Escape Velocity (23 page)

—Bruce Sterling^

Yawning with your mouth sewn shut isn't easy, as Stelarc discovered during his 1979 Event Jor Support Structure. The Australian performance artist spent three days in Tokyo's Tamura Gallery, sandwiched between planks suspended from a tepeelike arrangement of poles, his mouth and eyelids stitched tight with surgical thread. At night, he slept on the gallery floor.

"Interestingly enough," he recounts, "it wasn't so much the painful-ness of the stitching ... or the compression of the body between two pieces of wood but rather the difficulty in yawning . . . that presented a problem." His deep-toned, diabolical laugh bounces off" the walls. "This is something I hadn't considered."^

Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou) is the foremost exponent of cybernetic body art. Decades before virtual reality went pop, he experimented with jerry-built simulation technology at the Caulfield Institute of Technology and, later, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

From 1968 through 1970, he constructed a series of enclosures called Sensory Compartments in which the user was "assaulted by lights, motion, sound" and fabricated helmets fitted with goggles that split the wearer's binocular vision, immersing him or her in a fun-house-mirror world of superimposed images. The artist, a confirmed McLuhanite, describes these devices as the product of a "realization . . . that it was the body's physiological hardware that determined its intelligence, its awareness, and that if you alter this [hardware], you're going to present an alternate perception." This is a reiteration, in so many words, of McLuhan's assertion that

[t]he extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act-the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.^

Proceeding from that proposition, Stelarc has evolved an aesthetic of prosthetics in which "the artist [is] an evolutionary guide, extrapolating new trajectories ... a genetic sculptor, restructuring and hypersensitizing the human body; an architect of internal body spaces; a primal surgeon, implanting dreams, transplanting desires; an evolutionary alchemist, triggering mutations, transforming the human landscape.'"*

His nearly naked body plastered with electrodes and trailing wires, the artist in performance bears a striking resemblance to a Borg, one of the implacable cyborg villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With his Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, Third Hand, Automatic Arm, and Video Shadow, he bodies forth the human-machine hybrid all of us are metaphorically becoming. Less a man than the organic nerve center of a cybernetic system, he literalizes our vision of ourselves as terminal beings, inextricably entangled in the global telecommunications web. In that sense, he is a postmodern incarnation of the archetypal image of Man the microcosm-a naked man, spread-eagled inside a pentagram, which according to J. E. Cirlot is emblematic not only of the analogical relationship between the individual and the cosmos but of "the human tendency towards ascendence and evolution."^

"All the signposts direct us to him," declares John Shirley, in an essay that theorizes Stelarc as the embodiment of cyberpunk's posthuman yearnings, "a chimera grafted together of horror and grace, the synthesis of

erstwhile humanity and tomorrow's humanity strugghng to be born."^ Positioning the artist alongside Survival Research Laboratories as a cultural mutagen "doing the work of science fiction outside the genre," Shirley draws parallels between Stelarc's preoccupation with techno-evolution and the themes of cyborged or genetically engineered body modification treated in SF novels such as Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix and Samuel R. Delany's NovaJ

Stelarc has performed with hulking, industrial robot arms, dodging their potentially bone-shattering swipes. On occasion, his events take place in the midst of sculptural installations of glass tubes crawling with plasma discharges or flashing and flickering in response to signals sent by his body. A cagelike structure perched on the artist's shoulders emits argon-laser pulses. Synchronized to throb in time to his heartbeat, the beams are made, through eyeblinks, facial twitches, and head movements, to scribble curlicues in the air. "Video shadows"-images captured by video cameras positioned above and around him and projected on large screens-are frozen, superimposed, or juxtaposed in split-screen configurations,

A welter of thrrrups, squeals, creaks, and cricks, most of them originating in Stelarc's body, whooshes around the performance space. The artist's heartbeat, amplified by means of an ECG (electrocardiograph) monitor, marks time with a muffled, metronomic thump. The opening and closing of heart valves, the slap and slosh of blood are captured by Doppler ultrasonic sound transducers, enabling Stelarc to "play" his body. For example, one transducer is fastened to his wrist. "By constricting the radial artery of the wrist," he informs, "the sound varies from the normal repetitive 'whooshing' to a 'clicking' as the blood is dammed, with a flooding rush of sound as the wrist is relaxed."^ A kinetic-angle transducer converts the bending of his right knee into avalanches of sound; a microphone, placed over the larynx, picks up swallowing and other throat noises; and a plethysmogram amplifies finger pulse. From time to time, an electronic keening splits the air, wobbling on a single pitch, then zigzagging suddenly upward into a ragged whoop. It is produced by analog synthesizers triggered by "control voltages"-electrical signals modulated by the artist's heartbeat, muscles, and brain waves (translated into EEG, or electroencephalogram, readouts).

