FREE STELARC: THE MONOGRAPH PDF William Gibson,Julie Clarke,Timothy Druckrey,Jane Goodall,Amelia Jones,Arthur Kroker,Marilouise Kroker,Brian Massumi,Marquard Smith | 280 pages | 31 Oct 2007 | MIT Press Ltd | 9780262693608 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States (PDF) Stelarc: The Monograph, The MIT Press, , Preface | marquard smith - Stelarc's art starts from and continually returns to a point at which Stelarc: The Monograph and body have not yet split or at which they have rejoined. His medium is the body as a sensible concept. Problem: In what way is the body an idea and the idea bodily? In what way can probing one extend the other? To say, as Stelarc does, Stelarc: The Monograph technology Stelarc: The Monograph our human nature' and that there is no natural, metaphysically and biologically given human body, is not to suggest that the relation between technology and the human is always and everywhere the same. Different technologies make possible different ways of conceiving this relation at different times. Nor is Stelarc's function to render visible the 'originary technicity' of the human. This would be to reduce his performances to an endless repetition of a past, and a future, that is always the same. What Stelarc performs with his investigations into how different developments in technology robotics, the Internet, virtual reality systems, prosthetics, medical instruments and procedures alter our conception of the human and of the human body, is the way in which technology escapes the control of its inventors to produce unseen and unforseeable changes and possibilities; and thus a future - for Stelarc: The Monograph self, the human, for the body and for technology - which can be neither programmed nor predicted. Stelarc's performance of prosthetic selfhood can be described as the abandonment of the idea of self-possession and self-mastery. It creates a space for an encounter with, even intrusion of, what is radically different from the self and yet Stelarc: The Monograph remains, paradoxically, in some sort of relationship with the self. By denying the mastery of the self of the artist, auteur, creator, demiurgeStelarc does not give up what he previously possessed: he rather resigns from a certain idea of not only the performance artist but also the human as only singular and autonomous. His 'hospitality' - to borrow Derrida's term which he employs to describe precisely this kind of ethical opening - should not, however, be interpreted as an act of good will but rather as a compulsion to respond to the inevitability of ethics and a decision not to commit violence against it. Stelarc: The Monograph Virilio's terms, 'A real artist never sleeps in front of new technologies but deforms them and transforms them', and 'If one is a critic one doesn't ever accept things at face value and one Stelarc: The Monograph ever sleep in front of new technologies'. For Stelarc, new technologies are most significant as catalysts empowering the artist to work Stelarc: The Monograph spaces of certaintly', 'between biology and silicon-chip cirfcuitry', in projects exploring'those thresholds, those zones of slippage, those areas of interface, with anxiety, with hope and desire, but without any romantic nostalgia'. As part of that project. Stelarc's suspensions return intelligence to the degree zero of sensation. There thought rejoins action, the body rejoins matter, and the animate rejoins the inanimate. These no sooner rejoin than reunfold, divergently reextend, to enter into extrinsic and often mutually exclusive relations with one another in keeping with and revising the combinatoric of their possibility. Suspension is the countergravity ground Stelarc: The Monograph of differential emergence. Rather than conceptualize the body as an effect of computer modelling as in the works of the last decade Stelarc: The Monograph, Stelarc renders the human-machine interface as the site of controlled conflict, trauma, shock- in short, a kind of circuit in which the "galvanic Stelarc: The Monograph loses its metaphysical aura and instead is materialized as a Stelarc: The Monograph mechanism rather than as a "spark of life". In Stelarc's work, the interface is a kind of negative "diaelectric" realized through electrodes, transducers, muscle stimulators, amplifiers, force- feedback systems and extra limbs that probe the Stelarc: The Monograph perhaps resistance- between the human and machine. For Stelarc, Stelarc: The Monograph body has always been prosthetic- a site of radical experimentation that in his art has been objectified, penetrated, virtualized, roboticized, emptied out, alienated and suspended with such ferocity that the purely prosthetic quality of the body has been forced to surface. He begins by approaching ideas as materialized thoughts and making them into unthinkable objects- objects that can only be sensedpure sensation. Then he puts the unthinkable objects on the body to see what might become of it. Stelarc: The Monograph body and thought converge toward a shared indeterminacy. They are together in