantation, “hear” and
transmit to an Internet audience what Stelarc is hearing.
When he first had his extra ear surgically installed, the
initial insertion of a microphone under the skin worked
when tested but became infected early and had to be re-
moved. The idea of Stelarc’s body being a listening device
for others repurposes his arm, but also his whole physical
presence, by providing another passive agent access to his
audible space and time.
Stelarc’s performances or “events” are inflected with his
cold aesthetic and provocative tone, but without offering
up resolutions or catharsis. Instead of any expressionistic
processing of the emotions that hybridity inspires, Ste-
larc’s demeanor is notably unemotional as evidenced by
the video recordings and still photography. Affect comes
in the form of a design choice, such as laser lighting or
sonic noise based on the body’s biological rhythms and
energies, but no affect comes from the artist gesturing or
acting out in traditionally cathartic ways—there’s no ex-
pression of pain or pleasure. In the videos and photos from
his performances, Stelarc maintains an expression of stoic
concentration. Ostensibly, he means to represent a cele-
bration of the possibilities, but his visuals also dramatize
the grotesque implications for embodiment, implications
made more troubling by the lack of affect in Stelarc’s sober
delivery, by his earnest and integrated philosophical deter-
mination and zeal. Especially when taken in combination
 STELARC AND TECHNO-FLESH HYBRIDITY
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FIG. 1. Stelarc. 1996. Ping Body.
with his more bombastic statements about the human body
being obsolete, his unemotional presence during the sus-
pension and other events is ironically utilitarian.
I am most compelled by Stelarc’s ability to make
strange the human communion with technology that we
have naturalized into our lives, and his presentation of
those technologies or communions that have not yet hap-
pened but are possible. Even a sampling from the abun-
dance of critical responses show how well he draws out
emotional flash points in our philosophical struggles with
hybridity. In an article examining metallic camp, Steve
Dixon (2004) writes:
[Stelarc] reverses conventional metaphors and views of a
disembodied body operating in virtual space. In Stelarc’s
version, the body does not leap out and float serenely in cy-
berspace; it demands instead that technology and the matrix
of cyberspace be brought into the body in order to advance
and reconfigure its corporeal physiology and ontology. . . .
Here the dehumanization and mechanization of the body
by technology is taken to extremes, with Stelarc’s body re-
duced to little more than an empty shell: a human cadaver to
be jerked like a puppet in some macabre human–computer
game. (30)
In his article “Artistic Simulacra in the Age of
Recombinant Bodies,” Timothy Murphy (2007) reviews
289
contemporary art dealing with genetics and genomic in-
formation and aligns Stelarc’s work as using art for its
dialectical impact: “Stelarc’s corporeal obsolescence here
makes way for a disturbing personification of monstrous
metaphor. Rather than demystifying or deconstructing the
utopian aims of genetics, he makes scientific practices for-
eign to themselves for the sake of extending their psycho-
social range in the practice of art” (172). Where Dixon
emphasizes Stelarc’s making the body strange in its con-
figuration with technology, Murphy emphasizes the way
scientific practices are made strange by Stelarc’s appli-
cations. As an artist, Stelarc’s success in making strange
technology and embodiment are powerful results because
he engages emotions, such as fear or anxiety, with aspects
of modern life, specifically embodiment among so much
intimate technology, which may have otherwise become
native, or have gone ignored under the fog of familiarity.
In conducting his work as experiments or demonstra-
tions of his inventions, Stelarc generates imagery and
sounds that seem designed to agitate rather than entice
or entertain. He draws us into the uncanny valley (Mori
1970) where the humanness of the technology bothers us,
but so does the machine-ness of the body. A good example
of Stelarc’s knack for emphasizing the alterity of hybrid-
ity would be his “Handswriting” event (Stelarc 1982),
 290 M. FILAS
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FIG. 2. Stelarc. 1982. Handswriting. Photo by Keisuke Oki.
documented as “Writing one word simultaneously with
three hands,” which disrupts our usual sense of order by
suggesting that a person could write even with two hands
simultaneously, much less the two natural hands plus
a prosthetic third, driven by a diverse set of voluntary
muscles from around his body. (See Figure 2 and note
that the word Stelarc writes is a childish, but legible,
“EVOLUTION.”)
