Chapter 12: Contestable Bodies: Excess, Indifference & Obsolence
Stelarc
Ideas Actualised / Actions Without Expectations
We experience our body as surface skin and as internal organization. We caress our skin, we sense our heart beating and we inflate our lungs with air. But the body is also a structure of circulatory systems and empty spaces. Internal spaces can become sites for sculptures. The body is increasingly occupied internally by non-human entities – both living and non-living. And now the body awaits the insertion of art. Not objects for medical necessity but as a matter of aesthetic contingency. And with the increasing micro- and nano- scaling of artifacts and biocompatible materials, body cavities become seemingly larger and more seductive spaces for sculptures. Our biological evolutionary architecture ends when technology invades the human body.
Having such a vulnerable body with slim survival parameters inevitably leads to risky interactions with the world. Biological embodiment means managing the trauma of gravity, of acceleration, and of inevitable frictions and collisions with objects. And coping with unpredictable encounters with other human bodies and nonhuman entities. The body is increasingly moving at speeds that are unsafe to its own survival, it is constantly assaulted by microbial life with sometimes-deadly consequences and it has to interact with massive and powerful machinery. Its complex analogue structure makes it difficult to replace diseased, damaged and deteriorating organs. A single malfunctioning component often results in the demise of the whole body. The human is a soft, unstable body construct that becomes anxious and uncertain, with the realization that it is profoundly inadequate and obsolete in the natural and technological terrain it now inhabits.
As a performance artist you have to undertake the physical consequences for your actions. Ideas are easy. Enacting ideas is difficult. These ideas though, should be actualized without expectations. Engineering interfaces, personally experiencing them through performances and having something meaningful and surprising to articulate upon reflection is the challenge. Awareness and operation is no longer limited by evolutionary biology. Your philosophy is no longer limited by your physiology. The body is complex but a fatally flawed evolutionary design. Although the body is profoundly obsolete in form and function it is not yet extinct. It is still possible for it to plot alternate trajectories, with acute indifference, to perform in unexpected ways and to have unpredicted outcomes.
Embodiment, aliveness and agency become problematic in an age of Prosthetic Flesh, Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh. Prosthetic arms are wired into nervous systems. Synthetic blood is injected into your circulatory systems. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing resulting in humans without heartbeats. By Fractal Flesh I mean bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected, generating recurring patterns at varying scales. And by Phantom Flesh, I mean not phantom as in phantasm, but as in phantom limb. With the increasing proliferation of haptic devices we will be able to generate more potent physical presences of remote bodies, facilitating feel and force-feedback. Technology does not signify the other or the alien; rather it determines what it means to be human. The body is invaded by circuitry and algorithms that remap, re-modulate and reprogram its capabilities. If Internet-connected, it can be accessed and actuated by people in other places. Fractal Flesh telematically scales up, with high-fidelity, the subjectivity of the body.
A body’s authenticity is no longer due to the coherence of its individuality but rather to its multiplicity of interacting agents. What becomes important is not the body’s identity but rather its connectivity. Not its mobility or location but its interface and operation. It is no longer meaningful to imagine having a mind of your own, nor any mind at all in the traditional metaphysical sense. The traumatized body inhabits proliferating spaces of stress and ambivalence. What it means to be human is perhaps not to remain human at all. We fear acting without agency and operating in automated ways. But the zombie is the body we have always been. And the cyborg is the body we have already become. The artist can do no better than initiate aesthetic actions – but ones that transgress, disrupt and generate contestable futures – possibilities that can be experienced, that can be interrogated, evaluated, possibly appropriated but most likely discarded. The pathological and the perverse become the poetic promise of the chimera.
Suspended Body / Stretched Skin
The suspensions were experiments in bodily sensation, expressed in different spaces and in diverse situations. Pierced, penetrated and pulled up, the body becomes a spectacle of stretched skin. These are not actions for interpretation, nor require any explanation. They are not meant to generate any meaning. Rather they are sites of indifference, emptiness and amplified states of erasure. The performances are not about affirmation or information but rather about intensity of affect. The body is an object amongst other objects in various installations and durations. Agency and intention recede into a flattened ontology of other objects and entities.
