Professor Stelarc

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA - including new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.

He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in remote locations.

For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Recently for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON- a pneumatically powered 6-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures.

Current projects include the EXTRA EAR - a surgically constructed ear as an additional facial feature that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an internet antenna, able to hear RealAudio sounds. And MOVATAR is an intelligent avatar that will be able to perform in the real world by possessing a physical body. It will have a sound feedback loop from the body giving the virtual entity an ear in the world.

He has also completed an EXTENDED ARM - a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS- an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real-time.

In 1995 Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from The Visual Arts/ Craft Board, The Australia Council. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed as a Senior Research Scholar for the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University, and in 2003 became Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University. In the spring of 2006 he was appointed Professor in the School of Arts at Brunel University.

• Resume
• Current projects
  

Publications

Journal Papers

(2012) Kroos, C., Herath, DC. and Stelarc., Evoking agency: Attention model and behavior control in a robotic art installation, Leonardo 45 (5) : 401- 407

(2006) Stelarc., Extra ear: Ear on the arm and blender, DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 36 (2) : 117- 119

(2005) Clarke, J. and Stelarc., Face-off (Stelarc), MEANJIN 64 (1-2) : 163- 169

(1999) Stelarc., Parasitic visions (Creating the vision of an existence between body and media using technical and electronic body prostheses), BALLETT INTERNATIONAL-TANZ AKTUELL 104- 109

(1997) Paulos, E., Canny, J., Kac, E., Goldberg, K., Pauline, M. and Stelarc., Interfacing reality: Exploring emerging trends between humans and machines, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics 448- 451

(1996) Hoberman, P., Vesna, V., Feingold, K., Stelarc., Falk, L. and Kurgan, L., Webbed spaces: Between exhibition and network, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics 499- 500

(1995) Stelarc., TOWARDS THE POST-HUMAN, FROM PSYCHO-BODY TO CYBER-SYSTEM, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN (118) : 90- 96

(1991) Stelarc., PROSTHETICS, ROBOTICS AND REMOTE EXISTENCE, POSTREVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES, LEONARDO 24 (5) : 591- &

Book Chapters

(2010) Stelarc., PROSTHETIC HEAD: Ideas and anecdotes on the seductiveness of embodied conversational agents. In: Broadhurst, S. and Machon, J. eds. Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance. Palgrave Macmillan