Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou) — Amplified Body / Third Hand

1984

Artists: Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou) · Year: 1984 · Medium: Performance art — the body instrumented with sensors, prosthetics, and robotic extensions · Substrate: EMG and EEG sensors amplifying body signals; custom-built Third Hand prosthetic (1980); laser and LED augmentations · Place: Yokohama, Japan / Melbourne, Australia · Institution: Independent; later Brunel University and Curtin University Stelarc is the Australian performance artist whose work since the late 1970s has treated the human body as the primary material of cybernetic art. His Amplified Body performances (from 1980) wired the body to sensors that converted its internal signals — heartbeat, muscle activity, stomach sounds — into amplified audio and synchronized light. His Third Hand (1980), a pneumatically-actuated prosthetic hand worn on his right forearm, was controlled by abdominal and leg muscle contractions and could write the word "EVOLUTION" simultaneously with his biological hands. His later works included being suspended by hooks from galleries and towers, grafting an ear onto his forearm, and being remotely controlled over the internet by viewers pressing muscle-stimulation interfaces. What Stelarc argues, across forty-five years of sustained practice, is that the body is obsolete in its evolved form and needs technological extension to remain relevant. The argument is more rigorous than it sounds. His performances are demonstrations that the body's interface with the world can be redesigned — that a prosthetic third hand can be a genuine appendage rather than a symbol of one, that internet-controlled muscle stimulation can produce a body that is legitimately distributed across its viewers. The work is confronting to watch. That is part of its proposition. Stelarc has said in many interviews that the discomfort is the point — the viewer's sense that something has gone wrong is the sensation of a future body announcing itself. He is still working, now in his seventies. Lore Stelarc, born Stelios Arcadiou in Cyprus in 1946, emigrated to Australia as a child. His early suspension performances — hanging from meat hooks inserted through his skin — were staged in Japan in the mid-1970s, and remain the most difficult part of his work to discuss. He teaches at Curtin University in Perth and has been a longtime advocate for the serious academic study of performance-and-technology. His Ear on Arm project (from 2006) grafted a third prosthetic ear onto his forearm; the ear remains attached. Sources • Stelarc personal archive (stelarc.org) • Smith, Marquard — Stelarc: The Monograph (MIT Press, 2005) • Curtin University — Stelarc research records