In conversation with the body conveniently known as Stelarc

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 293-308

  Abrahamsson, Christian ^a,b   Abrahamsson, Sebastian ^a,b  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ART; CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY;

EID: 34548070226     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007075364     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Nietzsche quoted in G. Olsson, Lines of power/limits to language, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
2. From Stelarc's homepage at http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
3. Ibid. (emphasis added).
4. Ibid.
5. For an interview between Stelarc and 'his' head see 'Prosthetic head: intelligence, awareness and agency' (ctheory.net, 2005): www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=490.
6. There are a few exceptions, for example, G. Olsson, Lines of power/ limits of language, pp. 146-50.
7. For an introduction to Stelarc's work see M. Smith, Stelarc. The monograph (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2005). Interesting comments are also to be found in C. Benthien, Skin, the cultural boundary of the self (New York, University of Columbia Press, 2002), chapter 12 and A. Clark, Natural-born cyborgs (New York, Oxford University Press, 2003).
8. Commenting on Stelarc's work, Chris Fleming suggests the concept of a 'guerrilla ontology' in regards to the artist's work. Fleming writes that 'Stelarc's work would seem to stand as a kind of performative research, as a mode of speculative ontology which doesn't hope to represent possibility but to enact possibilities in real time and space.' C. Fleming, 'Performance as guerrilla ontology: the case of Stelarc', Body & society 8(3), pp. 95-109.
9. Norbert Wiener: 'We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment.' N. Weiner, The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1952), p. 46.
10. See especially N. Thrift, 'Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect', Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography 86 (2004), pp. 57-78
11. and W.E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002) pp. 83, 208-9.
12. The actual text reads: 'It is only when the smoothness and seamlessness of a situation is interrupted that awareness or attention is required'. This article also contains an interesting interview between the artist and his virtual/prosthetic head, revealing its, more or less successful, conversational strategies. See Stelarc, 'Prosthetic head'.
13. For a critical examination between the artist's performances, his 'provocative' rhetoric and Cartesianism; see especially J. Clark, 'Stelarc's prosthetic head' (ctheory.net, 2005): www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=491; R. Farnell, 'In dialogue with "posthuman" bodies: interview with Stelarc', Body & society 5(2-3), pp. 129-47;
14. or, A. Jones, 'Stelarc's technological "transcendence" /Stelarc's wet body: the insistent return of the flesh', in Marquard Smith, ed., Stelarc: the monograph (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2005), pp. 87-147.
15. B. Massumi, Parables for the virtual (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 89-132.
16. Ibid., p. 116.
17. M. McLuhan, Media extension of man (London and New York, Routledge, 2001 [1964]).
18. Massumi, Parables for the virtual, p. 122.
19. R. Kurtzweil, The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology (New York, Viking, 2005), pp. 35-110.