Body Machine

Stelarc: Machining the Body

Performances, Devices, Aesthetics

A year after the suspension performance in Brisbane, Stelarc was invited to do a performance in the Japanese city of Ofuna. During this Event for Stretched Skin and Third Hand, Stelarc’s body was suspended with hooks and strings in a horizontal position, hanging from a disused monorail structure (figure 5.2).⁸ Attached to this overhead structure was a motorized winch which could move the body up and down, and which was controlled by the artist by means of a small control box which he held in his hand. As in Brisbane, the body was immobilized by the suspension, yet in control of its own motorized and indirect movement. In Ofuna, however, the body was additionally wearing the Third Hand, a technical prosthesis which was designed and built in Japan with Stelarc’s participation after he had studied phantom limb sensations, and which he wore attached to his lower right arm.⁹ Moreover, the body was “amplified,” which means that measurements were taken of body functions with medical sensors attached to the body, and the data from these measurements were then used to create sounds.¹⁰ The principle of the Amplified Body was, as we will see in a moment, in other cases extended to other media, and to a “body in feedback” whose readings of physiological functions as information were externalized as images, sounds, or movements of prosthetic extensions or surrounding machinery, and fed back to the body as mediated impulses.¹¹

Figure 5.2 Stelarc, *Event for Stretched Skin and Third Hand (The Last Suspension)* (1988), Yokohama Art Gallery, Ofuna, Japan, 29 May 1988. Photo by Simon Hunter. Courtesy of the artist.

Another recurring motif of Stelarc’s work is mechanical and robotic structures that carry or support the human body. In a performance in Kansas City in 1993, the body was held by a crane with a fixed position, a so-called “Strong Arm.” Its hydraulic lifting arm can be used to lift and move objects. In the Strong Arm performance, the crane was carrying the medical equipment that was attached to Stelarc’s body. The “amplified” body was thus indirectly attached to the Strong Arm crane; the body controlled and guided the crane’s movements while being freed of the weight of the medical equipment. At the same time, the crane’s mechanical structure, radius, and design determined what the body could do.¹²

Such a relationship of physical interdependence also characterizes the Exoskeleton project, which Stelarc has been working on since 1998. Exoskeleton is an insectlike robotic structure with six mechanical legs and a platform which can support a human body. From its central position on the platform, the human body can control the movements of the Exoskeleton: as the body lifts a leg, some legs of the robot are lifted and thus amplify the human gait. The gesture of walking is translated into a complex set of movements by the robot; the direction of the human head determines the direction in which it moves. The sounds of the moving mechanical joints and hydraulics are amplified and turn the presentation of the device in performance into a noisy and spectacular event.

Besides such mechanical couplings of body and technology, Stelarc also began developing a rather more “dialogical” relationship with the technical systems he was using in the performances. During the Psycho Cyber performances in Helsinki and Den Bosch (1993), he performed side by side with a Scanning Robot, that is, an industrial robot that had a video camera attached to it and could be controlled by the body through the stimulation of muscles in the upper right leg.¹³ The images from the video camera were directly projected onto and behind the body and the robot, visually doubling and extending the performance space for the audience. The projected images were not recognizable for the performing body immersed in the projection, but were rather part of a theatrical staging of the scene. During the performance, the robot was made to point the camera in different directions, panning and turning continuously so that the physical performance and interaction between human body and robot was accompanied and surrounded by the video images taken from the viewpoint of the tip of the industrial robot’s arm. The aesthetics of the video images was that of a surveillance camera or video probe investigating its surroundings, and, in this case, also the human entity that was positioned next to it. At times, the camera was spun around so that the video image would suddenly show the artist’s body upside down, or sideways. The fact that the actions of the robot were controlled by the human body was not immediately visible to the audience, though for the artist there was an immediate visual feedback to the controlling movements he was making. The Scanning Robot had a dual status: it was at the same time an extension of the human body through which the body could turn an externalized, perhaps narcissistic gaze at itself; especially for the audience looking at the performing robot and the body with its video double, the Scanning Robot was also an external entity which turned its gaze at the human body, investigating, recognizing, and interpellating it.¹⁴

The relationships between body and technical apparatus constructed in Stelarc’s different projects vary considerably, though the motifs of dependency and control recur. As a way of introducing this chapter on body-machine relations, we take a first though not a comprehensive look at this variety before entering into a more thorough discussion and historical contextualization of the works.

