*EXTENDED-BODY*

Stelarc Interview
©1995-Paolo Atzori & Kirk Woolford

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist,    born in Limassol, island of Cyprus. Stelios

Arcadiou changed his name in Stelarc once moved to Australia, where he studied Arts
and Craft at T.S.T.C., Art and Technology, at    CAUTECH and M.R.I.T., Melbourne
University. He tought Art and Sociology at Yokoama International School and Sculpture
and Drawing at Ballarat University College.
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K&P: When did you first decide to hang yourself between two different worlds-- to
place your body between two levels of existence...

S: Well you have to remember the suspension events weren’t the initial, sort of primitive
and physically difficult events and the technology ones were the more recent, more
sophisticated ones. In fact, the third hand project begins a year after the first suspension
event. These things were happening simultaneously. On the one hand you were
discovering the psychological and physical limitations of the body. On the other you
were developing strategies for extending and enhancing it through technology. I’ve
always used technology in my performances. The very first things I made in art school
were helmets and goggles that altered your binocular perception which stylistically has
this connection with virtual reality head-mounted-displays and compartments which
were whole body pods that you sort of plugged you whole body into, and that was
assaulted by electronic sounds and lights.

K&P: When people see your suspension events, they immediately think of Hindu,
American Indian, or other rituals. Which of these practices did you come into contact
with first?

S: It was the Hindu Indian ones that I knew about, but one has to put this into the
context that for 5 years I was doing suspension events with ropes and harnesses, with a
lot of technology. Laser eyes were first used when the body was suspended, oh, ‘70, ‘71
that sort of time scale, but one of the sort of visual disadvantages of all this
paraphernalia was that there was all this visual clutter: all the ropes and harnesses were
seen more to support the body than to suspend it, so when I first came across the notion
of piercing the skin, I thought, if you could suspend the body using techniques like
these, then you would have a minimum of support, you’d have just the insertion and
single cable. Mind you, I never hid, there was no desire to make the suspension a kind
of image of levitation. For me the cables were lines of tension which were part of the
visual design of the suspended body, and the stretched skin was a kind of gravitational
landscape. This is what it took for a body to be suspended in a 1-G gravitational field.
The other context is the primal desire for floating and flying. A lot of primal rituals have
to do with suspending the body, but in the 20th century we have the reality of astronauts
floating in zero-G. So the suspension event is between those sort of primal yearnings,
and the contemporary reality. Of course, suspension means between two states, so I
think there is an interesting linguistic meaning that fits in with the idea of suspending
the body. For me there was no religious context, no shamanistic yearnings, no yogic
conditioning that had to do with these performances. In fact, they occurred in the same
kind of stream of consciousness. In mean, I don’t take any aneasthethetics, I don’t chant
or get into altered states. I think metaphysically, in the past, we’ve considered the skin
as surface, as interface. The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and
simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the
skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.

K.&P.:Do you follow a very strict discipline to train your body for your performances?

S: In fact, there’s never really been any discipline and when I start feeling the
performances have become, in a sense predictable, because the techniques assume more
importance than the creative impulses, then I stop doing them. I stopped doing the
suspension events 4 years ago because having done 27 of them in various locations and
different situations there seemed to be no more raison d’être to continue doing them.
The interest was really coupling the expression of an idea with the direct experience of
it. That applies to all of these performances whether the suspension events, the stomach
sculpture, the third hand performances, or the virtual arm event. These are all situations
where the body is plugged into for direct experience. So it’s not interesting for me to
talk academicaly or theoretically about ideas of interface, the important thing for me is
to plug in, extend the body with cyber- systems and see what it can actually do.

K&P: So you’ve always been interested in enhancing the body?

