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Interview with Stelarc / By Tilman Baumgaertel

Tilman Baumg„rtel: Please describe "Parsite", the performance you did at the opening of ars electronica.

Stelarc: "Parasite" involved a search engine that during the event live scanned the internet, selected images and then optically displayed them to the body. The JPEG data file was then mapped to the body via muscle stimulation, triggering involuntary movements. So these movements were made by internet data, and the images you see are the images that move your body. It was a kind of crude but external virtual nervous system. The body becomes immersed with the internet images.

Baumg„rtel: How did you feel about the way your performance was shown with you inside a building and your audience outside?

Baumg„rtel: Well, I tried to get most of my friends inside! (laughs) I think the problem is that sound is an integral part of the performance, and it is best seen intimately. I could not control what was happening outside. I prefer the performances not to be spectacles but more intimate and powerful experiences.

Baumg„rtel: Do you feel that the set up of the performance here took away part of the experience?

Stelarc: Well, I think the experience is very mediated and dispersed if you are not in the space watching it. But I knew it was for broadcast and designed for that.

Baumg„rtel: How could the viewers tell that you were physically connected to the internet?

Stelarc: It depends on how much voltage there is. If you look at my face, sometimes I grimace because sometimes the stimulation becomes very strong, especially when it is simulataneous and not sequential. But at a lower voltage level it's a body prompting system - you can feel yourself moving and you can resist. But last night it was between 30 and 50 volts, and it was too strong. You move even without your body's memory or desire.

Baumg„rtel: It looks like T'ai chi.

Stelarc: I guess it looks like that kind of motion because I have the electrodes on the biceps and the deltoids so you get these movements, and the leg moving and lifting. If I placed the electrodes elsewhere I would get a different movement. Yes, it's a problem of this performance that you can't discern exactly what is happening and how. For example if you were watching a suspension event that I did you see the hooks in my skin. You can evaluate the experience - you know what it is to stick something in your skin, you have a familiarity with it. But I have wires, and there are no sparks, the viewer cannot actually identify with it. It's like the difference between watching someone doing yoga and doing yoga yourself. But if I wired you up, you would move in a similar way as well. My right leg is never stimulated because I need it to balance.

Baumg„rtel: Does it really matter if you are actually getting electronic shocks or not. With something as immaterial as the internet there shouldn't be a difference if you actually feel physical pain or just pretend to...

Stelarc: Well, I think this problem is whether you are working with theatrical performance, mimicking, simulating or, as I have done in all of my performance, require the direct physical experience to evaluate that interface. My ideas have physical consequences. I am not interested in sciene fiction or theatrical production because for me these are not very authentic experiences. So it is very important to me that the experience is a direct expression and physical consequence.

But I agree, sometimes in my presentations I will wire up three or four people from my audience so that people can see others moving in similar ways. A viewer cannot easily apprehend every experience. I think that the audience in recent years is kind of expecting interactivity and a secondary or vicarious experience and this is possible with a lot of performances, but not with some. I did a sculpture in the inside of my body. This was an electronic object which was 40cm and opened and closed extended and retracted with a flashing light - we videotaped it. But would other people like to do this performance? It is physically difficult. Maybe people don't know that this is also physically difficult because they don't see hooks or pyrotechnics.

Baumg„rtel: So you say it's important to feel what you are doing...

Stelarc: No, not exactly in that sense but I think that in all forms of life and activity there are degrees of physical difficulty. If you are an athlete you have to try and condition your body. There is a possibility of physically endangering yourself. The woman over there did not get pregnant to experience pain, but it is unavoidable. In the same way my performance may be physically challenging but it is not the subject of the performance. I think that being moved by the internet or exploring the internet as a kind of external nervous system or as being able to electronically connect a multiplicity of bodies spacially separated, but being able to interact physically, is a fascinating possibility.

Baumg„rtel: How do you feel about S.F. movies like "Terminator"?

Stelarc: Movies like "Terminator 2" or "Robocop" are beautiful to watch. They are stunning, there is no denying that. They *are* very seductive. They are often about a phallic, metalic, military, macho kind of cyborg body. I am not interested in the cyborg body, but in the cyborg system of mulitiplicities of bodies, spacially seperated, but electronically connected by the internet, operating as much more complex systems of perception and of operation.

Baumg„rtel: Are you an internet surfer in the sense that you surf a lot, or are you rather using it as a metaphor?

Stelarc: Well, I am not a programmer, I don't construct my own HTML or VRML-sites, but I use the internet a lot. I have a website, that is constantly updated and I search for information. I do a lot of communication on the internet. But the difference is as a means of transmitting or retrieving information in a globally spacial way. The performances that I have been doing recently don't suggest the internet not merely as a transmitter of information, but as a kind of transducer, physically affecting the human body.

?: In your performances you appear as a subject of technology, which seems to indicate that you don't believe in the active use of technology by people...

Stelarc: I don't necessarily think that's true, because the whole performance is not designed as an totally automated body, the body as an automaton, but rather the concept is the split body or the fractal flesh. Half of your body has voltage in, actuating involuntarily movements, the other half of the body has voltage out, controlling a Third hand.

Baumg„rtel: A what?

Stealrc: The Third hand is something that I can control directly, but other people can access my arm and perform with my arm in another place. So if you are here in Linz, and I am in Melbourne, Australia, you have your interface system to your computer, your computer is internet-connected with my computer which is connected with my reciever/stimulation system. You make a movement here, I will make this movement over there. You can perform a task here with another body over there.

Baumg„rtel: You started to work with telematics in the early eighties. Do you feel that this artistic work somehow preceeded the internet.

