Experimenting With Alternative Anatomical Architectures. An interview with STELARC

STELARC: I began performing in the very early 70s. And since then I have endoscopically filmed 3m of internal body space, did 28 body suspensions, and augmented and performed with prosthetics and robotics. Over that period, the technology I used evolved from analogue to digital, from wired to wireless. From cumbersome to miniaturized sensors. And from proximal to remote online performances.

I recently donated my performance archive to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. Some of the early tapes were deteriorating and I had formats both in NTSC and PAL that had never been edited. In return I got digitized versions. The archive is also a history of video, from  Sony Porta-Pak, open reel B&W video to VHS, Betamax, Betacam, U-Matic, Mini DV and every other digital format up till now.

STELARC: it was always a dilemma and difficult to get someone to document the performances, whether photographically or with video. Unfortunately some of the performances in the 1970’s and even the 1980’s were only recorded photographically. And I was often not satisfied with how the performances were framed. From the early ‘90s I started to position cameras above and round me. Typically one of the cameras attached to the end of a robot arm, programming panning and tilting camera motion and a camera on my wrist which allowed close-ups of the artist and his attachments. A kind of “aesthetic surveillance system” for the performance. That allowed the artist to frame his own performance and being able to complete a multi-cam edit. And in the Reclining StickMan performance at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art the 4-camera monitoring system was also streamed live so the people who remotely actuated the 9m long 4m high robot could see their choreography from multiple viewpoints—including a camera on one of the robot arms.

STELARC: That’s right. I’m more concerned with what a body is and how a body performs with its attachments and machines. I’m more concerned with the performance structure and the interactive relationships between the body, the technology and the computational system. For example in the Fractal Flesh performance for Telepolis (1985) my body in Luxembourg was accessed and remotely actuated by people in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Media Lab in Helsinki and the Doors of Perception conference in Amsterdam via a touch screen interface and muscle stimulation system. I could see the face of the person moving me and they could see their actuation of the body. The choreography of my involuntary body also composed the body signals and sounds of the performance. I did have control of my Third Hand though ha, ha. I much prefer to designate the actions as “events” rather than performances, which has theatrical baggage. In fact all of  my early actions were sub-titled “events”. For example “Seaside Suspension: Event for Wind and Waves”

STELARC: Well, the term ‘event’ conjures up a particular action at a designated place, at a certain time in specific circumstances. I think it's a much better word than ‘performance’... but we got stuck with it in the 1970s, through art publication—performance Art became the accepted terminology.

STELARC: Well, in terms of technology in general, I'm neither dystopian nor utopian. I'm concerned with the kind of aesthetic gestures which allude to alternative possibilities. And I'm not really in sync with transhumanism as such. I don't think simplistically that it's about enhancing the human body but rather experimenting with alternative anatomical architectures. You know, what can you do with a third hand, an extra ear, an extended arm, an ambidextrous arm?  How do you navigate the world with six legs? So it's that kind of approach, which is not concerned with social ethics or political posturing. And certainly neither with scifi dystopian or utopian imaginings.

STELARC: Well, I think we can still talk about individuated bodies because we are biologically separated bodies. I think the notion of individuality, with agency and embodiment are problematized with cutting edge biotechnologies, novel prosthetics, robotics and increasingly miniaturized implants.  We are in the realm of circulating flesh where body parts from cadavers are inserted and reanimated in living bodies. The body you are born with is not necessarily the body you will die with. We cryogenically preserve bodies; we sustain comatose bodies on technological life support systems. We plastinate dead bodies and preserve them indefinitely. So for the first time we exist in proximity with these various kinds of artificially sustained and  artificially preserved bodies. Dead bodies need no longer disintegrate.  We need no longer die biological deaths. We'll die when our life support systems are switched off. Or in some catastrophic accident. So, there is blurring of the living, not-yet-dead, the dead and the yet-to-be-born. And Nietszche reminds us that the living are only a species of the dead. All of these projects and performances problematize what a body is and how a body operates in the world, how a body interacts with the world.  To question what generates aliveness and the kind of embodiment the body it should have.

STELARC: It's not so much about being occupied by others, rather the body becoming a host for remote others.  People associate this with issues of agency, that someone's controlling your body. But really what it's about is constructing extended and more interesting operational systems. This body with other bodies remotely situated, or with machines elsewhere. So, the body can't be thought of anymore as an individual body, because we're extended and interconnected. We're remotely connected to people in other places all the time. We are always in multiple places all the time. And cognitively we're augmented with all kinds of wireless devices and computational systems and our bodily rhythms are now more influenced by our algorithms  than by our circadian rhythms.  Our media machines modulate our behaviour and prompt unwanted past memories at unsuspecting moments. Our sense of self is no longer contained by our skin. It is extruded and shared. Our body is emptied of our self.

