Stelarc, Stockholm, 2002. © Carl A
Stelios Arkadiou, also known as "Stelarc", is an Australian gentleman-artist who's gone to great lengths to experiment with the fundamental facts of human perception and even of life itself. As contemporary art continues to become more and more evanescent and ephemeral, it's refreshing to encounter someone who not only has genuinely weird and wonderful ideas but also the guts to throw himself into the maelstrom of hardcore psycho-physical causality. This civilised and highly sympathetic Dr. Frankenstein of the art world should, in the best of all worlds, receive the Nobel prize (exactly for what is not as relevant). But, as has been stated elsewhere many times, this is not the best of all worlds. Instead, struggling on in his grandiose transphysical machinations, Stelarc remains an eclectic enigma to the world. When in Stockholm in 2002, Stelarc agreed to chat for a while about his ideas. Not even my half-hearted attempts at playing the "proto-natural" Devil's advocate could make him change his humble attitude and will to thoroughly explain. His warm and bellowing laughter, guaranteed to silence an entire café, could probably, in its strangeness, be seen/heard as symptomatic of someone who is either extremely human or an artificial avatar. Stelarc, I think, is a bit of both.
Let’s start in the beginning... How did your interest in art arise?
I was always interested in being an artist but at first this was a very naive idea. We thought that art was just about drawing and painting very well. In art school my ideas changed a lot. I discovered that I wasn’t a good painter (laughs). But I was always interested in the human body, not only as a medium of expression but also as a being of experience. In performance you not only represent the body as an image or as a symbol or metaphor but you experience the body directly. You take the physical consequences of your performances. If you want to suspend your body or put something inside your body or extend your body, these are not easy things to do. The body has to experience and articulate the interface. That was really the beginning of my interest in the body and performance. I had a general interest in the evolution of the body. To see the body as a kind of evolutionary architecture for operation and awareness in the world. If we alter the architectural body, we adjust its awareness. Just as when we add technological extensions, the body can perform remotely or can project its physical presence, extrude its voice... These are bits of technology that alter the biological architecture and enable us to perform in very alternate ways.
Is it correct to say that there was a Zeitgeistish focus on this in the mid- to late 60s, with the body in active performance? I’m thinking of Hermann Nitsch, Coum Transmissions, you and many others... In different places but at the same time, there were occurrences of using the body as an almost primoridal tool. Why do you think that happened at about the same time?
I think there were various reasons. If we have an historical overview, we can see that there were performances connected to Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, sort of futuristic, body performances, body ballets... Of course the Viennese actionists. In the early 70s we had performance art as we know it in the visual arts, with people like Chris Burden, Vito Acconci... In the late 60s, you had an increasing etherialisation of the art object. Art became more and more minimal and also art became more and more conceptual. When you reach the end of minimal and conceptual art, there’s nothing for the body to play with except itself. In a way, the body turns to itself after the modernist direction of minimalist and conceptual art. In a way, this was my beginning point. It also had a lot to do with my individual concerns, my individual inabilities to use other kinds of media. I was always very interested in and envious of athletes, gymnasts, dancers, singers who’d use their own body in their artistic expression.
Before you started with the machinery and external gadgetry, you started simply with altering your perceptions, with body suspensions etc. During these, did you have any illuminations or insights that took you further?
The first things I did were in fact based on technology. The first things I made were helmets and goggles that altered you biocular perceptions. And a compartment that the body was inserted in and which had a revolving dome with electronic sounds and changing light. This idea of modifying the body’s perception and experience were really the first objects that I made very soon after art school. Between 1973 and 1975, I made three films of the inside of my body, inside my stomach, my lungs, and my colon. At that point I guess there was already an exploration of the physical parameters of the body, both the internal and the external. The suspension events were part of a series of performances which also involved sensory deprivation and physically difficult actions. The first suspensions were in fact with ropes and harnesses. I’d done hooks before that too. It wasn’t like it was first the suspensions and then the technological, it was more like an oscillation between on the one hand determining the physical parameters of the body and on the other hand exploring extensions of the human body. The realisation that these performances generated was not an empowering of the body or a kind of shamanistic experience or a yogic kind of spirituality. It was rather that the body was obsolete. We’re at the limits of biological bodies. Our perception and our philosophy was largely determined by our biological structure.