Will the next step in hybridity erase some essential
core that will leave us feeling less human? One thing is
certain—even if we are not enamored with his vision, we
are forced to recognize it as possible, since his work, at its
core, is never entirely speculative. When he performs his
invented hybridizations, Stelarc also demonstrates what
is possible now. Anxiety is inherent in many aspects of
the hybrid postevolutionary person. Perhaps the most eas-
ily misunderstood performances of Stelarc’s might be the
“obsolete body suspensions” he describes on his web-
site: “Between 1976–1988 he completed 25 body suspen-
sion performances with hooks into the skin.” Recently, in
2012, Stelarc again performed a suspension1 integrating
a sculpture of his ear-on-arm project into the event (see
Figure 3).
The arresting imagery is just one aspect of these per-
formances. When Stelarc stretches his skin and positions
his body in different environments, he is forcing new con-
texts for the body, new functionality for organs. Of course
the metal hooks and occasional trickles of blood empha-
size pain, but Stelarc’s straight-faced decorum during the
events, as well as his accompanying treatises, provide no
catharsis for the implicit pain in the images or in the sit-
uation. Instead, his dramatic argument is that the flesh is
becoming obsolete in our technological era and can be
repurposed—his is a postevolutionary suspension, meant
to foreground the re-deployment of the skin as a structural
organ that holds the body up. What the skeleton does on
land, the skin (and hooks) do in space. Most of the time
Stelarc performs naked when he exhibits his machine in-
ventions, or when he suspends the body into space, and his
nudity lends intensity and vulnerability to the images from
the suspensions; it also emphasizes authenticity in a com-
pletely nonsexual way that would be diminished were he
clothed. The stretching of his skin at the hook points, the
dangling genitals, these visuals confront the viewer with
the stark penetration he takes into himself to show “the
body” (he never refers to himself in first person when dis-
cussing the performances) in alternate relationships with
hybridity—from industrial technology, like shark hooks,
pulleys, and cranes, to state-of-the-art medical and com-
munications equipment. There is no expression of his
pain during these suspensions, and Stelarc’s lack of af-
fect leaves at full unfiltered strength the strangeness of
seeing the body in unnatural configurations. Because this
is perhaps the most difficult and confrontational aspect of
 STELARC AND TECHNO-FLESH HYBRIDITY
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FIG. 3. Stelarc. 2012. Ear on Arm Suspension. Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne. Photo by Claudio Oyarce.
Stelarc’s work, I believe it leads some to dismiss his work
as sensationalism. Yet there are good reasons for the dan-
gling genitals and painfully pulled skin, the cold, almost
clinical, visual vulnerability. In part, he is meaning to em-
phasize the deficiencies and limits of the body, and his
detached professionalism during the “events” lends credi-
bility to his more confrontational statements. On his Web
page (2013) in a section titled “Obsolete Bodies,” Stelarc
writes:
It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with
binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biolog-
ical form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and
quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated
by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is
biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial
environment.
The body is neither a very efficient nor very durable structure.
It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly; its performance
is determined by its age. It is susceptible to disease and is
doomed to a certain and early death. Its survival parameters
are very slim—it can survive only weeks without food, days
without water and minutes without oxygen.
