Stelarc - extending the body

OK. The readings have helped ... a bit. I still say he's a strange strange man, but as they say, it takes all sorts to make a world, and if nobody was a little on the extreme side, then we'd never progress anywhere.

I've just finished reading Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford's Extended body: Interview with Stelarc which was surprisingly accessible and understandable.

I'd heard about Stelarc's suspension events, but hadn't realised that he'd started off working with ropes and harnesses. He switched to hooks through the skin after coming across Hindu Indian piercing practices (presumably something like the festival of Thaipusam as celebrated in Malaysia and Singapore) as a way of reducing the visual clutter of the ropes and harnesses - as Stelarc puts it, "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." So I guess for Stelarc, the hooks enable his artwork to focus on the act of suspension rather than the technicality of achieving suspension. Although the grotesquerie factor rather makes one wonder if this is the case - yes, the visual appearance of the performance is simplified and the act of suspension is the focal point of attention - but to my mind, it's the focus because everyone is thinking "OOOUUUCHHHH!". Hmmm. Apparently with the Indian (and also North American) rituals, there's a key element of trance which results in participants feeling no pain, experiencing little bleeding and no post-event scarring. Seems that Stelarc does not go into trances for his performances. In the interview, he states: "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. I mean, I don't take any anaesthetics, I don't chant or get into altered states"

He also talks of his suspension events linking primal yearnings and contemporary reality - primitive suspension rituals relating to a primal desire for floating and flying compared to present day zero-gravity floating of astronauts... 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." (Hmm. I was having a thought when I started typing this but it seems to have run away. Maybe it'll allow itself to be recaptured later on...).

I found it interesting that while reading this interview with Stelarc - and the other readings I've gone through so far for this week's class (most notably "What do cyborgs eat?" by Margaret Morse) - that what has most been brought to the fore in my own mind are two of my favourite TV shows - Buffy and Dark Angel. The Buffy episode I was especially thinking of was the one where Willow starts an internet relationship - which turns out to be a demon trapped in the internet - from a flesh body, he has been trapped within a book, and has been released into the internet through scanning the text - kind of like what Morse seems to be heading towards in her article, where the body in this age of technology has become more or less obsolete as we more and more focus on the life of the mind and our bodies are more and more neglected by lack of maintenance and poor diet. Dark Angel of course is all to do with genetic engineering and in the second series looks at synthetic implants, and nanotechnology. Not sure that I'll bring up my pop-culture meanderings in class though - I don't think my thoughts are well-enough ordered yet.

Don't think I can quite come at Stelarc's stomach sculpture yet though... that's GOT to be uncomfortable. I hope none of the bits drop off into his system... uuurrrrghhh.

An addition - 11:54pm
Thinking more about pop culture and how it tackles human vs machine and human-machine combinations... It may just be the shows I watch and the books I read, but there seems to be a clear consensus in shows and literature which does more than just tell a catchy story in favour of the human - in Buffy, technology is a useful tool - like magic, when it becomes more than just a way of obtaining necessary information, when it takes over the human, it leads to evil or at least wrongness and must be stamped down - cf Warren and the robot girl (and of course The Trio), Spike's Buffybot, Willow's internet 'boyfriend', Ted. CS Lewis' This Hideous Strength pits the human (and Christian) against the horrific might of science and the fascination it holds for mankind which gives it the power to largely do whatever inhuman things are required in the name of knowledge. Even a film like Terminator 2 supports the humanity-rather-than-machines ethos, with Arnie's cyborg gradually developing human-like characteristics (which the bad-guy cyborg never does) - but ultimately remaining machine and so being destroyed, leaving the humans in possession of the field - which hopefully due to the machine's assistance will remain human and avoid the destruction wreaked in the possible future where the machines take over. And of course The Matrix - where computers are 100% the bad guy and while humans use technology, it's to bring about the destruction of the machines and re-establish a society based on human values.

Actually, thinking of Buffy - ever noticed how many of the villains represent the human (or "human") being taken over by the non-human? Angel-turned-Angelus the Mayor-turned-big-snake, Adam (the cyborg par excellence), Ben-turned-Glory, Bad Willow? I can't quite remember the details of Season 7, but 5 out of 6 ain't bad!

Probably babbling here. Apologies if all this sounds incredibly trite - it *is* the middle of the night & I'm just trying to make some sense of what I'm reading!