ear on arm, 2008 - image: nina sellars

stelarc: the cadaver, the comatose, & the chimera: avatars have no organs
thursday, october 8, 2009, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
henry art gallery, (henry auditorium), seattle

the australian-based performance artist stelios arcadious AKA 'stelarc' will give a talk tomorrow
at the henry art gallery in seattle entitled 'the cadaver, the comatose, & the chimera: avatars have no organs'.
the artist uses his own body to explore 'human-machine interfaces'. his projects include appending robotic limbs
to himself and the ear implanted in his arm, which was grown partly from his own adult stem cells. this ear will
eventually become a remote listening device for people in other places. 'for example, someone in venice could
listen to what my ear is hearing in melbourne'.

'cadavers can be preserved forever with plastination whilst comatose bodies can be sustained indefinitely
on life-support systems. cryogenically suspended bodies await reanimation at some imagined future date.
donated ova are now fertilized by sperm that were once frozen. the dead, the near-dead, the un-dead
and the yet to be born now exist simultaneously. these phenomena and others have brought us, in the mind
of the artist stelarc, to the age of the cadaver, the comatose and the chimera, a newly-dawned epoch that
will be the subject of this lecture.'

'in a career spanning four decades, stelarc has made art by employing medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics,
virtual reality systems, the internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces
with the body.'


ear on arm, 2008 - image: nina sellars


ear on arm, 2008 - image: nina sellars


ear on arm, 2008 - image: nina sellars

third arm, 1996

exoskeleton, 1998