Design and Art Australia Online

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed and exhibited in Japan, Europe and the United States. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has acoustically and visually probed the body, having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon. He has done 25 Body Suspensions with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in remote locations. He has performed with a Third Hand, a Virtual Arm, a Virtual Body, an inserted Stomach Sculpture and Exoskeleton, a six-legged walking machine.

For Fractal Flesh , as part of Telepolis, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as Ping Body and Parasite probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. The Motion Prosthesis is a compliant upper body servo-mechanism that allows programming of precise, repetitive and accelerated movements of the arms. The Prosthetic Head (an ongoing project) explores issues of awareness and identity. An embodied, somewhat intelligent, conversational agent, which speaks to the person who interrogates with real-time lip-syncing and facial expressions, was exhibited at Sherman Galleries in May 2005.

In 1997, Stelarc was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was artist in residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 2002, he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Laws by Monash University. He has completed visiting artist positions in Art and Technology at Ohio State University (2002-04), and in 2004 he was awarded a two-year Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship. In 2006 Stelarc was Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Writers:

Murray-Cree, Laura

Date written:

2006

Last updated:

2011