Isn’t there are difference between using external things like helmets and goggles which create, one could say, a creative distortion and the hooks which must surely work through pain?
They also create a disorder in the body, a stretching of the body. In a way, that was a physical analogue to extending the body in other ways. You extend the body’s form by stretching the skin. There was no methodical or modernist logic about this. It was really an oscillation of concerns...
When we talk about the body being or becoming obsolete, how do you look upon concepts like soul or spirit?
The more and more performances I do, the less and less I think I have a mind of my own nor any mind at all in the traditional metaphysical sense. In other words, one of the consequences of filming the inside of the body was the experience of a hollow body. One of the experiences of inserting a sculpture inside the stomach was that the body was no longer a host for a psyche or a soul but simply for an artistic object. I think that the words mind or self or soul really are words that describe certain sophisticated and subtle behaviours. In other words, I don’t think these are actual entities but rather categories of behaviour. If you’re a spiritual person, you behave in a certain way. You might have a religion, you might fast, you might consider things like life after death and so on. If we say you’re intelligent, it means that you act in a certain rational way, in a certain appropriate way in certain circumstances. What our langauage does is on the one hand to allow us to categorize the world to help to clarify our experiences. In doing so it often confuses us philosophically. We mistake a category for an entity. Profoundly, we do not have a mind. Profoundly, we do not have a self or a soul, because these are not things we possess. These are ways of describing and explaining our behaviour. For example: When one person says ”I go here” or ”I make a sculpture” or ”I give a lecture in Stockholm”, ”I” means only this body. ”I” only designates this. It’s a huge leap of metaphysical imagination to say that ”I” is in fact something inside the body. The word ”I” is only a word and it refers to this, the body. ”You” refers to that. To say that ”you” refers to a spiritual entity or a self or a mind or a platonic homunculus is a huge leap of imagination.
But wouldn’t you in a way agree that your work is in fact very metaphysical, although not in a traditional way? It deals with the physical and tries to clear away illusions.
Again, it depends on how one uses language. Certainly, there is an exploration of the physical in an alternate way. ”Metaphysical” though, is a kind of culturally rooted word, generally referring to the spiritual life beyond the physical. In that sense, I’m not so interested in the metaphysical.
We were talking yesterday slightly about the idea that time is moving faster or at least the human perception of time is that it’s moving faster. Information overflow and technological inventions that allow faster communication... The means are certainly there. What would you say will be the result of this? A good thing or a bad thing?
It’s difficult to evaluate this occurrence of the experience of time speeded up in either a good or a bad way. I think it’s happening because of technological developments. What we really need to do is develop strategies for managing this kind of situation rather than to say ”It’s good” or ”It’s bad”. If you measure time in smaller and smaller increments and if the meditative or the reflective moment between intention and action collapses, then the body becomes more and more a stimulus response machine. In other words, things are happening to it faster and it has to respond faster. The brain is relatively slow. The body’s metabolism is relatively slow compared to the precision and speed of machines and instruments. I think this is one of the problems, to try to develop new interfaces between the body and its machines, to cope with the slow metabolism of the body.
Do you see the technological development as just a very natural development, a stage in evolution?
It depends where we want to arbitrarily draw the boundaries. If we have evolved, obviously it’s as biological creatures. The human body can be seen as a part of natural evolution. If the human body develops techniques and constructs technologies, then by definition technology is just as natural as the body. On the other hand, we can make some kind of distinction. Some of the materials and some of the machines and instruments that we fabricate and construct aren’t initially available and they don’t occur in the first phase of evolutionary development. In some ways, it’s a kind of post-evolutionary stage. If we augment the biological apparatus of the human body with technological components, then we are constructing an extended architecture for operation and awareness of the world, where the body can perform beyond the boundaries of the skin, beyond the local space that it occupies.
Kids who’ve grown up with fast-paced editing on TV and computer games... It’s all presented and used in an incredibly fast pace. They seem to be able to integrate more information, and faster. From a Darwinian point of view, the survivors are those with the strongest will to power and the greatest capacity to adapt...