In Sitting / Swaying, counterbalanced by a ring of rocks, the body was gently swaying from side to side, activating random oscillations of the rocks. In Mexico City at the Sculpture Space the body was spun over a field of lava rock, bounded by a circle of concrete structures. With the Seaside Suspension the body’s attention slid between the distant horizon, the rocks beneath it and the waves splashing over it. With the Prepared Tree Suspension, the body was suspended from the branches of a tree whose roots were exposed. Over East 11th Street in NY, with the Street Suspension the body had a good view of the police cars arriving in all directions. The artist was arrested not for the display of public nudity or for performing some sado-masochistic action, but rather for being a danger to the public. Suspended almost 60 meters high above the Royal Theatre in the Copenhagen City Suspension, the artist was a danger to himself. Above the city skyline, all the body could hear was the whooshing of the wind, the whirring of the crane motors, and the creaking of the skin. In Remote-Controlled Suspension, the body hung vertically from a gantry crane and holding a control box was able to choreograph his own movements through the warehouse space, generating swinging whenever he stopped suddenly. With the Ear on Arm Suspension the body spun above a much larger sculpture – a laser scanned and laser cut representation of the artist’s ear on his arm.
The landscape of stretched skin is indicative of the 1G gravitational field in which the body is suspended. The body is stretched between what it never was and what it could never hope to become. Suspended between the inward pull of gravity and the outward thrust of information. To be suspended is to be between irreconcilable states. The body is seen not as a site for the psyche or for social inscription but simply as a sculpture. The body is empty, absent to its own agency and performs involuntarily. The suspended body is physically exhausted, exposing its limitations and proclaiming its profound obsolescence. The body should no longer be seen as an object of desire but rather as an object to radically re-design.
The Cadaver, the Comatose, the Cryogenic and the Chimera
We are living in an age of excess and indifference. Of prosthetic augmentation and extended operational systems. An age of Organs Without Bodies; of Organs Awaiting Bodies. There is now a proliferation of biocompatible components in both substance and scale that allows technology to be attached and implanted inside the body. Flesh is also circulating. Organs are extracted and exchanged. Organs are engineered and inserted. The face of a donor body stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a third face, resembling neither. Limbs can be amputated from a dead body and reattached and reanimated on a living body. Blood flowing in my body today might be circulating in your body tomorrow. Ova are fertilized by sperm that was once frozen. Skin cells taken from an impotent male can become sperm cells. And more interestingly skin cells from female bodies can become sperm cells.
Liminal spaces are proliferating. 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. The dead, the near-dead, the un-dead and the yet to be born now exist simultaneously. This is the age of the Cadaver, the Comatose, the Cryogenic and the Chimera. The chimera is the body that performs with mixed realities. A biological body, augmented with technology and performing with virtual systems in telematic task envelopes. The contemporary chimera is a construct of meat, metal and code. The chimera is an alternate embodiment of multiple agency. The body is simultaneously a possessed and performing body. It is a split body, not a split mind and body but a split physiology. The body experiences extreme absence and the alien other.
Glove Anesthesia and Alien Hand are pathological conditions in which the patient experiences parts of their body as not there, as not their own, as not under their own control – an apparent absence of physiology on the one hand and an absence of agency on the other. The problem would no longer be possessing a split personality, but rather a split physicality. In our Platonic, Cartesian and Freudian pasts these might have been considered pathological conditions and in our Foucauldian present we focus on inscription and control of the body as a social construct. But in the terrain of cyber complexity that we now inhabit, the inadequacy and the obsolescence of the ego-driven biological body cannot be more apparent.