By arguing against embodiment as the end game for hu-
manity, Stelarc takes his art to a philosophical telos most
291
people would like to avoid or argue against. Even if bodies
do need food, water, and oxygen, the useful years of the
human body seem to be outliving our telephones, comput-
ers, and automobiles. It’s not clear that technology has a
leg up. Embodiment, hassles and all, is what most people
are comfortable with. But in the context of Stelarc’s state-
ment, the images of his vulnerable, naked, hooked-skin
body take on a different register—the work is not about
his body in pain, it is about his body in transformation. It
is not about his nudity as an object of desire—rather, with
the skin stretched by hooks, it is a disturbing clinical state-
ment about the limits (and capacity) of the flesh. As an
artist, Stelarc can reach for a certain grandeur or heroism
by enduring pain for the sake of art, for the exploration of
a postevolutionary hybrid vision, and his approach inten-
sifies his impact. Because Stelarc provides no expression
of the pain associated with his invasive connection to the
machinery, his audience is left pent up with no outlet for
sympathy or fear. And this aesthetic principle—disturbing
visuals of the body invaded by equipment—follows the
early years of suspension events through to other staged
“events”—demonstrations of connectivity involving pros-
theses and electronic signals in and on his body. Among
the more than two dozen suspension events between 1976
 292
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FIG. 4. Stelarc. 1996. Stomach Sculpture. Photo by Anthony Figallo.
and 1988, Stelarc used urban settings—hanging three sto-
ries above a Manhattan street, and from a crane 50 meters
above Copenhagen; industrial settings—including an el-
evator shaft and a warehouse; interior settings—notably,
galleries, in minimalist balance with suspended rocks as
counterweights; and outdoor settings—adorning the sea-
side amid waves and rocks and suspending from a tree.
Stelarc describes on his website (2013):
Not all the performances were static. The body swung, spun,
swayed and propelled itself. It was also moved by motors
and machines. And in some of the suspensions heartbeat
and muscle sounds were amplified, providing an extended
acoustical aura for the stretched skin body.
Collectively, his 26 suspensions feature the body pierced
and suspended in spaces representative of a full range of
natural and built environments, a gesture toward compre-
hensive representation. Through those sustained repeti-
tions, Stelarc establishes that the skin can be repurposed
to be the supporting organ, placing the body, and con-
sciousness, into a suspended space.
Stelarc has explored the themes of repurposed organs
in other work, turning his attention to interior organs be-
tween 1973 and 1975 when he filmed the inside of his body
(stomach, colon, and lungs, plus a full-body x-ray scan)
for the sake of making art films. And in 1993 he swal-
lowed a custom-made expanding device, self-illuminating
M. FILAS
and sound-emitting, controlled by a logic circuit, that
was displayed within his esophagus and stomach (see
Figure 4).
In this way, just as he repurposed the skin in his suspen-
sions, Stelarc repurposed the body’s interior, the digestive
system, to be a space and a surface for making art, a flat-
tened body. And while flattening reflects the notion of
postmodern depthlessness (Jameson 1984), the beeping
and lighted sculpture also makes the body a platform for
an illuminated and audible work of art. Of the “Stomach
Sculpture,” Stelarc writes: “Here technology invades and
functions within the body, not as a prosthetic replacement
for some medical necessity, but through artistic choice,
as an aesthetic adornment. The hollow body becomes a
host, not for a self, but simply for a sculpture—an alien,
electronic object moving, flashing and beeping in a wet
and vulnerable internal environment” (2001). In the very
gesture of invading his body for the sake of art making,
Stelarc reinforces his argument about a future humanity
in which the flesh body is an open territory without the
traditional stipulations of bodily integrity.2 In other less
invasive actions Stelarc has used his body’s energy (heart-
beat, brain waves, pulse, muscle contractions) to drive and
generate audio soundscapes for his performances—in this
way taking information typically used in medical diagnos-
tics and procedures to affect the environment in which his
connectivity is otherwise being demonstrated.
 STELARC AND TECHNO-FLESH HYBRIDITY
The most inescapable aspect of Stelarc’s work is his
fundamental argument that if our connectivity with tech-
nology goes where our current know-how can take it, we
could conceivably change who we are—less focused on
individuality and more on access to data and the ability
to connect to information sources and outlets, including
other people both inside and outside our social networks.
Criticism of Stelarc’s projects (Clarke 2005; Massumi
2005; Farnell 2000) sometimes calls up canonical post-
modern theories such as that of Deleuze and Guattari’s
Body without Organs (1980), but some, such as Timothy
Barker (2012), take those ideas and relate them well to
network design and hybridity of humans and technology.
