otherness as an artistic project of examined life

CyberEmpathy - Visual and Media Studies Academic Journal ISSUE 9 2014 Cyber Art ISSN 2299-906X

Source of Image: http://www.stelarc.org/

Katarzyna Otulakowska

Otherness as an Artistic Project of Examined Life


Katarzyna Otulakowska

Otherness as an Artistic Project of Examined Life

Bring something incomprehensible into the world! (G. Deleuze)

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in socjety, general clumsiness,

are justified in the person who creates good art. (R. Payne)

Abstract:

According to Kapuściński’s notion of the Other, the uncertainty about the identity of the other

was the reason why people decide to be hospitable. For over three thousands of years, the

other always received the role of a mirror in which our own identity was displayed. Socrates

has been teaching that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’. The main task of the

humankind is to reach for recognition, understanding, close-up in order to create one

community.


In November 2004 in Austrian Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen Ryszard

Kapuściński gave a series of talks known as Viennese Lectures. In those lectures he presented

a picture which has arised from his numerous journeys all around the world – the picture of

so called ‘the Other’. His conscious approach to foreign cultures met during voyages and his

deep reflection over the notion of humanity let him build an anthropologically-philosophical

definition of the Other – someone we meet unexpectedly different than ourselves.

Kapuściński used to refer this definition mostly to representatives of foreign, other (than his

own) cultures. But he was very aware of the deeper philosophical meaning of the term – what

he exposed for instance in two other texts: The Other in a Global Village and On

Multiculturalism1.

Despite this strong ethnological aftertaste one can find in the world-known reporter’s

description, I would like to focus on its general thesis, which I believe can be used as a basis

for analysis of the meeting with the particular Other in today’s cyberculture.

Kapuściński notes that, the whole world literature, beginning with historically very

early examples, is dedicated to Others – this is an overall narration of humankind: we build

our cultural identities by comparing ourselves to others. Therefore, the Other is one of the

richest source of knowledge about the world. Since forever being challenging, the meeting

with the Other in the 21st century is a challenge, too. An important point in Kapuściński’s

thought is the recognition of the reasons why we decide to start such a meeting – why we let

1 It is worth mentioning that in Polish the last talk’s title is The Meeting with the Other as a 21st Century

Challenge , and much better emphasises author’s vision. All cited lectures are parts of one book – The Other.

See: R. Kapuściński, Ten Inny, Znak, 2006.


ourselves leave the world as we know it and to start interacting with someone untypical to

our habitat. The voyage begins for three reasons: as the effect of fear, as the will of change, or

as a chance we see in sucha an interaction. The journey which ends up with the meeting of

the Other is seen as a difficult task, an ambitious project to do, and always allows us to feel

that its importance is hidden in our responsibility for meeting the Other’s.

Keeping Kapuściński’s picture in mind, let us immerse in today’s – technologically

mediated – culture and the significant example of the Other it owns. I would like to present

Stelarc – the Australian performer, and to consider him – together with his extreme artistic

achievements – as the Other (maybe/so far the only one trully Other) we can find in our

technologized global village.

Stelarc is a performance artist who for over 40 years has been using his own body as

an artistic mean, in order to explore its boundaries and to try out the possibilities it gives. A

deep reflection over his work, an insatiable research instinct and a still growing curiosity is

what makes his art so impossible to ignore, so meaningful and so inspiring when attempting

to investigate the culture we all participate in. The main thesis in Stelarc’s worldview is that,

„the body is obsolete” – the notion of an out-of-date human body, not being able to achieve

much in the more and more technologically advanced world of existence. Body art presented

by Stelarc is always thought as testing the interfaces, points of contact of the human body and

its surroundings. His performances constantly take on our understandings of physical

dimension of human being and make us re-think many views and definitions of what we

know as being a human.

http://dict.pl/dict?word=ambitious&lang=EN

http://dict.pl/dict?word=insatiable&lang=EN


Following his view on the body being obsolete, in the early 70s, Stelarc begun a series of

multimedia performances (continued until 90s) called Amplified Body. The general idea here

was using artist’s inner bodily processes as impulses in order to initialize the outer side of the

performance. Being technologically registered as they’ve appeared (by EEG, EMG, ECG and

ultrasound sensors), the brainwaves, muscles movements, heartbeat, blood-flow, and

stomach sounds became movers for a series of as unexpected as interesting processes (sound

broadcasting, light and video projections) – each time, the biological signals were changing

the surrounding through the technology. In his text Orlan, Stelarc and virtual body art,

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński says, these performances begun the process of biological-

technological communication coming from inside (of artist’s body) to outside. They remarked

the problem of the border between those two spheres2. Once the technology allowed it,