We become hollow bodies, not through any lack but because of the excess of our attachments. With the Re-Wired / Re-Mixed performance at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2015), for five days, 6 hours each day continuously I could only see with the eyes of someone in London, I could only hear with the ears of someone in NY, but anyone, anywhere at any time could access my right arm exoskeleton and remotely actuate it. A sharing of visual and acoustical senses and an outsourcing of agency. Simultaneously in three places at once, two virtually and one physically.

STELARC: Ha,ha, No. Art is not useful in that sense. These are aesthetic gestures rather than actual research, completed with limited funding and with little expertise. And one has to kind of remember that art isn't about information transfer or information dissemination. It's about affect, it's about generating experiences and sensations. Okay, some political art might be about conveying a particular message but often political art is not interesting art. I'm not concerned with any kind of propaganda or expressing any kind of discourse. For example, the suspension performances did not require any interpretation and were not meant to generate any meaning. They were experiences in bodily sensation, expressed in bodily action, in varying spaces and in diverse situations. That’s all…

STELARC: Well, this body is a kind of convenient container that you mess with, that you hack, that you experiment with.  But having said that, the performances are not necessarily about this body. So there's the distinction between being the convenient body that's experimented on but it could be any body.  It could be any body suspended.  It could be any body probed with technology. It could be any body on a six-legged walking robot. It doesn't have to be this particular body. But this particular body can conveniently  perform these actions  and allude to these alternative possibilities, without the gender, ethical or social constraints.

STELARC: Well, the idea actually was to insert a sculptural object which became a kind of a simple machine choreography — to deploy it inside the stomach, to occupy a lot of the stomach space. I mean, we could have made something much smaller and swallowed it, but the Stomach Sculpture (1993, for the Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial) was 50mm long and 15mm in diameter as a closed capsule. With the assistance of a friendly endoscopist it was inserted down the esophagus into the inflated stomach. Fully opened in was 75mm and 50mm in diameter. Inside the stomach the object opens and closes, extends and retracts, has a flashing light and a beeping sound. So there was a simple machine choreography inside an organ of the body. An artwork for an organ. A sculpture not for a public space but for a private physiological space. The body not as a site for inscription nor a site for the psyche but simply a site for a sculpture.

STELARC: Oh yes! In fact, it took six insertions to shoot about 15 minutes of video, over a period of 2 days. There will be a video clip in the presentation taking place at Gray Area in San Francisco the evening of this discussion. But unexpected things like—well, if you insert something into your stomach, your stomach is going to produce more and more acidic fluids. So we had to actually withdraw it after every four or five minutes, because of the stomach fluids that built up. It was very uncomfortable, and  you were gagging and you wanted to throw up. Actually it was probably the most uncomfortable performance I've ever done.  Like you I could manage the hooks…

STELARC: No, as you can see! Having said that, though—for the Stomach Sculpture performance, which actually was over two days because the endoscopist was not keen on continuous insertion. And in fact, he decided to stop on the second day because we were scraping the esophagus with this object and there were traces of blood on the endoscope. Anyway, I needed to stay overnight at the clinic to be observed. So that was probably the most,...well, not the most serious one.

The most serious one was with the Ear on Arm project. It got seriously infected—in fact, I was hospitalized for a week. And every hour on the hour I was awakened because my arm needed to be flushed with sterile saline solution. I almost lost an arm for an ear. Because of the inserted microphone into the ear construct, and with wires hanging out from my arm, which stayed there on my return to Australia. It was never meant to be permanent but rather to further test the inserted microphone.

STELARC: Yeah, we did a test during the second surgery and had a microphone implanted in the ear construct. You'll see on the video where the surgeon is speaking to the ear, my arm is wrapped in bandages, I've got a partial plaster-cast, but the ear picks up his voice and wirelessly transmits it. Having said that, it still has not been implemented permanently. There are both biomedical and technical problems to do this elegantly.  Firstly, I imagined or hoped to embed everything in the ear construct, which has proved impossible up till now. Not that theoretically it couldn't be done.  And there are issues of charging the wireless transmitter. Again problems that are not insurmountable. But the extra ear has remained as simply a relief of an ear on my arm.