Barker first brings down the importance of differences
between human and technological components within a
network: “Networks can be technological, yes, but they
are also biological, social and political. . . . Machines can
be considered as organs of the human species. A tool or
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a machine is an organ and organs are tools or machines”
(2012, 264). In general, Barker sees networks as biologi-
cal extensions of the organism; human plus tool equals a
bio-network: “Life can only be understood as biological
forces in constant contact with their milieu, which acts as
a structuring or individuating force, as something that an
organism attaches to and by which it becomes organized”
(264). Barker characterizes the “Ping Body” as “an attempt
to explore what the body can do when put in constant con-
tact with technology, which reorganizes it, yielding it new
boundaries and potentials” (267). Barker also provides an
interesting model through which he examines data orga-
nization as a type of body, and conceptually aligns the
database body with the human body to show new organi-
zation, a new biosystem, an idea applied to Stelarc’s “Ping
Body” performance:
Stelarc placed on his body a series of muscle-stimulating
electrodes that were connected to the World Wide Web. The
muscle simulators responded to Internet users logging into
the performance website and selecting various body parts on
a graphical representation of Stelarc’s body. The stimulators
did not respond to the selections made by users per se but
rather to the ping values gathered from their collective values.
Stelarc’s body was thus not simply manipulated by other
users. His body did not simply react to other human bodies.
Instead, his body was forced to move by the Internet itself, by
the data conveyed by ping values, which measure the density
of Internet use. The body here is not merely constituted by its
set of internal organs but also made up of the technological
environment as a set of external organs—that it extends into.
(267)
Using the network as the presiding allegory, Barker em-
phasizes the role of data and its role in his analysis, empha-
sizing the Internet’s role in manipulating Stelarc’s body.
In “Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A
Historical Perspective,” Arthus Elsenaar and Ramko Scha
293
(2002) situate the body manipulations in history reach-
ing back to early electricity performances in the courts
of London circa 1729, through the development and im-
plementation of electricity for its killing power, culmi-
nating in the first execution by electrocution in 1890 in
New York. Stelarc’s use of electricity for body manip-
ulation points more to Jean Jallabert’s 1747 discovery,
in Geneva, that muscles could be manipulated with elec-
tric shocks. By 1756 in Bologna it was demonstrated that
nerves conduct the electricity to the muscle. In 1800 Paris,
cadaver parts were being shocked to movement, includ-
ing faces on severed heads. These were demonstrated in
traveling “anatomical theatre.” And in 1862 Guillaume
Benjamin Armand Duchenne published his findings that
electric muscle stimulation, in methods still used today,
is best conducted by electrodes placed, with precision, on
the skin. For Elsenaar and Scha the main point to take
away from Stelarc’s performance is not the metaphorical
emphasis on a data-driven body performance, but on the
remote control, as well as Stelarc’s simultaneous control
of other agents in the electronic network through
remotely controlled body movements with large-scale audi-
ence participation via the Internet. [Stelarc] presented the
Fractal Flesh event. During this event, Stelarc’s body was
located in Luxumburg, while audiences in Paris, Helsinki
and Amsterdam could view and control his muscles through
a web interface. At the same time Stelarc could activate his
robotic Third Hand and also trigger the upload of images to
a web site. (2002, 25)
Heretofore I have been using the “Ping Body” event
as an example, but the “Fractal Flesh” event discussed
here used the same technology and approaches, in a work-
ing trope Stelarc labels “Involuntary Body/Third Hand.”
Again, the emphasis ends in looking at the connections
and combinations of data, of Stelarc’s body as a trans-
ducer of sorts, receiving and issuing electronic informa-
tion, and responding to it in ways we are unaccustomed
to understanding. Compare the disturbing movements of
Stelarc’s macabre dance (see YouTube video at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTYYJZG0f68), electroni-
cally controlled by outside agents, to the dancing silhou-
ette of an iPod TV commercial where someone wired with
earbuds and a handheld device rocks out. The latter de-
picts a sensually desirable kind of intense and the former
something else.