the sensation. While Kant could entertain the fantasy of chimeras, he could not forsee that they would one day exist as objects of experience. Stelarc's work underlines and extends the prosthetic character of the human body, throwing into question the philosophical distinctions in which it has traditionally been thought. By emphasizing the view of the body as technologically organized matter, Stelarc performs an alignment of matter and form that would avoid any metaphysical opposition. In some ways the logic of his work can be seen to have been anticipated in Kant's text, even if Kant was eventually unable to sustain the thought of the technological chimera. Art Journal, Spring Stelarc as cyborg appeared as the antithesis of Stelarc in suspension. The silent and frighteningly vulnerable body of flesh was transformed into a techno-alien figure- the generative centre of a noisy Stelarc: The Monograph visually spectacular force field. It is the energizing, utopian hope of figuratively rewiring embodied consciousness to allow for "new ways of integrating with the world" that is worth maintaining- but only with the caveat that these ways acknowledge the specificity of the bodies and subjects that are in question at every moment and in every "operational" situation. Yes, Stelarc is a futurist. Marinetti said: man must be nourished on electricity, not just protein. Stelarc and others have this idea that to survive humanity has to mutate, but mutate voluntarily by its own means. This I think is a delirium of interpretation on the nature of Stelarc: The Monograph, which is one of the big questions of ecology. Ecology has not yet touched on it. In the Art of the Motor and in 'Silence on Trial', for instance, Virilio rejects the screaming and streaming multimedia performances of the body artist Stelarc. As Virilio notes, Stelarc: The Monograph is of fundamental importance that the hyperviolence and the hypersexuality that at present rule the screens of hypermodernity are challenged given that they are the supreme instigators of social insecurity and the crisis in figurative art. Because he is a performance artist whose understanding of technology is always presented with an attentive laser eye to the gathering electronic crowd, Stelarc's art is often displaced into the safety of futurist rhetoric. But what is most futurist about Stelarc is that his artistic imagination is a relentless, critical dissection of present regimes of bodily understanding. In the literal sense, we are living within the architecture of Stelarc's "outered" mind: the "absent bodies" of networked communication, the "phantom bodies" of the image simulacrum, the "hollowed out" bodies of global capitalism. Ours is the age of liquid Stelarc. Find on stelarc. Selected Quotes. Brian Massumi Source: "The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason" from Parables for Stelarc: The Monograph Vitual: Movement, Affect, Sensation", Duke University Press Rather than conceptualize the body as an effect of computer Stelarc: The Monograph as in Stelarc: The Monograph works of the last decadeStelarc renders the human-machine interface as the site of controlled conflict, trauma, shock- in short, a kind of circuit in which the "galvanic twitch" loses its metaphysical aura and instead is materialized as a control mechanism rather than as a "spark of life". Timothy Druckery Source: "An Itinerary and Five Excursions" Stelarc: The Monograph Edited by Marquard Smith, MIT Press For Stelarc, the body has always been prosthetic- a site of radical experimentation that in his Stelarc: The Monograph has been objectified, penetrated, virtualized, roboticized, emptied out, alienated and suspended with such ferocity that the purely prosthetic quality of the body has been forced to surface. Stelarc and PS Media Edited by Smith art history, Kingston Univ. Stelarc : The Monograph. Stelarc is the most celebrated artist in the world working within technology and the visual arts. He is both an artist and a phenomenon, using his body as medium and exhibition space. Stelarc: The Monograph in the interface between the body and the machine, employing virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, and the Internet, Stelarc's art includes physical acts that don't always look survivable—or, as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, "sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality. Works in progress include the Extra Ear Projecta soft prosthesis of skin and cartilage to be constructed on the artist's arm. Stelarc's work both reflects and determines new directions in performance art and body art. Although there have been hundreds of articles written about Stelarc since he began performing in the late s, Stelarc: The Monograph is the first comprehensive study of Stelarc's work practice in over thirty years. Taken together, these writers give us a multiplicity of ways to think about Stelarc. An Itinerary and Five Excursions. We Are All Stelarcs. Stelarc: The Monograph Will to Evolve. Marquard Stelarc: The MonographJulie Stelarc: The Monograph Clarke.