stelarc talk at henry art gallery, seattle

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