Stelarc decided to amplify his earlier artistic acts such as suspension performances – thanks

to all the electronic devices used now, also these older ideas could become the forms of

human-machine interfaces. In the 1976-2012 Suspensions cycle, the artist (in various places

and in a variety of forms), having metal hooks pierced into his skin and flesh, has suspended

himself 26 times. Those „body sculptures”, because of the pain they’ve generated, showed

„the psychological and physical limitations of the body”, and how these can be overcome by

„developing strategies for extending and enhancing it through technology”3. The hurt but re-

awaken body widened his sensibilities and his perception, and showed that the distinction

2 See: R. W. Kluszczyński, Orlan, Stelarc i sztuka wirtualnego ciała [on-line:]

http://www.academia.edu/4485370/Orlan_Stelarc_i_sztuka_wirtualnego_ciala, [19.08.2014], 3 P. Atzori, K. Woolford, Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc [on-line:]

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html, [19.08.2014],

http://dict.pl/dict?word=initialize&lang=EN

http://www.academia.edu/4485370/Orlan_Stelarc_i_sztuka_wirtualnego_ciala

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html


between mind and body is merely artificial. „Suspended and in stress the anonymous body

realises its obsolescence.”

„The realization in fact was that the body was profoundly obsolete, inadequate, empty,

often absent to its own agency and generally performs habitually and involuntarily. But by

obsolete, I don’t mean we can do without a body. Certainly this body with this form and these

functions has limited capabilities, a brief life-span and is not very robust nor reliable. So the

post-evolutionary imperative is to consider alternate anatomical architectures, alternate

embodiments, and even experimenting with more chimeric constructs of meat, metal, and

code to better operate in Mixed and Augmented Realities.”4

A year before the first suspension event, Stelarc created the Third Hand – prosthetic

robotic arm, used later in the Amplified Body performances. Attached to his body, artificial

limb reacts on the signals coming from artist’s abdominal and leg muscles, and that forces

the body to cause completely new movements. The new arm can grasp and pinch – via EMG

returns signals to the biological body, giving the artist new phenomena of feeling (f.e. by

writing, drawing). In 1980, Stelarc gave a statement:

4 J. Hicks, Meat, metal, and code: Stelarc’s alternate anatomical architectures, [on-line:]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/14/3261078/meat-metal-and-code-stelarcs-alternate-anatomical-architectures,

[19.08.2014]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/14/3261078/meat-metal-and-code-stelarcs-alternate-anatomical-architectures


„Third Hand has come to stand for a body of work that explores intimate interface of

technology and prosthetic augmentation—not as a replacement but rather as an addition to

the body. A prosthesis not as a sign of lack, but rather a symptom of excess.”5

What a great exemplification of McLuhan’s theory on media as ‘extensions of man’ it is! It

correlates with his view on the role of an artists, too. In Understanding Media. The

Extensions of Man, McLuhan says that, the artist abstracts the message of cultural and

technological challenges decades earlier than other members of the culture, and this fact

gives him the right to builds models of future relations, before the changes come6. In 1964,

McLuhan also says what Stelarc’s artistic acts still prove to us today: ‘The new media are not

bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature.’

In the mid 70’s, Stelarc has made several films inside his body: he filmed the inner walls of

his stomach, of his colon and his lungs, and videoscanned the whole inside of his body. These

early experiments showed up to be crucial in 1993, when the Stomach Sculpture project

became alive. Stelarc created the first ‘sculpture for a private, internal space’.

„It was inserted 40 cm into the inflated stomach cavity. The sculpture opened and closed,

extended and retracted and had a flashing light and a beeping sound. So you have to imagine

this as a machine choreography inside the body”7.

5 See: Stelarc on Third Hand, [on-line:] http://stelarc.org/?catID=20265, [19.08.014]. 6 M. McLuhan, Zrozumieć media. Przedłużenia człowieka, Warszawa 2004, s. 112, 7 J. Hicks, Meat, metal, and code… [on-line],

http://stelarc.org/?catID=20265


With this device, the self-illuminating and sound-emitting technology became inserted

into body. Another boundary just got violated.

„I've moved beyond the skin as a barrier. Skin no longer signifies closure. I wanted to

rupture the surface of the body, penetrate the skin. With the stomach sculpture, I position an

artwork inside the body. The body becomes hollow with no meaningful distinction between

public, private and physiological spaces. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a

soul, but simply for a sculpture”8.

Stelarc mentions about the problems which appeared during inserting the sculpture into

his body. This rare moment of artist’s confession shows us, how extraordinary yet violent

experimental actions Stelarc undertakes.

