Stelarc Interview
Jet Krusec and artist Stelarc talk about artistic practices, deepfakes, nanotechnology, and the future.
MARCH 2021
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This interview with performance artist, Stelarc, took place on an unusually cold march night, we joked about how our lives were connected through a shaky zoom connection and I collected one of those boisterous Stelarc chuckles. Throughout his nearly 50 year-long-career, he has pushed the human body’s capabilities and questioned its importance, developing robotic appendages, internal sculptures, and interactive structures. Our discussion started with his beginning as an artist, in the studios realising he could not draw or paint as well as the others and decided to become a performance artist.
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Stellarc via Zoom (2021) Screenshot by Jet Krusec
Stelarc: I became interested in the evolutionary architecture of the human body, How our physiology in a sense determines our philosophy. How we phenomenologically Experience the world. Our cognitive capabilities, our sensory perception, Our mobility all these things and our senses and our own kind of umwelt.
HOW DID YOU BEGIN COLLABORATING WITH SCIENTIFIC PROFESSIONALS?
There are two problematic words there. Collaboration and science. Most of my collaborations are more in the realm of technical assistance. I need assistance but generally, the artwork is driven by the artist. Having said that an interesting definition of art and one that I like to use is, art is the slippage that occurs between intention and outcome.
In other words, you have an intention to do something, but the outcome should not be predictable. If art is about simply carrying out a particular plan, then it is probably not interesting. Art should be more about effect and intuition rather than accumulating information and trying to get a factual outcome and that is the problematics of this art-science genre. Artists are increasingly collaborating with scientists, more artists are doing bio-art or art or using other scientific means to generate an artwork. But the danger there is you get artists doing bad research and scientists making bad art.
The Third Hand included in more recent performances such as Fractal Flesh, Ping Body, and Parasite
WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES YOUR PROCESS SUCCESSFUL? I WILL NOT USE THE WORD COLLABORATION ANYMORE. BUT PROCESS FEELS RIGHT.
That is the other problem word for me. Success. I don't think you should evaluate art in terms of being a success or a failure because art is in the realm of this. I would characterise what’ve done as being a career of failures because everything that I have done is always inadequately completed. That's why you have to accept art as a kind of aesthetic gesture towards possibilities.
THAT IS AN AMAZING WAY OF LOOKING AT YOUR CAREER AS WELL. JUST TO THE IDEA OF EXPERIENCING AND CREATING, I THINK IT IS VERY INSPIRING.
And also, the more you do with your body, the more you realise the inadequacies of the body, perhaps even how radically obsolete it is having to function in the technological terrain that it now inhabits. But even so, we shouldn’t imagine the body anymore as this biological form with these limited functions. The body now is more like a contemporary Humira of meat, metal and code. It's a physiological body but augmented and accelerated to extended by law, machines and instruments, but also has to manage virtual data streams of information from the nanoscale to the cosmos. Even now, you're a flattened face on a screen. We’re remotely communicating and collapsing the psychological distance between us. Your body becomes increasingly a hollow body, that increasingly extrudes self, beyond the skin, and what's increasingly important is not what's inside, but what happens between us in the medium of language that we communicate in and we can increasingly extend that frame of observation and evaluation.
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SPEAKING ALONG THE LINES OF THAT, YOUR PROSTHETIC HEAD THAT YOU MADE WAY BACK IN THE 2000S, THE WAY THAT YOU DESCRIBE IT IS THE WAY THAT PEOPLE DESCRIBE DEEP FAKE TECHNOLOGY. HAVE YOU WORKED WITH DEEP FAKES?
I haven't but, the intention of deep fakes is precisely that, to construct alters, an imaginative kind of situation. The prosthetic head came about because I was increasingly getting more and more queries from PhD students to do interviews and I was busy travelling a lot. And I thought, if I could engineer a talking head, that could speak on behalf of the artist, then instead of interviewing me, they could interview my head.