I think this is a relatively small period of evolutionary time to imagine what kinds of effects technology is having directly on the body. We can say that the machines and instruments that are developed now might enable us to perform extended operations in the future generations. We can’t at the moment really claim that technology is really making the biological body significantly speedier or significantly altered in its basic functions. I think this question is still very open. What we’re seeing at the moment are relatively trivial effects. If people are using their thumbs more in sending SMS-es, that doesn’t mean it’ll be very significant. Developments are happening so quickly that a skill today is obsolete tomorrow. If we played with our thumbs for a few million years then we might see a selective effect. The dynamics of cultural and technological change supersede and become faster than the evolutionary changes.
Do you think that science today has any other value than as a possible profitmaker?
I think that’s a simplistic way of looking at science. There are lots of human activities driven by economic and consumerist-capitalist desires. One can argue that a lot of the miniaturisation in computer technology for instance, has been capitalist and consumerist-driven. But the final result is that we all have very small and powerful machines where we can be subversive, where we can hack into the system, where we can construct new kinds of communication. One can argue that there’s an economics of art as well as one of science. What’s interesting about the scientific community is that it generates information that always has to be tested by a community of other scientists. This is a very rigorous and methodical kind of system. The quality of scientific research always remains high because of this testing and investigative process. Art functions in a totally different way.
Considering your project "Movatar" as a potential soldier, and other commercial useages in prosthetics and warfare...
You have to consider that there are political and military technologies that are being especially developed for these sorts of things. My ”inverse capture system”, the idea of an avatar performing in a physical body... These are an alternate possibility. The third hand or the extended arm, these don’t really have utilitarian functions. If they were to have utilitarian functions you would design them in a somewhat different way. The Movatar is not good military technology. It would have to be designed in such a different way. Recently they’ve turned creatures like cockroaches and fish into surveillance objects by implanting a processor controlling the direction in which the cockroach or fish moves, with alternating electrical currents and then having pin-size cameras mounted on their backs. They’ve even now done this with mammals, with mice. So you can actually direct a mouse now with electrical stimulation and you can turn it into an object of violence or force. It could also be useful for exploring earthquake ruins but it might also be used for military purposes. With all of these things, it’s in the detail and in the specific use. I don’t think any art projects ever really become direct military or political applications.
Have you ever been approached?
No. All of my projects and performances are a little too... They’re never in the direct realm of pure research or for utilitarian use. In that way, it’s very unlikely that any of these projects would be developoed for any other kinds of use. Look at the six-legged walking robot... This is a very big robot. It weighs 600 kilograms. It’s probably the largest six-legged walking robot with a human robot. It’s jerking, it’s relatively slow, it can only function on fairly flat ground. There wouldn’t really be any utilitarian use for it. It’s interesting for me because it explores the idea of navigating spaces. Not with a human bipedal gait but with an insect-like six-legged machine locomotion. By translating arm gestures into movements. All of these have esthetic explorations in mind rather than utilitarian uses.
In terms of your own creative process, how do you come up with ideas? Can you find a creative pattern?
I’ve never really been interested in observing the creative process. What we call creative is a process which explores the alternate, the ambiguous, the surprising, the unpredictable... I’m not so interested in the obvious or the utilitarian use of technology, so then I think of other ways of using it, other ways of constructing it. There’s a new project called ”The Prosthetic Head”. Artificial Intelligence has been around for a while. There’s the famous Eliza program and there’s a perfection of 3D-modelling. Taking all of these possibilities and then combining them into this project of a prosthetic head. The head will look like my head. It will be an installation of a very large head. The head will look like me. It will make different sorts of expressions. It will have lip synching and speech synthesis and an artificial intelligence database where someone who interrogates the head will elicit a verbal response and a behavioural response. It will speak to the person who asks it questions. Hopefully it will also be able to learn from the conversation it has. Any new words or situations will be added to its database. This can be another way of exploring prosthetic augmentation or prosthetic distinction, which includes a virtual actual interface, just as Movatar did. But Movatar was an inverse motion capture system primarily having to do with the movement of limbs. Here, it’s more to do with verbal and facial communications. The idea that the human body can converse in a seemingly meaningful way with a virtual entity. This installation will be completed for ”Transcinema”, a festival in San Francisco in the middle of October. I’m interested in the ambiguity between intention and action or the physical and the imaginary or the actual and the virtual. This prostehtic head will play on all of these things. You see it and it looks like my head but it doesn’t exactly look like me or speak like me or make my behavioural gestures. It approximates them and it’s seemingly meaningful but it really isn’t. These sorts of things interest me. How convincing must an intelligent pageant have to be before one accepts it as a living entity? In other words: If this head looks like me, speaks like me, has my laugh, it becomes a seductive surrogate of my head. It has the advantage that it doesn’t have to be in one place. It can be situated on a website for instance. It can be somewhere for everyone or it can proliferate in physical spaces where you can have a kind of physical exchange, a physical experience. It’s a project that further explores the idea of a prosthesis. In Movatar the body itself becomes a prosthesis for manipulating the behaviour of an avatar. Before that, I had bits of technology attached to my body or inside my body. I’ve had prosthetic attachments or insertions. Here, the body itself becomes a prosthesis for an intelligent avatar.