„The stomach sculpture is actually the most dangerous performance I've done. We had to

be within 5 minutes of a hospital in case we ruptured any internal organs. To insert the

sculpture, the stomach was first emptied by withholding food for about 8 hours. Then the

closed capsule, with beeping sound and flashing light activated, was swallowed and guided

down tethered to it's flexidrive cable attached to the control box outside the body. Once

inserted into the stomach, we used an endoscope to inflate the stomach and suck out the

excess body fluids. The sculpture was then arrayed with switches on the control box. We

documented the whole performance using video endoscopy equipment. Even with a stomach

8 P. Atzori, K. Woolford, Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc [on-line],


pump, we still had a problem with excess saliva. We had to hastily remove all the probes on

several occasions”9.

Transforming own body into an art gallery, Stelarc emphasizes by his action the more and

more stronger connection of art and practical science. His successive projects, again focusing

on the outside > inside stream of impulses, will tighten this cybercultural hybrid tendency.

In the mid 90s, Stelarc has treated himself to something new: he allowed his body to be

Net-connected, and as such, increasingly captive from other peoples’ will. In his next three

big projects: Fractal Flesh – Internet Body Upload Event (1995), Ping-Body – Internet

Actuated Event (1995/96), and Parasite – Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body (1997),

Internet users were – simultaneously – audience and originators of his performances. In

Fractal Flesh experiment, Stelarc’s body was practically fully subjected to the will of an

interacting recipient of this installation (the receiver became the causing factor of Stelarc’s

body movements by using a touch-screen connected with STIMBOD computer system). P.

Zawojski notices that in this event “for the first time, perhaps, (…), appears the possibility of

remote transfer of the will together with the signal for action, coming from one body to

another.”10 Stelarc’s statement from the 1997 essay Parasite Visions explain the novelty of

such a telematic approach:

9 Ibidem {on-line]. 10 See: P. Zawojski, Destrukcja versus wspomaganie ciała w cyberprzestrzeni. Przypadek Stelarca, [on-line:]

http://www.zawojski.com/2006/04/19/destrukcja-versus-wspomaganie-ciala-w-cyberprzestrzeni-przypadek-

stelarca/ [19.08.2014] ,

http://www.zawojski.com/2006/04/19/destrukcja-versus-wspomaganie-ciala-w-cyberprzestrzeni-przypadek-stelarca/



“The body has been augmented, invaded and now becomes a host - not only for

technology, but also for remote agents. Just as the Internet provides extensive and interactive

ways of displaying, linking and retrieving information and images it may now allow

unexpected ways of accessing, interfacing and uploading the body itself.”11

Stelarc, fascinated with the power of Internet in ‘extruding body awarness’, enlarges this

vision of a more complex and thus more interesting body:

„Consider a body that can extrude its awareness and action in other bodies or bits of

bodies in other places. An alternate operational entity that is spatially distributed but

electronically connected. A movement that you initiate in Melbourne would be displaced and

manifested in another body in Rotterdam. A shifting, sliding awareness that is neither "all-

here" in this body nor "all-there" in those bodies. This is not about a fragmented body but a

multiplicity of bodies and part s of bodies prompting and remotely guiding each other.”12

Further, Stelarc points out that our Platonic, Cartesian and Freudian past has come to the

end. Our Foucaldian present brings to us the matter of control of the body. Recalling

Wittgenstein’s as the first who dreamed about raising one’s arm unintentionally, he shows

that we currently observe a ‘transition from psycho-body to cybersystem. In November ’95 he

11 Stelarc, Parasite Visions, [in:] J. Brouwer, C. Hoekendijk (ed.), Technomorphica, 1997, pp. 5. Text can also

be found on-line: http://v2.nl/archive/people/stelarc [19.08.2014] ,

12 Ibidem, pp. 6.

http://v2.nl/publishing/resolveuid/eb9fd493aae161c9fffbd2fce4b23e4b

http://v2.nl/archive/people/stelarc


performed another action, again with his body being remotely controlled via Internet by

electronic muscle stimulas. People from the three places of the world (Paris – the Pompidou

Centre, Helsinki – The Media Lab, and Amsterdam – the Doors of Perception Conference)

were (linked via a performance website) allowed to tele-stimulate artist’s body physically

based at that time in Luxembug.