STELARC: The ear was never meant to be a symbolic kind of presence. So it was never going to be about simply replicating an ear and relocating it on my arm.

STELARC: No, the intent really was to realize this physically and electronically. I have to  admit to having made a career out of being a failure. Nothing that I do turns out the way that I imagine it ha, ha. Having said that—the realm of art is that realm of slippage between intention and actuality. Which also allows for the accidental, the unexpected, to be incorporated. Most of my projects are incomplete. I mean, my Third Hand, begun in 1976, was never fully realized. It has a 290 degree wrist rotation (CW and CCW). It has a pinch release, a grasp, it even has a tactile feedback system for a rudimentary sense of touch. But the Third Hand now is physically positioned and fixed beside my right hand.  But originally the intention was to rotate the hand around the arm as well, which would have given it an extra degree of freedom. And I just ran out of money funding the project…  and I wanted to start performing with my Third Hand. So it was never completed.

Originally the Third Hand was just seen as an... aesthetic attachment for performance. But I tried doing some Japanese calligraphy with the three hands, and writing one word—“EVOLUTION” with each hand simultaneously writing a separate letter. I had to keep my two eyes on what my three hands were doing, because I was writing every third letter coping with the spacing of the three hands. And because that performance [link] was done on a sheet of glass between the artist and the audience, I had to write it back to front.  It was painfully slow and because each letter was a different complexity, I was trying to match the speed of writing the O at the same time as writing an E or a V or an I.

Again, these are aesthetic gestures as to alternative possibilities. I mean, now, in universities, there are “Augmented Humans” labs. This has become a research study. Of course, the sort of raison d'etre for the researchers initially is that they might be able to assist a person in a wheelchair that has a robotic arm attached. So, how can a paralyzed person actuate that robotic arm — especially if they’re quadriplegic? There are all these kinds of research being done on how bodies that are differently-abled can be assisted with these augmentations, and how they can actuate and control them. But this has also become research now into how fully abled bodies can also be augmented with an extra physical and virtual limbs and what unexpected possibilities might eventuate in real world and virtual task environments.

My  own projects are not  conceived as useful, in any prosthetic or robotic context. Having said that, the Third Hand was sophisticated enough at the time to get invitations  to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and the Johnson Space Center in Houston to demonstrate the hand to the Extra Vehicular Activity Group.  The interest was that the hand was EMG actuated, controlled by muscle signals. At that time NASA was more involved with force feedback control.  They were thinking of making spacesuits with extended sleeves so you could attach a mechanical manipulator. The problem with force feedback actuation is that if your hand gets tired, your mechanical hand becomes useless. With EMG  control—with the electrical signals from the muscles, once you learn control, you can generate a signal, you produce a motion…  you can retain that grip until you produce another signal from another muscle.  You don't expend any energy maintaining the grip. 

And also with the Ambidextrous Arm project, engineered and programmed at the ISIR lab in Paris, my fingers bend one way, the thumb rotates, you've got a right hand, but the fingers can bend completely the other way; the thumb can rotate backwards, so you have a left hand and a right hand all in the one design. If you're an amputee and you lose your left hand, why not replace it with an ambidextrous hand?  Sometimes two right hands might better complete a task. At any rate the idea of an ambidextrous hand might be applicable in prosthetics, given you only need to produce one kind of hand.

STELARC: Oh, thank you! It doesn't happen in the art world too often!

STELARC: Oh, thank you! It doesn't happen in the art world too often!

STELARC: You know, I did a project, a Virtual Arm project, where the virtual hand was a kind of ‘fractal hand.’ This virtual arm project was completed in 1992 at the RMIT Advanced Computer Graphics Centre. It was actuated at that time with a pair of data gloves. The right glove generated mimicking movements, whilst the left glove had a gesture recognition command language allowing for additional capabilities. So if I wanted continuous wrist rotation, for example I would motion with my right glove and touch my thumb and first finger with my left glove. Different gestures, for example, enabled stretching the length of the virtual arm and even growing smaller hands on each finger. So it was a kind of fractal hand. The fingers would multiply and get smaller and smaller. The justification was that in a virtual task environment, you might wish to manipulate smaller and smaller virtual objects. With the heads-up display the virtual arm appeared to emanate from my chest. But you needed two arms to actuate one virtual arm ha, ha…

STELARC: When we speak of feeling disembodied operating in virtual space, in fact our bodies are part of a massive embodiment of other bodies, interfaces, wired and wireless media, computational and satellite systems. This is what allows you to perform as your avatar online and experience a feeling of fluidity, smoothness and instantaneousness. But rather than feeling disembodied, it would be more accurately described as feeling differently enabled. It’s an effect of a machinic and computation system. Second Life, for example as an online virtual platform that allows you to perform remotely with other avatars, constructing multiple personas and identities. I did a performance at the Tate Modern in London for the conference on the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Real Life and Second Life — using a Kinect sensor to animate my avatars with my physical gestures. This was in collaboration with an avatar in Upstate NY providing the virtual camera views and another avatar contributing visuals from Melbourne.

