Lecture date: 2012-02-20
The Enabling Evening Lecture Series is organised by Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos
Flesh is circulating. Organs are extracted and exchanged. Limbs detached from a dead body can be reanimated on a living body. The face of a donor body becomes a third face on the recipient. Cadavers can be preserved forever with plastination while comatose bodies can be sustained indefinitely on life-support systems. Cryogenically suspended bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. The dead, the near-dead and the yet to be born now exist simultaneously. The body is a chimera, a construct of meat, metal and code.
Stelarc is an Australian artist who lived in Japan for 19 years. He has performed with a third hand, stomach sculpture and exoskeleton, and a six-legged robot. He is Chair in Performance Art, Brunel University West London. In 2010 he was awarded the Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts Prize.
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