S: Oh, absolutely. And the connection with VR systems is a very fundamental one with
me because, as I said, the very first things I made at art school were these helmets which
split your binocular vision and compartments which were sensory environments, multi-
modal structures for experience with the body. So that was a primary concern, and really
the suspensions are often taken out of context whereas they are part of a series of
sensory deprivation and physically difficult events which include: making the 3 films of
the inside of the body, where I had to film 3 meters of internal space, for example. All
these actions occurred simultaneously. The agenda wasn’t a stylistic one with a
particular technology, it was a general one. A sort of probing and determining the
parameters of physical and psychological interface.

K&P: You always work with your body. Your body is your form of representation, your
medium. How do you feel being both an artist and an artwork?

S: It’s interesting you’ve pointed that out, I’ve never felt that I am the art work. In fact
the reason why my performances are focused on this particular body is that it is difficult
for me to convince other bodies to undergo rather awkward, difficult and sometimes
painful experiences. This body is just merely the convenient access to a body for
particular events and actions. So I’ve really never been obsessed by the fact that
somehow I am the artwork because I don’t critique it in that way.

For me the body is an impersonal, evolutionary, objective structure. Having spent two
thousand years prodding and poking the human psyche without any real discernible
changes in our historical and human outlook, we perhaps need to take a more
fundamental physiological and structural approach, and consider the fact that it’s only
through radically redesigning the body that we will end up having significantly different
thoughts and philosophies. I think our philosophies are fundamentally bounded by our
physiology; our peculiar kind of aesthetic orientation in the world; our peculiar five
sensory modes of processing the world; and our particular kinds of technology that
enhance these perceptions. I think a truly alien intelligence will occur from an alien
body or from a machine structure. I don’t think human beings will come up with
fundamentally new philosophies. An alien species may not have the same notions about
the universe at all. The desire for unity may well be the result of our rather fragmentary
sensory system where we observe the world sensually in packets of discrete and
different sensory modes. So our urge to merge, our urge to unify, that religious,
spiritual, coming together might very well be due to an inadequacy or an
incompleteness in our physiology.

K&P: If such a philosophy is devised, it would not be a human philosophy. How would
it be applicable to the human race?

S: Well of course one shouldn’t consider the body or the human species as possessing a
kind of absolute nature. The desire to locate the self simply within a particular
biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly
redefined. For me, this is not a dilemma at all.

K&P:So a human is not this entity sitting here with these two arms and two legs, but
something more beside?

S:Yes,of course, if you are sitting there with a heart peace-maker and artificial hip and
something to augment your liver and kidney functions, would I consider you less
human? To be quite honest, most of your body might be made of mechanical, silicon, or
chip parts and you behave in a socially acceptable way, you respond to me in a human-
like fashion, to me that would make you a kind of human subject.

K&P: You keep speaking about redesigning the human body. Who decides and how
should it be redesigned ?

S: (Laugh) There is often misunderstanding about these notions, partly because they are
critiqued with a kind of rear-vision mirror mentality of a fascist, dictatoriaI, Orwellian-
big-brother scenario.
I don’t have a utopian perfect body I’m designing a blueprint for, rather I’m speculating
on ways that individuals are not forced to, but may want to, redesign their bodies--
given that the body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information
environment it has created. It’s had this mad, Aristotelian urge to accumulate more and
more information.
An individual now cannot hope to absorb and creatively process all this information.
Humans have created technologies and machines which are much more precise and
powerful than the body.
How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded
up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape-velocity, has to function in zero-G
and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological
inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic
approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can’t continue designing
technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the
body. Perhaps it’s now time to design the body to match it’s machines. We somehow
have to turbo-drive the body -- implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways
of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it’s
done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There’s no way of directly jacking in.
Mind you , I’m not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities
are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we
discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the
body.
K&P: This recombinant body implies a widening of our sensibilities, of our perception.
But our senses are linked to our brains, everything ‘happens’ in our brain.
So it’s not enough to have, for example, X-ray vision. We need to change our synapses,
the connections in our brains as well.