Are you familiar with the company in America called ”Real Dolls”?
No.
It started out as an advanced form of sex doll. But the customers seem to want the dolls for much more, other kinds of company, as they are so well done, so accurate.
What’s interesting for me is not that the virtual avatars are totally convincing but rather that they’re convincing enough to create a disruption between the actual and the virtual. They’re accurate enough, so that they focus your attention on what makes them real or seemingly real. I’m very fascinated by these kinds of automatons, whether they’re mechanical or virtual. These automatons are becoming, in effect, so convincingly real that they focus your attention on why tehy’re not real and why they fail.
When one looks at your textual explanations, one comes across terms like ”Absent”, ”Obsolete”, ”Invaded”, ”Involuntary”... Can one here perceive almost a hatred for the human body?
Absolutely not. Quite the opposite. It’s actually neither a hatred nor a simplistic acceptance of the body. When people see your body suspended by hooks or that they see you inserting things into your body or when you hear me say that the body is obsolete, often people assume that there’s a kind of loathing for the body. It’s really quite the opposite. They think there’s a yearning for disembodiment. But again, quite the opposite. It’s not about yearnings for disembodiment or going beyond the body as such. When I say that the body is obsolete, what I really mean is that this for and these functions are proving to be inadequate in a technological terrain of fast, precise and powerful machines. Information measured in nanoseconds and lightyears, where it’s beyond their subjective experience. Can we construct bodies that can subjectively experience these extended informational forms? Can we construct bodies that have a great longevity? Why should a body arbitrarily be in good health for only 75 years? This has nothing to do with a spiritual yearning for transcendence or an extropian sci-fi yearning for disembodiment. It’s simply that if you examine the engineering and architecture and operation of the body, it’s very limited. We can only do minutes without air, maybe a week without water, maybe a month without food. If our internal temperature varies only a few degrees, we’re in deep trouble. If we lose 10% of our body fluids, we’re dead. Our survival parameters are very, very slim. We’re very vulnerable to bacteria and viruses in the environment. I’m not about bigger and better bodies in the medical or military sense but rather speculating and tentatively exploring alternate possibilities, alternate structures, alternate interfaces.
Have you come across any interesting findings in terms of longevity?
Not really. Not in the medical sense. You read theories about the genes having a kind of clock and also the relationship between metabolism and longevity. Generally speaking, creatures with a higher metabolism have shorter lifespans. There’s also a theory that all mammals have approximately the same number of heartbeats in a life. It’s not really all conclusive but they’re interesting generalisations of the human condition. One interesting thing philosophically is of course this: if we fertilise the egg outside of the human body and we go a step further and we nurture the embryo and the foetus totally outside of the womb, then technically life begins without a birth. If we can replace malfunctioning organs of the body with replacable components or transplants, then technically the body need not die, except for in accidents. We can’t eliminate accidents. In other words, we have to, in a sense, redefine existence as neither beginning with birth nor ending with death. This analogue birth, maturing, declining and death is no longer what we mean by existence. Perhaps existence then becomes only effective operation. You are effectively operational in the world or you’re not. A more digital definition. I think there are some interesting conceptual or philosophical implications. For example, the idea of developing a kind of new synthetic skin. A skin with only a couple of capabilities. It’s permeable to oxygen so the skin can breathe through its pores. Secondly it might have a sophisticated photosynthetic capability that can convert light and moisture in the air into chemical nutrients for the body. Our skin does this in producing vitamin K for the body, through the skin, with sunlight. Imagine if this were a sophisticated photosynthetic skin that was permeable to oxygen. Then you would literally hollow out the human body with this new skin. You would not need lungs to breathe, you would not need gastro-intestinal tracts for nourishment, you would not need a circulatory system to convey oxygen throughout the body. Oxygen would already be distributed throughout the body. By constructing a synthetic skin one could totally hollow out the human body. It would be a very seductive strategy because a hollow body would be a better host for the technology one can put in (laughs)...