Stelarc: Perhaps the internet was happening, but not as broad-based as it is now. I did a remote control performance with my Third hand in 19XX (???). I was in my Yokohama studio, and we transmitted my muscle signal to a gallery in Tokyo, and a japanese artists had my Third hand attached to his body. I think, what is unique is not telematics or the concept of teleoperation, but the concept accessing and choreographing another part of a body in another place.

Baumg„rtel: But isn't that telematic?

Stelarc: Yeah, but all this before has not been done physically, with the human body. It has been done only indirectly, by transmitting information, by transmitting other kind of data, by controlling a robot arm. But this is a very different situation to actually interfacing with another body.

Another internet performance I did was "Fractal flesh". In that case it was a one-to-one possibility. One body could access your body. Through a picture tel ISDN link I could see the face of the person who was moving me. And they could see my involuntary action.

?: How does it feel when somebody else is in your body?

Stelarc: On one level, it is just an electrical stimulation. But if you can see the face of the person, who is programming the touch screen interface, then you are associating that face with that movement. Also, your arm makes some movement, and you know it is not you. You are aware that it is another body in another place.

Baumg„rtel: Do you feel subjected to this "body"?

Stelarc: No, because it is not designed as a machine for control, constraint, coercion or torture. Of course, one can think of all sorts of devious military and S/M functions for such devices. But I think in the realm of artistic ideas, we are working with subtle distinctions and with different contexts and concepts. Of course, virtual reality systems can be used in military warefare, but they can also be used as tools for exploring the self and the body, and as means of navigating through computer software.

Baumg„rtel: You have been doing this kind of internet performances for a number of years. What is going to be the next step?

Stelarc: It is difficult to say. I already had a plan to grow my skin, and have this as a kind of an internet phenomenon. But I don't like to talk about it, unless I physically do it. I am working on a new skeleton arm. There will be thumb rotation, and wrist rotation, so this will be a very strange and beautiful manipulation system.

Baumg„rtel: All these technical devices cost money, yet you don't have anything to sell...

Stelarc: That is really a problem for me. I do more performances than I would choose to do, because I need to earn a living as a practising artist. If you know someone who wants to purchase a Third arm, that is still in good operational condition, I would be very happy to meet such a person. (laughs)

?: Is there any part of your body that you wouldn't connect to anything else?

Stelarc: I could think of a few places that I probably shouldn't mention. (laughs) The reason why I have amplified body signals, or why I have made three films of the inside of the body as an internal sculpture, or why I have a Third hand, or now perform with the internet, it's because these are possibility not yet actualizied, but plausible and state of the art.

Baumg„rtel: Did you do any lasting damage to your body with your performances?

Stelarc: The only descernable effect has been a loss of hair (laughs). No, I don't think so. We all age and detirioate. I don't smoke, I shit voltage. Someone said: In your performances you put your body on the line. And I said: Well, actually I put my body online.

Baumg„rtel: Do you have medical advisors?

Stelarc: Certainly I try to get medical advice. But for the "internal sculpture", where I inserted an endoscope into my stomach, so people could see the inside of my body, we couldn't get a doctor to help.

Baumg„rtel: Why?

Stelarc: Ethical reasons, or concerns about bad publicity, whatever. I therefore had to perform that by myself, standing up, with no anaesthetic.

Baumg„rtel: What do you think would be the reaction of the audience, if you would die during a performance? Would that be the ultimative spectacle?

Stelarc: I guess, we have a short longitivity as it is. We average a life span of 70 years in reasonable health, and I am already fifty (laughs). But there is never an attempt to be deliberately self-destructive or to make a performance terminal. I have heard of snuff movies, but not of snuff performances.

Baumg„rtel: Yeah, but still: Imagine if something goes wrong during one of your performances, and you die on the spot. It's like in the roman Circus Maximus...

Stelarc: It *is* a shocking idea. I did "Kopenhagen suspension", where my body was suspended 200 feet high (60 meters) from a crane, with strings put into my skin. Or I was suspended over a street in New York. In New York, I got arrested, in Kopenhagen the police assisted. Had I fallen, of course it would have been terminal. But I knew that my skin was not going to rip. I knew the system was strong enough to hold my body. The difference between being suspended three meters high or 60 metres high is the same. Of course, there is some calculated risk, but it is not a deliberate and dangerous abuse of the body. I think that the body is obsolete. But that doesn't mean that there is a repulsion of the body. All I think is that the body has created an information of intense data, data that it is alien to our subjective experience. We have created an enviroment of precise, powerful and speedy machines that often out-perform the body. We've constructed computers that now can challenge and compete chess grand champions. Technology speeds up the body, the body attains planetary escape velocity. The body finds itself in alien enviroments, in which it is biologically ill-equipped. For all of these reasons, the body is obsolete. Now, do we accept the evolutionary status quo? Do we accept the arbitrary design of the body? Or do we evaluate the design of the body, and come up with strategy of reconstructing, redesigning, rewiring the body?

t of the experience?

Stelarc: Well, I think the experience is very media 56 { ' ) Z \ Æ È © « ( * K f h Ë Í s u Ñ Ó ˆ Š ° ² xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ² ê ì Ð Ò Â Ä Ð Ò á ã W Y c e e xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx e g | ~ e g ó õ Æ È ï ñ ! ! %" '" `" b" ª# ¬# ß# á# ä% æ% xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx æ% d& f& ¸' º' ( ( G) I) ˜) š) + + \+ ^+ j, l, —, ™, h- j- |- ~- . xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx . . ©. «. ã/ å/ †0 ˆ0 36 56 xxxxxxxx 56 m ² e æ% . 56 n o p q r Times New Roman