Attached to an acrylic sleeve on the artist's right arm, the Third Hand chirrs frantically, its stainless steel fingers clutching at nothingness.

Custom-made by a Japanese manufacturer, the Hand is a dexterous robotic manipulator that can be actuated by EMG (electromyogram) signals from the muscles in Stelarc's abdomen and thighs. It can pinch, grasp, release, and rotate its wrist 290 degrees in either direction, and has a tactile feedback system that provides a rudimentary sense of touch by stimulating electrodes affixed to the artist's arm. Stelarc's left arm, meanwhile, is robotized-jerkily animated by intermittent jolts of electricity from a pair of muscle stimulators. "Voltage is applied to the flexor and biceps muscles," notes Stelarc, "bending the wrist, curling the fingers and jerking the arm up and down involuntarily."^

In recent performances, Stelarc has reached into cyberspace with his Virtual Arm. Developed at RMIT's Advanced Computer Graphics Center, the Arm is a computer-generated "universal manipulator"-a digital cartoon of a humanoid limb-controlled by gestures from a CyberGlove. The Arm can rotate its wrist and fingers continuously; stretch from here to eternity; sprout extra hands or clone an octopuslike tangle of arms; draw lines with its fingertips or shoot spheres out of them.

In Actuate/Rotate: Event for Virtual Body (1993), Stelarc took the next step up the techno-evolutionary ladder. Donning a Polhemus magnetic tracking system whose sensors were attached to his head, torso, and extremities, he interacted with a digital doppelganger that mirrored his every move. The double appeared, alternately, as a wireframe skeleton or a fleshed-out mannequin on a video display monitor. Simultaneously, video cameras fed live images of Stelarc's physical body into the system, and the computer-generated point of view-the virtual camera-was choreographed by his gestures, generating montages of fleshly and ghostly bodies.

Stelarc's performances are pure cyberpunk.' Slowly contorting his body in a series of cyborg mudras, he unleashes an inhuman bedlam that sounds like a brawl between a shortwave radio and a Geiger counter. The twin beams of his "laser eyes" stab into the dark; tendrils of electricity writhe, like living things, inside the sculptural installation's glass tubes; and "video shadows" flit across monitors, now freezing, now stuttering stroboscopically. His arm is yanked upwards, puppetlike, by a burst of electricity while his Third Hand scrabbles at the air. In Stelarc's cybernetic synergism, the distinction between controller and controlled is blurred; he is simultaneously extended by, and an extension of, his high-tech system.

Ironically, the Australian artist's reputation rests on the twenty-five unequivocally low-tech "suspensions" he executed between 1976 and 1988. Reminiscent of the Native American sun dance, these events involved raising the naked artist skyward by cables attached to stainless steel hooks embedded in his skin. Unforgettable evocations of prenatal weightlessness, the primal urge to fly, and space age fantasies of floating in zero gravity, the suspensions were testaments to gravity's victory over the earthbound body.

For each event, Stelarc was skewered at multiple points so that the weight on his hooks was uniformly distributed. In Sitting/Swaying EventJor Rock Suspension (1980), he floated, cross-legged, in a Tokyo gallery, counterbalanced by a gently swaying ring of rocks. In Seaside Suspension: Event Jor Wind and Waves (1981), he swung precariously over the ocean, buffeted by gusts of wind and spattered by crashing waves. In Street Suspension (1984), he swooped, via cable and pulleys, from the fourth floor of one building to another in New York's East Village. And in City Suspension (1985), he hung from a crane two hundred feet above Copenhagen's Royal Theater, describing lazy circles under the watchful gaze of the building's stone sphinxes.

