Science Fiction in Performance Art, Part 2: Body beyond capacity.

Stelarc — Amplified Body, Laser Eyes & Third Hand (1985)

Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou) is a Cypriot-Australian performance artist whose work can be understood as a cyberpunk manifesto. His art focuses on how the possibilities of the human body are not enough, and hence it might be possible to modify and extend such possibilities and capacities.

His performances explore various techniques and aspects including body modification through technology and hardware, medical intervention, robotics and biotechnology, etc. In 2007, he even had an ear implanted in his left arm through surgery as well as cell cultivation.

He has received several prizes for his art, mostly because of his avant-garde and post-modern manifestation of an alternative human body. Stelarc explores how the capacities of the human body cand be modified to the point of altering the normal structure of its anatomy. For Stelarc, the human body is obsolete and needs to be adjusted. Here is a brief video of him in the 14th Media Art Biennale, in Wroclaw, Poland, 2011. He talks about his ideas on body modification and his arm:

 

When we contemplate the work of Stelarc, we can ask ourselves, for example:

• Will the human beings get to the point of having to change their bodies to function better?
• Will it be normal, someday, to have cyborg friends or relatives, or even constantly walk among them?
• Will technology grow so much that we will be drowned by it and will not be able to tell what is organic and what is cybernetic?

The work of Stelarc and his manifesto can be connected to the work of Japanese film director Shinya Tsukamoto and his 1989 sci-fi cult classic Tetsuo, the Iron Man; where a man is suffocated by metallic and trashy representations of the invasion of technology:

Still from Japanese cyberpunk flick Tetsuo, the Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Here, you can visit Stelarc's official website and enjoy more of his work. Just click on the following quote by him and transport yourself into his world.

"The body needs to be repositioned from the psycho realm of the biological to the cyber zone of the interface and extension - from genetic containment to electronic extrusion". 
---- Stelarc, 2000.