You’ve always been the protagonist in your own projects. Have you ever considered taking everything one step further and actually making a transplant, a genetically improved organ?
As an artist, what I’m really interested in is not some kind of sci-fi speculation but rather see what’s plausible at the moment. In other words: what can be constructed now? What kind of interfaces can you experience? And then you can articulate this. It’s not enough to simply have ideas. Maybe in 50 years’ time, with stem cell technology, we’ll be able to grow an organ, not only eyes and ears and noses but perhaps a complete heart with all its complexities. A lot of this is speculation right now. But the extra ear project is plausible right now. There are already reconstructive techniques to construct it. These techniques are available. What is the problem is the kind of conservatism that prevails in the medical community. The ethical considerations for them. Cosmetic surgery is now accepted. If you just wanted to change the shape of your nose or make your lips fatter, then that’s OK. But if you want to construct an extra feature, this crosses over from the cosmetic to the monstrous. For the medical community, at least. Our cyborgs today are experiments made by the medical community on the ill and the aged. I hope some time in the future they will allow artists as well to be experimented on (laughs...)
Is your work often met by dystopian criticism?
Yes, but I think it’s something stemming from the popular press and from science fiction in general. There is a kind of dystopian discourse that accompanies the popular press, the mass media and science fiction writing because it’s more interesting. I’m neither interested in utopian blueprints for a perfect world nor dystopian scenarios of computers taking over. There are different cyborgian constructs. The traditional one is a medical, military cyborg, a body that has undergone some dramatic accident and its organs are replaced and it’s transformed into a cyborg. A medical military model. Some unexpected directions like micro-miniaturisation of technology, like nanontechnology, introduce another possibility. That technology in the future might be invisble because it’ll be inside the body. The body becomes a host for its machines. The internal landscape of the body becomes the new space for micro-miniaturised nanotechnology robots. A future cyborg may not look different externally but it will be recolonised and augmented by these micro-machines. This is not unusal. We already have colonies of microbes and bacteria and viruses inside the body. To introduce nano-machines would mean to augment the bacterial environment and to construct surveillance systems for the body that at the moment it doesn't have. It doesn’t have adequate surveiilance for pathological changes in chemistry, temperature or blockages in the circulation system. Generally speaking, what it detects is far too late. If you have symptoms, then the pathological condition has developed too long. I see nano-machines as a way of surveillance and of maintaining and extending the body’s structure. A cyborg might be a biological body with all its machinery inside instead of outside. Another possibility is that machines and bodies also generate images and imagine images that are increasingly imbued with an artificial intelligence. An image is a wrapping of software to make that code visible. Imagine that the posthuman will not be determined by the realm of biological bodies or the realm of comupters and robots but rather by the realm of intelligent avatars in the medium of the intellect. With these intelligent images the avatars will replicate, proliferate and operate literally with the speed of light. One of the problems will be how can we interface to these avatars whose operations far exceed our subjective experience and the metabolic operations of our bodies? That’s another scenario of what a cyborg can be. It may not be a body or a machine. It might be an intelligent avatar.
Concerning artificial intelligence... Do you think it would be a good thing to go in and program a thing like ”will”?