In the mid-1990s, Stelarc began to explore the interaction of the body with objects in virtual reality environments. These were initially abstracted representations of human bodies which were controlled by motion-sensor-monitored movements of Stelarc’s own body, and presented in performances through video projections. From these experiments, the Prosthetic Head and Walking Head projects evolved, in which mimetic representations of Stelarc’s head were presented as 3D images in a virtual space, or as a 2D representation on a monitor that was fixed on a robotic base. These projects probed the “hollowness” of the human body from the perspective of representation, and asked what the difference might be between the body and its virtual double.

Also in the years around 1996, Stelarc did a series of performances that developed the notion of the “involuntary body.” During these performances, parts of his body were connected to external systems through movement actuators that would stimulate the respective muscles independent of his will. At the same time, the body was wearing the extension of the Third Hand, and it was “amplified,” i.e., equipped with sensors that took readings of physiological states and translated these into sound events. Thus, the audience would see Stelarc’s almost naked body standing in front, with multiple sensors and actuators attached to different parts of his trunk and limbs and connected through cables to peripherally placed computer systems. His limbs were moving erratically, sometimes elegantly, but often in a strange disjunction with the rest of the body’s posture, indicating that the body was not in control of the movements of all of its parts (figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3 Stelarc, *Amplified Body* (1994), V2_Organisation, Rotterdam. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

These performances were done in different variations, including the Parasite event (1995), during which the involuntary movements of the body were controlled by the audience through a visual interface that effected the activation of sensors and thus the stimulation of muscles in defined areas of Stelarc’s body (figure 5.4). For the Ping Body performance (1996), the muscle actuators were connected to a technical system that translated the results of ping signals from the Internet into impulses on the muscle regions. Since ping signals represent the speed at which a specific impulse is processed and returned by the multiple networked computers between two points, the impulses they produce vary according to unforeseeable fluctuations in processing and network activity on and between different server computers. The performing Ping Body’s movements were thus dependent on a precise yet volatile and unpredictable configuration and temporary structure of activities in the computer network of the Internet. In the Split Body performance (1995), only one half of the horizontally “split” body was controlled externally, while the other half was self-determined.

Figure 5.4 Stelarc, *Parasite* (1995), diagram. Copyright © the artist.

The different modes of supporting, moving, and controlling the body exemplified in Stelarc’s projects point to several distinct conceptualizations of what the body is. The Suspensions use the physical link of piercing metal hooks through the skin and muscle tissue to lift and hold the body, treating it as a passive object, not dissimilar to a marionette held up and guided by the player through a set of strings. This passive configuration is opened up in Suspension settings where Stelarc would either have his suspended body manually lifted and held by a rope and a pulley, or in the setting of the Brisbane performance in which the crane mechanically lifting, holding, and moving the body was controlled by means of an electrical steering interface. The body remains immobilized similarly to the Exoskeleton performances, though the body is here not pierced and fixed to the technical structure, but can move relatively freely on the vehicular platform. In contrast, the Involuntary Body performance series uses electrical impulses on the skin. The body surface is not pierced, but it is used as a conductive membrane through which the electrosensitive muscle tissue underneath the skin is stimulated and made to contract, causing the limbs to move. The physical body generates the movements not as a result of conscious or unconscious impulses from the brain or the nervous system, but in response to external impulses.

This concept of an external control mechanism is also the basis of the project Movatar which Stelarc has been working on since the year 2000 (figure 5.5). Movatar is a mechanical corset for the upper body, whose main technical unit is carried like a rucksack on the back. Connected to it are two robotic units with manacles at the upper arm and around the wrist which can force and lock both arms into defined positions. The Movatar was conceived by Stelarc as a conceptual counterpart to the “avatar”: if an avatar is a representation of a physical body or object in a virtual world that can be controlled by an agent in the real world, then the Movatar is a device that makes it possible for an agent in a virtual world to control a human body in the real world. “The body becomes a host for the agency of an artificial intelligence—a prosthesis enabling the behaviour of a virtual entity.”¹⁵ The human body strapped into the Movatar is treated as a mechanical robot, controlled not through subcutaneous electrical impulses but through physical force conducted by a metal, mechanical structure.

Figure 5.5 Stelarc, *Motion Prosthesis (Movatar)* (2000), drawing. Copyright © the artist.

Stelarc’s Discourse

An important dimension of Stelarc’s artistic work is his textual production. Stelarc’s discursive practice is part of his artistic project, a speculative and experimental mode through which he constructs ideas and artifacts, images and phantasms, possibilities and failures. Since this discursive practice does not serve the theoretical assertion and interpretation of the performance work but forms an extension of that work, the artist does not shy away from inconsistency or contradiction. It is put forward in published texts, lectures, interviews, and liner notes to the performances, and is carried by an idiosyncratic terminology and conceptual framework which have evolved over the years, in step with the sequence of projects. It is a textual dispositive, a discursive apparatus that Stelarc both operates and is operated by, like the Third Hand or the Movatar.