The “Extra Ear” project is not yet realized to the
point that the new organ functions as an input device—as
yet, there is no embedded microphone. Arguably, even if
Stelarc wanted a third ear, a remote hearing organ for a
third-party audience, there is no concrete reason that it
must be shaped like the original ears nature put on the side
of our heads. But the implications of the technology, once
he gets it to work, will certainly be underscored by the
 294 M. FILAS
uncanny imposition of a synthetic mutation, an extra ear,
grown as tissue culture, designed and built not to expand
the agency of Stelarc, but to make his body and bodily
presence useful to agents beyond his own body, beyond
his individual subjectivity. A paranoid vision might see
this project parlayed into a future race of humans reduced
to sentient drones deployed to spaces as remote audio re-
ceptors. Technology already exists, through experimental
balance therapy headphones, to direct the walking move-
ment of an individual through electrical stimulation of
their inner ear. With a remote control, Japanese scientists
were able to make subjects walk in whatever direction
they wanted through the low-frequency stimulators in the
headphones. “By sending current down to those nerves in
our inner ear, they’ve created remote controlled human be-
ings” (National Geographic 2007). Were this movement-
control technology combined with a third ear, well, the
individual body becomes a remote agent of others who
Downloaded by [184.98.227.47] at 23:46 23 October 2013
control its movement and a different audience who re-
ceives the remote audio data. Rather than viewing each
development as agency denying, Stelarc thinks of the pos-
sibility of global consciousness: “Going beyond the purely
psychological the more global kind of consciousness that
has to do with being able to function remotely, being able
to connect and interact in a multiplicity of ways, both with
other people, with teleoperated robots, software agents.
There are probably more programs roaming the Net than
there are people now” (Stelarc 1995). When Stelarc in-
vokes the notion of programs as agents here, or as subjects
in a consciousness network, he draws on notions Gibson
famously fictionalized in Neuromancer (1984) where pro-
grammed constructs in the matrix have agency and carry
markers of a mutated but slightly human-like personality.
Stelarc sees the Internet as a platform that invites this sort
of connection. “The body becomes connected with other
bodies in other places in a multiplicity of ways, a whole
range of sensory antennae that the technology provides. In
a sense the body becomes part of this greater operational
structure, where intelligence is distributed remotely and
spatially over the Internet” (Stelarc 1995). At the same
time, though, the remote controlled-ness denies agency of
the individual.
The provocations of Stelarc’s events, and the theoreti-
cal contexts I’ve reviewed here, all point to ways in which
he presents, without the usual capitalist or curative con-
texts, some raw possibilities for embodied hybridity. My
personal emotional reaction becomes relevant when we
consider that art always, inherently, means to engage our
emotions as well as, sometimes, our intellect. Personally,
I still feel native in something of the Freudian idea of ego-
based individuality that Stelarc refutes (Sterlac 1995), and
my interest in Stelarc has been driven in no small part
by a fundamental discomfort with, or anxiety about, the
sacrifices of agency requisite in the hybridity he portrays.
My doctoral dissertation closed with an extended consid-
eration of his works as representative of distributed con-
sciousness, a term I used to frame new cyborg subjectivity
(Filas 2001). Since then, I have studied Stelarc in several
contexts: as an artist in comparison with experiments by
roboticist Kevin Warwick (Filas 2007b), who uses chip
implants, computer recognition, and unrefined transmis-
sion of nerve impulses in the voluntary muscles of his arm.
I have looked at Stelarc as a practitioner of techno-collage
in the tradition of Dada photomontage and assemblage
artists (Filas 2008), as he relates to nanotechnology (Filas
2006), and in the context of science fiction in Amazing Sto-
ries from the early 20th century (Filas 2007a). And I have
taught units on Stelarc in many cultural studies seminars.