A transition from psycho-body to cyber system becomes necessary to function effectively and intuitively with forward masking in remote spaces, speeded-up situations and complex interacting architectures. Can a body cope with experiences of extreme absence and alien action without becoming overcome by outmoded metaphysical fears and obsessions of individuality and free agency? A body would thus need to experience its actuality neither all-present-in this-body, nor all-present-in-that-body, but partly-here and projected-partly-there. This generates a radical emptiness, not through lack but rather through an excess of its hyperlinks. An extrusion of its subjectivity. As bodies, our awareness and operation is now extended, interacting and operating with other bodies and machine end-effectors across spaces and time-zones. The body acts with indifference. Indifference as opposed to expectation. An indifference that allows something other to occur, that allows an unfolding – in its own time and with its own rhythm. An indifference that allows the body to be suspended with hooks into its skin, that allows an insertion of a sculpture into its stomach and that allows an ear to be surgically constructed and stem-cell grown on its arm.
Alternate Anatomical Architectures
The solution to redesigning the body may only be skin-deep. What of the plausibility of engineering a synthetic skin with two additional capabilities? A membrane that would be permeable to oxygen and to also possess a more sophisticated photosynthetic capabilities to enable the body to produce its own nutrients. Simply through a change of skin we would radically hollow out the human body. You would not need lungs to breathe, a gastro-intestinal tract to digest food. You would not need a circulatory system to convey oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. And a hollow body would be a better host for all the technological components you could pack into it. And if we can recolonize the human body with nano-sensors and nano-bots to augment our bacterial population, it may be possible to redesign the body, atoms-up, inside-out. The changes would be so minute and occur so incrementally we would not be aware of them until changes to the body’s external form and behavior is observed and felt. An invading and then inverting of the architecture of the human.
The body is no longer merely an evolutionary apparatus but rather a hybrid human-machine system. The Third Hand, the Extended Arm, the Virtual Arm, Exoskeleton, the Ambidextrous Arm and the Extra Ear are projects that attempt to actualize ideas of alternate anatomies. People are being increasingly augmented by artificial body parts. Compact and more complex, technology now becomes a component of the body. A prosthesis was once seen as a sign of lack, now as technology proliferates it is symptom of excess. And with wearable robots, prosthetic replacements and medical implants, intimate and haptic interfaces can be developed to more adequately wire living flesh with functional machinery. Technology inside the body collapses any spatial or subjective separation of the body and its artifacts. The body becomes a contemporary chimera of meat, metal and code. We animate and anthropomorphize machines while simultaneously pacify and automate the human body through containment, constraints and computational calculation. Just when machines extend their behavioral vocabulary of aliveness, bodies increasingly perform with machinic repetitiveness and regularity – but without machinic robustness. The distinction between “being alive” (biological organisms and bodies) and exhibiting “operational aliveness” (machine systems) is blurring.
These human-robot-information hybrids increasingly become extended operational systems, accessing online, real-time remote sensors, actuators and fluctuating data streams. In the Re-Wired / Re-Mixed performance, for five days, six hours a day, the artist could only see with the eyes of someone in London, only hear with the ears of someone in New York, whilst anybody, anywhere could access his exoskeleton and remotely choreograph the movements of his right arm. His vision was disconnected from his hearing and his arm was effectively disconnected from his agency. The body experiences itself as part physical, part phantom; grounded by gravity but dislocated from a particular place. The body is effectively blind and deaf to its proximal environment, but optically and acoustically extended and aware of remote locations. The artist’s experience of his physiology is fragmented and his self is scrambled; his senses are noninvasively rewired and remixed. His senses are outsourced to others.
Rather than a body without organs, the body itself becomes an e-organ, an internet organ that is electronically wired to facilitate the intimate transmission and consumption of streaming media, between people in other places. Consider a synaesthesia not the outcome of scrambling senses in one body but generated from cross-wiring senses from other multiple and remote bodies. Perhaps the post-human body now becomes a kind of hyper-object, one extruded in scale across spaces and time-zones, immersed in the virtuality of extruded selves. Coupled and complicit, it performs beyond the boundaries of its skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The hyper-body is a contaminated construct of alien circuitry and viral codes, spatially distributed but electronically connected. Affirming the sensory, cortical, and anatomical architecture of one body in an age of online, AI-imbued computational systems and precise and powerful instruments and machines is sheer folly. In the liminal spaces of aliveness and operation the human body has simply become a floating signifier.
Los Angelos, USA, 19 September 2018
copyright Stelarc 2024