Imagine a body that can perform an action without memory; a body that can make a motion without knowing that it will carry it out; an action without any expectation; consider a body driven by multiple agents remotely situated and spatially separated; a problem no longer of having a split personality, but rather a split physicality; if you were watching this body’s movements in London, what you would be seeing would be the manifestation of a remote, spatially separated body; in other words, the body becomes a host for another agent; electronically coupled bodies could then extrude agency from one body to another body in another place; your awareness would neither be all here, nor all there. (Laughs.)¹⁶

This excerpt from an interview recorded in 1995 displays the characteristic rhetoric that does not seek merely to describe and interpret but also projects further possibilities. Stelarc’s discourse creates narrative brackets for the performances, it articulates actions with words, it “makes sense” of what he has already done, and it speculates about what could be done in the future. Thus, even ideas that are, on a technical level, purely fictitious can be made an active part of his work—and when Stelarc laughs his characteristic, loud laugh, he is clearly happy about an idea that he has expressed, like about a joke that he has accidentally happened upon. Similar to the way in which the performance dispositives are set up to allow for unplanned things to happen, Stelarc’s discourse is not controlled and strategic, but exploratory and excessive.

This play with words can be observed, for instance, with regard to the way in which Stelarc refers to his own body, or to himself. In an interview published in 2005, he points to the deliberate confusion of terms: “Words like agent, person, and body are being deliberately interchanged.”¹⁷ And when speaking at a conference in Perth, Australia, in 2013, about the experiences of realizing the performances, Stelarc at one moment says “my body,” in the next sentence he says “this body,” then he speaks of “I” (“I had an experience of people moving me”), and shortly after, regarding the Split Body performance, “The body is performing with a posture of indifference.” In a formula that frequently recurs in his discourse, Stelarc claims that one cannot distinguish between the body and an “I,” and that the person is this body. The “self,” according to Stelarc, is not a location but is based on connectivity, and “what is interesting is what is between us, the social, the institutions.” Like a mantra he repeats the question that, however general, seems to underwrite much of his artistic exploration: “How can we construct a body that is not Platonic, Cartesian, Freudian?”¹⁸

Commentators of Stelarc’s work frequently adopt the artist’s own descriptions and interpretations as secondary sources for the treatment of the artistic works. In their text about Stelarc, cybertheoreticians Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for instance, pick up on his own rhetoric: “He can brilliantly conceptualize the Prosthetic Head because he has always lived in a relationship to his own flesh as prosthetic body.”¹⁹ The Krokers’ interpretation of Stelarc’s work must, in turn, be read in line with his own discourse—not as critical investigation, but as a form of continuation of the artistic practice and its imaginations:

When the history of the twenty-first century is written, the name Stelarc will light the intellectual horizon as one of the few artists whose aesthetic creations were imprinted under the sign of postbiologics. Present at the historical juncture in which the body, responding to the stress of technological change, suddenly doubled itself in the form of a split physiology (one part the local physiology of an earth-bound and the other part the networked physiology of an electronically mediated body), Stelarc will be spoken of as the courageous prober of the future and a relentless debunker of past illusions.²⁰

It can be seen as part of the success of Stelarc’s project that he has been able to co-opt his commentators as collaborators who propel the Stelarcian speculation: “What if Stelarc’s artistic performance practice were reversed? No longer is Stelarc the artistic probe of technology’s impact on the body, but technology … performs Stelarc.”²¹

In another variant of taking Stelarc’s rhetoric at face value, Amelia Jones has insistently argued against the rhetoric of the body’s obsolescence, claiming that the artist’s present, full and “wet” body plays a crucial role in his art.²² Jones reads Stelarc’s discourse as a somehow disingenuous or incorrect interpretation of his performative work. Instead, I would argue that besides Stelarc’s performances, images, and technosculptural installations, his discursive practice is another mode in which he develops the “Stelarc” project. Pointedly put: “Stelarc” is not so much the author of performances and texts, but “Stelarc” is a project that articulates different modes of expression. The artist who performs the “Stelarc project” calls himself “Stelarc,” and in that role his spoken and written discourse is not, of course, an attempt at objective and critical commentary about the project but is itself part of the project. The artist does not speak about but rather in the role of Stelarc. In that sense it is legitimate to correlate the artist (we could call him by his original name, “Stelios Arcadiou”) with his wet human body, but it makes little sense to demand of “Stelarc” that he assume the identity and corporeal reality of “Stelios Arcadiou.” Stelarc’s discourse springs from the same conceptual imagination that also brings forth the technical contraptions and performances of the body. This project is about the blurring or the erasure of the distinction between body and technology. It speculates about the absence of such a distinction by devising modes of lowering the threshold between them. Text, spoken and written, is one of these modes.