A word like will, a word like desire, a word like curiosity... These are words that describe certain kinds of behaviours in certain situations. It’s not really a matter of programming will or desire or intention but rather, in a sense, constructing entities that can generate and perform these kinds of behaviors. The effect will occur. Curiosity was said to have evolved because creatures were mobile. Being mobile they explore the world. They search, they navigate and they move through the world. A mobile creature has different points of view and constructs the world in a three-dimensional way. One evolutionary explanation of what we call a curious creature is one that is moving, one that is mobile. What’s been interesting recently is a shift from the idea of artificial intelligence, which in a sense focusses attention on the so called mental processes, to artificial life. I don’t see artifical life as a kind of alternative to artificial intelligence but rather a superseding of an initial approach that was not succesful. Initially, artificial life was examined by constructing virtual entities in the medium of computer space and electronic space, constructing a virtual world for a virtual entity and then seeing how it changes its behavior. How it socialises, how it develops and so on. This way of examining artificial life was not very successful because you could never create a very complex artificial world. Already we have a complex world. Why not make simple little robots, put them in the complex world and then see how that works? Now, artifical life is explored more and more hy making actual insect-like robots and inserting them into the environment. Why should we be interested in insect-like architectures? We observe insects and see that they form complicated individual and social roles and collaborations. Why do insects do this? An ant’s behavior is sophisticated because the world is complex. It’s the interaction of a simple entity with a complex world that generates interesting behaviour. We construct simple robots, put them in a complex world and see what kinds of behaviours can be generated. In humans, we have a genetic repertoire for moving in the world but we have all sorts of social and cultural constraints and colourings and modulations of our repertoire. One could argue that our behaviour and largely all of our actions are externally driven or modulated. In some ways then, we can be both seen as zombies and cyborgs simultaneously. A zombie body is a body that has no mind of its own, that performs involuntarily. We have never had free will, free agency in the romantic way that we believe we had it. A lot of our behaviour is involuntary, is habitual, is automatic. In a way we’re zombies. Ever since we evolved as hominids with bipedal locomotion, two limbs, we became manipulators and we began to construct technology. Technology is from the very beginning what it means to be human. We have never been biological bodies, really. What it means to be human is to construct tools, artifacts, to use language and so on. In a way then, we have always been cyborgs. We fear the involuntary, we fear the automatic but we fear what we have always been and what we have already become. We have always been zombies and we have already become cyborgs.
We’ve seen a lot of body modifications of lighter kinds these past two decades. You yourself have made an internal sculpture. Do you think that this kind of more substantial body modification will become more generally prevalent in the future?
I can see that. The internal sculpture that we constructed was an artistic addition to the body. I think that body modification and body piercing are general attributes of our subculture now but in one way we can see these modifications as neo-primitive affirmations in an increasing video- and virtual world. On the other hand one can see these modifications and piercings as a cyborgian impulse, meshing metal with meat. It can both be seen in the primitive sense and in a cyborgian sense.
I was thinking of the Sherman gallery... What exactly is sold?
It’s a problem. My art is managed by the Sherman gallery in Sydney but it’s difficult as a performance artist to earn a living from your artwork. On the one hand museums say that they don’t want to pay you too much money for a performance because it’s ephemeral. They also don’t want to pay too much for the documentation because it’s not the actual performance. Performance art as a mainstream kind of activity came and went in the 70s. This was not enough time for museums to come up with a strategy of sustaining performance artists. It’s a problem. I guess in the last five or six years I’ve done lots of creations and robots. These objects might be sold to museums. But I haven’t been successful in selling my third hand because I haven’t yet received the value I think it deserves. The prosthetic head will also be an installation that could be in a museum or a gallery. Jean Sherman has tried very hard. She initially made a portfolio of prints. She’ll have an exhibition of these prints in her gallery. But it’s difficult... I do get an occasional grant. But I barely break even. I’ve been a full time artist for 14-15 years but it’s been a real struggle financially.
Just as I need special training to understand what a subatomic particle physicist is talking about or to understand some of the cosmological models of the beginning of the universe, so does a scientist require a knowledge of postmodern discourse and a knowledge of contemporary art practice to understand what art is. I’ve been to seminars where famous scientists have had their ideas of contemporary art really exposed. Their idea of contemporary art went as far as expressionism. They had no idea what contemporary art practice is, as I had no idea of some of the mathematical modelling they were talking about. Being a spcialist is necessary in a world of information overload. It’s also an effective stragety to recognise patterns, like Marshall McLuhan talked about. Just to be able to cope with all this information. Collaboration between specialist informations is necessary to understand what’s going on. If you’re only a philosopher of metaphysics, I think that’s become completely irrelevant these days. The most interesting philsophers are those who take into account the findings of different kinds of sciences.
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