„Although the body's movements were involuntary, it could respond by activating its

robotic Third Hand and also trigger the upload of images to a website so that the

performance could be monitored live on the Net. Web server statistics indicated the live event

was watched worldwide.”13

The body however does not respond to the stimulas generated directly from another body

(internal nervous system). More extremely than in previous performance, this time Stelarc’s

body reacts on the Internet’s activity (external flow of data). Collective Internet activity

moves one body of the artist. Two-channeled communication occurs powerfully. Zawojski

notices that there’s no more cyborg discource to apply here – with the definition of the cyborg

by Donna Haraway: the hybrid of an organism and a machine); instead, we should talk about

the symborg – interactive-friendly construct, simulated, symbiotic, and symbolic; multiplied

body build from many physically separated but electronically connected bodies. Stelarc

points out that such a new hybrid has to deal with ‘a telematic scaling of subjectivity’.

13 Stelarc on Ping Body, [on-line:] http://stelarc.org/ [19.08.2014],

http://stelarc.org/


„What becomes important is not merely the body's identity, but its connectivity - not its

mobility or location, but its interface...”14

In Ars Electronica’s ParaSite performance, the involuntarily captured body were under

the influence of images and sounds streamed from the Internet – those, as techno-parasites,

mapped on Stelarc’s body initiate his muscles’ movements, which then go back to the

Internet in a feedback loop. This circuit Stelarc calls the VNS – Virtual Nevous System,

towards which the world is only simulated by unmaterial depictings, in order to allow the

parasite-body to feel with the spectral senses.

Since late 90s, for several years the artist’s focus went into enhancing the robotic

prosthesis by adding the newest technological solutions. 1998 project Exoskeleton was

constructed as six-legged, pneumatically powered walking machine, inside of which sitting

artist could by his arm’s movements initialise big spider-like robot to go. In 2002 Muscle

Machine the situation got problematic – the performance observer couldn’t be sure anymore,

from where the order of movement comes: the performer or the device itself… ‘The

performances are simply about taking the robot for a walk’ – says Stelarc, while experiments

with crazily huge insects-like prosthesis. Even seeing the device deactivated15, one must

admit that sucha n extension of human body must provide new powers found only in the

technologically mediated world. Suddenly, the unanswered question: do androids dream of

14 Stelarc, Parasite Visions, [in:] J. Brouwer, C. Hoekendijk (ed.), Technomorphica, 1997, pp. 6. 15 In May this year I had a chance to meet Stelarc during his exhibition Meat, metal, and code. Contestable

chimeras held by Laznia CCA in Gdańsk. The Exoskeleton robot, exhibited alone in its own room, was only

statically exposed – Stelarc could not navigate it because of the lack of the proper space,



electric sheep? finds its answer: yes, they do, because each and every technological prosthesis

makes us and should make us better (stronger, faster, more complex and more immersed)

humans! In this period of robotic constructions, Stelarc introduces several improved and

extended versions of earlier concepts (f.e. Hexapod, Extended Arm, Ambidextrous Arm; the

2003 project Prosthetic Head – a funny embodied conversational agent – also generated

alternate physical embodiments; was followed by Articulated Head with a robot arm torso, a

flying robot called Floating Head and by Swarming Head – cluster of small collaborating

robots also depending on human interactive touch).

Yet, the true revolutionary act was still about to come. Since 2003, Stelarc together with

the scientists were constructing something so innovative that until today it surprises and

causes ambivalent reactions. ‘Following on from the Third Hand project, which was a hard,

mechanical prosthesis, I wanted to explore the possibility of a soft tissue prosthesis’16 – says

Stelarc.

„(…) The body is both the medium of experience and expression. I’m also intrigued now

with the idea of circulating flesh. That we can increasingly extract and exchange organs. That

a face stitched onto the recipient body becomes a third face no longer resembling the donor.

That we can take the skin cell from an impotent male and turn it into a sperm cell. Which

means that it will be possible to take the skin cell from a female body and turn it into a sperm

16 A. McLeod, Stelarc: the Body and the Artist, [on-line:]

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/themes/virtualfutures/stelarc/, [19.08.2014]

http://vimeo.com/37238202

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_transplant

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/themes/virtualfutures/stelarc/


cell. We can indefinitely preserve a cadaver with plastination whilst sustaining a comatose

body indefinitely on a life-support system. (We no longer die biological deaths, we mostly die

from either catastrophic accidents or being switched off from our life-support systems). Now

cryogenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. There’s a

proliferation of liminal states where what a body is and what a body does, needs to be

interrogated. Issues of artificial intelligence, hybrid human-machine systems and avatars on

the internet all generate questions of aliveness and what it means to be human. Certainly we

need to consider the consequences and whether it’s even meaningful anymore to prolong and

preserve the body in its present form and with these particular functions.”17

They have created the copy of artist’s ear (1/4 scale), based on human and mouse cellular

material. It took about ten years, since Stelarc’s primary idea of having an extra ear placed on

his cheek, to find surgeons who agreed to implant the ‘partly surgically constructed, partly

cell-grown’ ear into artist’s forearm. This ‘biocompatibile scaffold’:

