Kinetica Artfair

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist whose work focuses heavily on futurism and extending the capabilities of the human body. Stelarc embodies humanity that is in control of its own physiology. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a ‘Third Hand’, a ‘Virtual Arm’, a ‘Stomach Sculpture’ and ‘Exoskeleton’, a 6-legged walking robot. He is currently Chair in Performance Art, School of Arts, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK. He is also Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the MARCS Lab at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

For his performance ‘Rotating Brains and Beating Heart’ at Kinetica Art Fair, Stelarc will for the first time re-create the Second Life graphic environment using the Musion holographic system. Stelarc will appear both live on stage as well as in a Second Life environment consisting of an installation of giant body organs - a ring of rotating semi-transparent brains and a beating heart, floating in the virtual space. The transparency of the organs allows avatars to travel ‘inside’ them, triggering the emission of sounds and particles of light. Stelarc’s avatar, accompanied by automaton Stelarc clones, will perform a choreography of prompted and scripted avatar movements within the ‘organ installation’, mimicking limb movements of Real Life Stelarc muscle stimulations.

Stelarc will also be presenting his ‘Prosthetic head’ via the holographic Musion system. The Prosthetic Head is an automated, animated and reasonably informed 3D avatar head that speaks to the person who interrogates it.

It has real-time lip-synching, speech synthesis and facial expressions, and exposes notions of awareness, identity, agency and embodiment as inadequate. Stelarc will perform with his own head alongside the Prosthetic Head.