But it was not until 2009, when I had the chance to meet
Stelarc and have a meal with him, that I really began to un-
derstand his work. Prior to that I had been an avid follower
of Stelarc’s work, but my well-developed understanding
came from a fixation on my part on the presence of anxiety,
expressed or not, in his work. He represented for me the
avant garde of distributed consciousness, of revoking the
subjectivity I am comfortable with for something different
and less personal, less body-centric, and from the looks of
it, less comfortable. In short, I never considered Stelarc’s
work without that anxiety as a component of my intellec-
tual motivation. With cold wooden emotions, Stelarc the
artistic persona demonstrated the grotesque combinations
of flesh and technology, and I appreciated the elegance of
how Stelarc isolated or combined themes, and used the
events to flesh out his arguments that the body is obsolete,
that the connection is more important than the ego, that
shared agency over a body is a good development. I did
not agree with the ideas, but I loved how his work pro-
voked the questions and stirred up anxiety over hybridity.
When I met Stelarc the person, though, at the home of
Kathleen Woodward and Herbert Blau, he was particu-
larly real—a person who visited, shared stories, drank and
ate with the rest of us. He was in Seattle to deliver a lecture
(Stelarc 2009) at the Henry Art Gallery on the campus of
the University of Washington, which Woodward, who di-
rects the Simpson Center for the Humanities, was hosting.
After a great evening of eating and visiting, Stelarc posed
for photos with me, and the other guests, showing off his
third ear (see Figure 5). What I remember best was our
conversation about family, his siblings, and a story he told
about his mom. He did not tell his mom about his “Extra
Ear” when he had it surgically attached under the skin of
his arm until she “busted him” for getting his third ear
attached when she read about his project in her Greek-
language newspaper. Thinking of the man whom I had
seen so many times, in so many images, whose bombas-
tic statements I had read and quoted multiple times—his
humanity was unmistakable, his laugh notorious for a rea-
son. He sounds a bit like a mad scientist when he laughs,
 STELARC AND TECHNO-FLESH HYBRIDITY
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FIG. 5. Stelarc, with the author and the Third Ear. October 9, 2009.
but not a shred contrived or sinister. Even though we were
talking about his work, and spent some time considering
his “Extra Ear,” Stelarc was all there, in that body, and
visiting with us like a normal person—a man who still
gets busted by his mom for his outlandish artistic actions.
That, I could relate to. Perhaps the distributed conscious-
ness, the suspensions, and the myriad other events show us
a subjectivity I find troubling, but when Stelarc talks about
hiding his more outlandish (even for him) projects from his
mom, I feel a human connection. When he is not hooked
up, not actively demonstrating postevolutionary possibil-
ities, Stelarc is someone I can relate to. In the end, after
meeting Stelarc I am less anxious about postevolution.
What I learned from meeting Stelarc was that the artist is
still a person with a romantic partner and family connec-
tions, a sense of humor, and who seems quite natural in
his embodiment. I can even see the logic in his repressed
emotions when he is demonstrating hybridity—it makes
sense. Now that I have experienced Stelarc the person, I
am less intimidated by his demeanor and the images from
his various performances where he is cool and removed
from what is happening to his body and agency. Emotions
295
don’t yet transfer very well electronically. If, along the
way in this life, I have to yield some agency in order to
get different agency in a new type of network, I might
just consider it. After seeing that Stelarc is as human as
the next person when he is free from the technology he
uses in his events, I am able to set aside my initial anxiety
and consider the trade-offs and how hybridity might affect
my basic humanity. I am willing to consider postevolu-
tion as something more than an unequivocal threat to my
personhood.
NOTES
1. Stelarc’s body suspension is similar to that undertaken in the
contemporary subculture for modern primitivism where piercing, sus-
pension, and body modification are practiced as religious rites without
the hybridity emphasis.
2. On May 24, 2001, Reuters reported the use of an ingestible cam-
era in experimental use in Israel and Britain as a means of diagnosis
for stomach and bowel problems. While the previous method of diag-
nosis was a much more invasive and surgical endoscopy, this method
is painless and allows the patient to proceed with normal activities
during the 24 hours it takes to pass through the system. In many ways,
 296 M. FILAS
Stelarc’s internal camera performances of the 1970s foreshadowed this
development, but without the medical contexts.
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