S: We shouldn’t start making distinction between the brain and the body. This particular
biological entity with it’s proprioceptive networks and spinal cord and muscles, it’s the
total kinesthetic orientation in the world, it’s the body’s mobility which contributes
towards curiosity. The desire to isolate the brain is the result of a Cartesian dualism. It’s
not really productive any more to think in that sense. We have to think of the body
plugged into a new technological terrain.

K&P: We can see things that were previously invisible. We can go to the very little
through nano-technology, see into infra-red and ultra violet spectrums, but this is not a
direct perception. We get this through artificial systems...

S: Yes, and what will be interesting is when we can miniaturize these technologies and
implant them into the body so that the body as total system become subjectively aware
again.New technologies tend to generate new perceptions and paradigms of the world,
and in turn, allow us to take further steps. If we consider technologies as intermediaries
to the world, then, of course, we never have direct experiences. At the moment, we
operate within a very thin electro-magnetic spectrum, and I would imagine that as we
increasing operate in wider spheres of reality, then yes our perceptions and philosophies
alter or adjust.
Technology has always been coupled with the evolutionary development of the body.
Technology is what defines being human. It’s not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it’s
part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn’t have a
Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn’t
consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way -- that we’re somehow selling
our soul because we’re using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is,
and always has been an appendage of the body.
K&P: Stelarc, your latest work centers around a sculpture you built for your stomach.   
What was the impetus for creating a sculpture to display inside your body?
S: I've moved beyond the skin as a barrier. Skin no longer signifies closure. I wanted to
rupture the surface of the body, penetrate the skin. With the stomach sculpture, I
position an artwork inside the body. The body becomes hollow with no meaningful
distinction between public, private and physiological spaces. The hollow body becomes
a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.
K&P: Funding any artwork is difficult, especially getting money for high tech
equipment. Did you have trouble finding funding for the sculpture?
S: Actually no. One of the museums in Australia was preparing a show and asking for
sculptures which explored alternative display spaces. I told them I had an alternative
way and place to display a sculpture.
K&P: Can you describe the stomach sculpture?
S: It's built of implant quality metals such as titanium, steel, silver, and gold. It is
constructed as a domed capsule shell about the size of a fist. The shell contains a worm-
screw and link mechanism and has a flexidrive cable connected to a servo motor
controlled by a logic circuit. The capsule extends and retracts opening and closing in
three sections. An embedded instrument array, light and piezo buzzer make the sculpture
self-illuminating and sound-emitting.
K&P: How did you insert it?
S: Very slowly.    The stomach sculpture is actually the most dangerous performance I've
done. We had to be within 5 minutes of a hospital in case we ruptured any internal
organs. To insert the sculpture, the stomach was first emptied by withholding food for
about 8 hours.    Then the closed capsule, with beeping sound and flashing light
activated, was swallowed and guided down tethered to it's flexidrive cable attached to
the control box outside the body. Once inserted into the stomach, we used an endoscope
to inflate the stomach and suck out the excess body fluids. The sculpture was then
arrayed with switches on the control box.    We documented the whole performance
using video endoscopy equipment. Even with a stomach pump, we still had a problem
with excess saliva. We had to hastily remove all the probes on several occasions.
K&P: Now you've penetrated the body. You've hollowed it out, extended it, expanded it,
hung it out a window, mapped out several miles of its interior. What is the next step?
S: It is time to recolonise the body with microminaturised robots to augment out
bacterial population, to assist our immunological system, and to monitor the capillary
and internal tracts of the body.    We need to build an internal surveillance system for the
body.    We have to    develop microbots whose behavior is not pre-programmed, but
activated by temperature, blood chemistry, the softness or hardness of tissue and the
presence of obstacles in tracts. These robots can then work autonomously on the body.
The biocompatibility of technology is not due to its substance, but to its scale. Speck-
sized robots are easily swallowed and may not even be sensed. At a nanotech level,
machines will navigate and inhabit cellular spaces and manipulate molecular structures
to extend the body from within.