How do we frame agency? At this particular time, at this particular place, I'm being interviewed by you. But there's been a series of causal events that have resulted in this happening here and now. Being invited to Gray Area many months ago, coming to San Francisco, Hannah arranging our meeting. You suggesting meeting at a certain hotel and eventually here we are speaking to each other. And I pick up a cup and take a sip of coffee, and I assert my agency. But how this eventuated depends on how we frame it. Sure I made a choice at this particular time, in this particular place and I assert agency. But there have been a series of causal events going back months that allowed me to do this here and now. I think we simplify the world to conveniently operate within it. Our language reinforces this sense of agency. We speak as an “I”. But all this means is “this person”. The word “I” designates this body, it doesn’t indicate an inner essence. Our language categorizes the world by naming it, by naming objects and people. And that allows for a more convenient and effective interaction with the world. But rather than enabling comprehension, categorizing it can also confuse us philosophically. I’m not denying choice. It’s both trivial and important. It’s how we contextually frame it. But it is an outcome of both an accumulation of past events and present unfoldings.

Do know the philosopher Hilary Lawson.

STELARC: He’s an English philosopher. And he says that the way we interact, the way we construct the world, is that we generate closures through making connections. By making particular associations we generate meaning of a reality that is ultimately indeterminate and inaccessible.

STELARC: Perhaps but not sure it would be framed in that way.  He’s certainly not denying reality but rather that it is open to our constructs, to our closures. Donald Hoffman, in a different way asserts that we cannot know reality, as it actually is, because we evolved only to better interact with the world, we have not evolved to be able to access reality as such.

STELARC: Gender hasn’t been a focus for these projects and performances. As an artist you have a particular trajectory, you make a particular contribution. Mine is interrogate issues of biological and machinic embodiment and aliveness. No denying the problematics of gender and its importance. I realise that it’s an inadequate response. But you can’t encompass everything in your practice…

STELARC:  Well, this does tend to happen. There’s a coherent and conceptual continuity with my ideas but I don’t specialise in any one particular medium. I’ve used prosthetics, robotics, biotechnologies and surgery to problematize what a body is and how a body operates. To explore issues of embodiment, agency and identity. What it means to be human. But also the body’s multiple and various machinic couplings.

STELARC: I guess my statement the body has become a contemporary chimera of meat, metal and code might sound cyberpunk ha, ha. Yes, I was pleased that William wrote the intro to the MIT publication. Interestingly,  I don't read science fiction any more!  It's a terrible thing to admit. And of course, I admire Gibson’s ideas and observations. I’ve often quoted his statement that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.  To be honest, it’s difficult enough to keep up with media theory literature, cognitive science and philosophical publications ha, ha.

In a sense, our philosophy is generated largely from our physiology. I mean, we're a bipedal creature, we walk upright. We have dextrous hands to better manipulate with. We have two eyes in the front of our heads. We walk forwards. We are forwards moving and thus future oriented. We don’t walk backwards. We generate expectations and imaginings with the way we perceive and operate in the world. Our physiology, our mobility and dexterity generate and reinforce our curiosity. Just as insects and animals have their own umwelt, their own perceptual and operational experience in the world, so do we. But now of course, how the body is, how humans are embodied and how humans perceive the world is largely determined by our instruments that heighten our senses; our computational systems that extend our cognitive abilities and our machines that amplify our musculature and propel us at speeds beyond the biological. What has determined human civilization has been our artifacts, instruments and machines. So we're just not merely the biological creatures that we nostalgically imagine ourselves to be…

STELARC: As reinforced by philosophers like Bernard Stielgler and McLuhan… Marshall McLuhan  is  one theorist that  I felt was always underestimated as a philosopher. He was seen primarily as a media theorist—a historian of media. Gutenberg Galaxy and writings like that… But a lot of what he  prompted at the time  were picked up by Jean Baudrillard (“Simulations”).