I discovered that if I hit a series of keys, that happened to be vowels it would make a kind of singing sound. I generated a program where if you asked the head to sing, it would kind of randomly construct a song based on these vowels. And, and then I thought, well, maybe it could also generate some sound poetry. It was just a simple program, where each sentence is like five or six words long. It has to have a noun and has to have a verb. It has to end. Each line has to end with a word that rhymes and if you ask the head to recite a poem, it constructs its own poem from its own language database, using those simple rules. And each poem is different.
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WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER, DID YOU HAVE ANY PREDICTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY? AND HOW IT WAS GOING TO DEVELOP? IS THERE ANY THAT CAME TRUE? AND ANYTHING THAT YOU WISH HAD COME TRUE?
The Prosthetic Head has been shown at New Territories, Glasgow 2003; Theica, London 2003; Interaccess, Toronto 2003; and at Transfigure 2004.
To be honest, I haven't read any science fiction. I just don't like that idea of kind of sci-fi speculation. As a performance artist, I actualise the ideas that I have or put in another way, ideas are only authenticated by their actions. It's not about just simply academically or in a science fiction way speculate on what might happen in 100 years. Having said that, there are some interesting possibilities that have been primarily generated from the products and performances that I've done.
When I got invited to the Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial in 1993, I haven't been invited to a Sculpture Triennial since[chuckles]. The theme of the triennial was site-specific works. But instead of a sculpture for a public space, I decided to do a sculpture for an internal physiological space. This object was about the size of my thumb, when it was fully closed, it was inserted down my oesophagus into my stomach cavity. When it’s inside the stomach, the sculpture opens and closes, extends and retracts and has a flashing light and a beeping sound. The body simply becomes a host for a work of art, a host for a sculpture. Having done that and learning about nanofabrication, one could imagine that technology in the future will be able to recolonise the human body with nanoscale sensors, nanoscale machines, to augment our bacterial and viral population.
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I WAS VERY FASCINATED BY THE STOMACH SCULPTURE. I THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE WOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT SWALLOWING IN SOMETHING LIKE THAT. AND PEOPLE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT MEDICAL PROCEDURES. AND THIS HIGHLIGHTS A LOT OF THINGS ALL AT ONCE.
It would have been more problematic had the artist wanted to insert a sculpture into someone else's body. As a performance artist, you have to accept the consequences of your ideas.
It's not a matter of being deliberately risky or even deliberately dangerous. But it's not designed simply to shock, and you try to plan as best you can. Then there comes a time when the planning stops, and the performance begins. You have to allow that to unfold in its own time with its own rhythm, accepting the consequences, the accidents, the unexpected outcomes that can generate.
WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER RECREATING A PAST PERFORMANCE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE?
Marina Abramovich and her exhibition retrospective in New York did do a live performance for that exhibition. But there is this dilemma, how do you recreate a performance? And what are the problems of doing that?
I did get a request once to redo the rock suspension, the suspension where my body was counterbalanced by a ring of rocks. And my response to that was, this was a one-off performance. I was willing to do a new suspension piece, but they wanted a recreation of the performance. I have performed about 10 times since 1997 with my six-legged working robot. Partly because the robot is not, the subject of the work and each performance is improvised in a different way.
Stomach Sculpture (1995) Photography by Anthony Figallo
The Muscle Machine, Gallery 291, London (2003) Photography by Mark Bennett
WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?
Very fortuitously I got a large commission in Melbourne, and this is very rare because until recently I have gotten very few commissions in Australia. There is a new Science Gallery opening that is part of Melbourne I will be creating a large interactive installation. It’s not figurative, but it is anthropomorphic in the sense that it’s a robotic structure with pneumatic rubber muscles, tendons and a skeletal structure. It will be four or five metres high and 5 or 6 metres in diameter and if you move below, it will generate a swarming behaviour. That will be completed by the beginning of 2022, that exhibition it’s a part of will open in February 2022. I can’t be more precise than that, it depends on a lot of things and if my idea is actually possible to create.
ALL IMAGES AND BIOGRAPHY ARE COURTESY OF STELARC.ORG
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2021