Reflecting on the experience of hovering over Copenhagen, the breeze shivering his cables, he confided:

I really suffer from a fear of heights. ... I kept my eyes closed for the first 10, 15 minutes. . . . 200 feet up, all you could hear was [the] whooshing sound of the wind, the creaking of the skin gently turning and swaying in the wind.'^

In each event, the pain was excruciating during liftoff and touchdown; in most cases, it took about a week for the wounds to heal and Stelarc to recuperate. Other body artists have pushed the threshold of pain even further: Chris Burden, the avant-garde's answer to "Evel" Knievel, set himself on fire, tried to breathe water, was crucified atop a Volkswagen Beetle, and, for his 1971 piece Shoot, arranged for a friend to shoot him at close range with a rifle, blowing a chunk of flesh out of his arm. "[A] guy pulls a trigger, and in a fraction of a second, I'd made a sculpture," marveled Burden.^^

Body art, a performance art subgenre that emerged in the late sixties and flourished in the seventies, sprang from conceptual art, which

rejected the commodified art object for an immaterial-and therefore theoretically unsalable-art of ideas. Body art was conceived of as intangible, transitory sculpture, fashioned by the artist from his or her own body and physical actions. Early body artists, most of whom were male, exhibited a curious detachment from the flesh that was their clay, a tendency that recalled the mechanical impersonality of minimalist painting, with its uniformly applied colors and hard-edged, rectilinear compositions. Shunning expressionistic or autobiographical impulses, they created works that resembled endurance tests (for the audience as well as the performer) or scientific experiments: Terry Fox's Push Piece (1970) consisted of the artist shoving, with all his might, against a brick wall until he was overcome by exhaustion; Bruce Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1968) is self-explanatory.

At the same time, body art constituted a backlash against the minimalist mandate that art be reduced to utter neutrality through the use of uniform "color fields" and flat, geometric shapes. This opposing tendency impelled the genre toward the ever more spectacular aesthetic exemplified by Chris Burden.

The feminist bodyworks of the seventies were as fervently political and unreservedly personal as earlier, male-dominated body art had been either coolly formal or histrionically gory. They evidenced a growing recognition of the body as war zone, a conviction asserted in the feminist axiom "the personal is political." The art critic Thomas McEvilley writes, "Much women's [performance art] relates to what in feminist literary criticism is called 'writing the body' As against the male assertion of abstract painting or modernist literature as essentially otherworldly endeavors aimed at immaterial realities . . . women artists restored focus to the reality of the body and with it to social and personal realities.'"^

Recasting her body "as a source of varying emotive power," Carolee Schneemann parried conventional images of woman as the weaker vessel in works that excavated prepatriarchal ages or cultures for archetypes of female empowerment.'^ Performances such as Eye Body (1963), a neo-shamanic ritual in which the recumbent artist, daubed with paint and writhing with snakes, personated a statue of a Cretan goddess, prefigured the passionate interest among feminist body artists in the Great Goddess, the Earth Mother, and other pre-Christian deities. In New Age feminist

narratives, the image of aprocreative nature goddess is often counterpoised with the stereotype of an angry god of war whose shock troops are Culture and Technology. "[I]t's no accident that the most technological, militaristic Western 'culture' was destroying all these ancient goddess sites," Schnee-mann observed, of America's bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War.*"*

A brief digression on body art is essential to any discussion of an artist whose signature works involve piercing his body with hooks and hoisting it high to dangle like a side of beef from a meat rack. There are obvious comparisons to be made between the aesthetic of extremes implicit in Burden's gonzo body art and the gut-clenching spectacle of Stelarc's suspensions, painful even to behold; between the minimalist objectification of the flesh in male body artists' flatly reportorial documentation of their activities and Stelarc's almost clinical disengagement from his physical self (in his essays and interviews, it is always ''the body," never ''my body").

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of characteristic body art by New Age or ecotopian feminists with Stelarc's work is highly instructive. The former harks back to ancient matriarchies and prehistoric goddess worship for a vision of the feminine unmediated by the male gaze, while the latter looks to a future just beyond the rim of possibility, made possible by technology. The former is heavily invested in a mystical ecopolitics symbolized by a loamy, generative Earth, while the latter dramatizes a theory of escape velocity in which the body falls away like a rocket stage as Homo sapiens accelerates into "pan-planetary" posthuman evolution.