„At present it’s only a relief of an ear. When the ear becomes a more 3-D structure we’ll

reinsert the small microphone that connects to a wireless transmitter. So if you’re in San

Francisco and I’m in London, you’ll be able to listen in to what my ear is hearing, wherever

you are and wherever I am.”18

17 J. Hicks, Meat, metal, and code… [on-line].

18 G. Dayal, For Extreme Artist Stelarc, Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future, [on-line:]

http://www.wired.com/2012/05/stelarc-performance-art/



Ear on Arm project definitely corss the boundaries: of natural evolution as we know it, of

the area of sensibility, takes the acoustic organ and puts it in a new context. Stelar’c dream is

eventually to create ‘an Internet organ for the body’ – still staying on the very egde of human

experience.

All of Stelarc’s work emerge from his thesis on the body being obsolete. Old and weak

human body cannot find itself in the cyberculture. It needs help from technologies, which will

transform it - nowadays via bio-compatibility – into a new hybrid of bio- and virtual

elements of post-biological era. „For Stelarc, the 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”19. As an artist, he consider himself

as ‘early alert warning system’ – all artists should generate „contestable futures – possibilities

that can be examined, evaluated, perhaps appropriated, often discarded.”20 His artistic

projects account for a serious, based on praxis-axis voices in our current debate on the

human existence in the technologically mediated world. Over forty years of experience and a

very deep experimental artistic track may give to Stelarc the right of naming him the creator

of the ‘narration’ of cyberculture. He says about his ideas: ‘Perhaps they might generate other

ideas, moving us away from simplistic notions of the future and introducing a multiplicity of

alternatives.”21

19 A. and M. Kroker, We Are All Stelarcs Now, [in:] M. Smith (ed.), Stelarc: The Monograph, MIT Press 2005. 20 G. Dayal, For Extreme Artist Stelarc… , [on-line] 21A. McLeod , Stelarc: the Body and the Artist, [on-line]


According to Kapuściński’s notion of the Other, the uncertainty about the identity of the

other was the reason why people decide to be hospitable. For over three thousands of years,

the other always received the role of a mirror in which our own identity was displayed.

Socrates has been teaching that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’. The main task of the

humankind is to reach for recognition, understanding, close-up in order to create one

community. If we can consider Stelarc as the other – the only one in front of us who is

courageous enough to explore the limits, we should not forget that:

„(…) 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.”22

The project was supported by the Polish National Science Center grant DEC-

2012/05/N/HS1/02873.

Bibliography:

Kluszczyński R., W., Orlan, Stelarc i sztuka wirtualnego ciała, [on-line:]


Atzori P., Woolford K., Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc [on-line:]


22 A. and M. Kroker, We Are All Stelarcs Now, [in:] M. Smith (ed.), Stelarc: The Monograph, MIT Press 2005.




Kapuściński R., Ten Inny, ZNAK, Kraków 2006

Hicks J., Meat, metal, and code: Stelarc’s alternate anatomical architectures, [on-line:]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/14/3261078/meat-metal-and-code-stelarcs-alternate-anatomical-

architectures

Stelarc on Third Hand, [on-line:] http://stelarc.org/

Stelarc on Ping Body, [on-line:] http://stelarc.org/

McLuhan M., Zrozumieć media. Przedłużenia człowieka, Warszawa 2004.

Zawojski P., Destrukcja versus wspomaganie ciała w cyberprzestrzeni. Przypadek Stelarca,

http://www.zawojski.com/2006/04/19/destrukcja-versus-wspomaganie-ciala-w-cyberprzestrzeni-

przypadek-stelarca/

Stelarc, Parasite Visions, [in:] Brouwer J., Hoekendijk C. (ed.), Technomorphica, 1997.

Haraway D., A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late

Twentieth Century, in: Haraway D., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New

York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

McLead A., Stelarc – The Body and the Artist, [on-line:]


Dayal G., For Extreme Artist Stelarc, Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future, [on-line:]


Kroker A. and M., We Are All Stelarcs Now, [in:] Smith M.(ed.), Stelarc: The Monograph, MIT

Press 2005.

Otherness as an Artistic Project of Examined Life/ K. Otulakowska. CyberEmpathy: Visual

Communication and New Media in Art, Science, Humanities, Design and Technology.

ISSUE 9 2014/2015. Cyber Art.

ISSN 2299-906X. Kokazone.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web: www.cyberempathy.com



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