Self-reflection and conceptual feedback are part and parcel of this artistic project. The fact that sometimes Stelarc’s discourse seems to jump ahead of the aesthetic evidence of the performances has led to the allegation that his project is more conceptual than performative. Stelarc responds:

The ideas that the performances have generated are speculations, they are not ideologies that drive the performance, that fashion the events. These ideas shouldn’t be seen as justifications for the events. Certainly as the ideas were realised they do have feedback looping effects and they do resonate in the performances—I can’t avoid that happening. But I don’t sit there thinking, “how can I express the notion of an obsolete body,” “how will I show that I can redesign the body.” These ideas have come from doing the performances as aesthetic experiences, and if they generate these speculations, if they present alternate possibilities, then that is fine. All of the ideas that we have talked about have come from the performances and from the experiences that this particular body has, but they are not about this particular body. In fact there is a particular misconception that performance art is about the body, and that it is about a particular body, the body that is making the actions. I would query both of those assumptions.²³

This passage displays how Stelarc’s discursive practice articulates preformed concepts with aesthetic experiences and projects these to form potential new concepts. It is worth noting—though not surprising—that the perspective taken by the artist is almost exclusively the subjective perspective of the performer, not that of an outside observer or an audience.

In a style similar, though less exuberant and transgressive than that of the Krokers, the Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi has offered an extensive philosophical and phenomenological analysis of Stelarc’s project in which Massumi takes Stelarc’s own texts and interview contributions as commentary and description, rather than as art.²⁴ Massumi’s insightful analysis is thus exegetic rather than critical. Moreover, in contrast to the techno-utopian interpretation of the Krokers, Massumi’s affect-theoretical reading of Stelarc’s work remains “anthropological” in its attempt to understand what it might mean for humans, and for an understanding of the human body. The Krokers instead suggest reading Stelarc’s project from the perspective of technology. Both perspectives seem logically possible if one superimposes, as a master discourse, the artist’s discursively formulated intentions onto the work. However, how does that perspective change when the analysis focuses on the aesthetic evidence—all the textual, narrative, poetic, and performative evidence of the Stelarc project?

Body, Machine

In Stelarc’s performance dispositives, we can observe different degrees of fusion between the human body and the technical installations. Whereas the Exoskeleton and Movatar are hard, metallic frames into which the body is placed and which directly and physically enforce certain movements, the Third Hand and the Scanning Robot are structures external to the body that are controlled through muscle movements which are tracked by sensors attached to the skin. In the Involuntary Body performances, the body is made to move by electrical muscle stimulation which is activated by audience members through local or remote interface systems, or by unpredictable impulses gleaned from technical systems, like, for instance, ping signals.

The different dispositives set up interactive systems in which body parts and body functions are coupled through sensors, cables, or physical force to technical parts and functions. Importantly, there is no integrated “machine” that the body would interact with, but a structure in which systemic aspects of the body are connected to other technical systems. The technology of Stelarc’s projects is a system into which the body is inscribed; it is not a “machine” with which the body would be confronted. Rather than subjectifying technology, Stelarc’s work desubjectifies the human into a technical system.

Discussing the performance work in an interview in 1996, Stelarc responds to a question about the relationship between body and machine:

I think it’s about seeing the body in a different way, instead of the body being a biological entity, operating in this local space proximal to someone else, in fact the body becomes a body connected with other bodies in other places in a multiplicity of ways, a whole range of sensory antennae that the technology provides. In a sense the body becomes part of this greater operational structure, where intelligence is distributed remotely and spatially over the Internet. A body is not just this entity, but this entity connected to another body, where awareness is sliding and shifting, coagulating, ebbing and flowing, intensifying and dimming, depending on the connectivity of the body. So for me, what’s important now, is not so much focusing on the individual psyche of a person, but that person’s connectivity and multiplicity of operational possibilities.²⁵

With respect to a broader discussion of the notion of machine art, it is interesting to note that Stelarc hesitates to adopt a strong notion of the machine. Speaking about the Parasite performance, he remarks:

It depends what you mean by machine. In this muscle stimulation system we can physically link up over this electronic space. Now, whether you want to call that a machinic operation or whether you want to call that a new physical coupling, an interactivity between biological bodies, the system that heightens and amplifies and projects human presence simultaneously in different places, well that’s really up to a definition of what a mechanism or a machine is. Certainly the emphasis has shifted from seeing the body as a site for the psyche and as a site for social inscription to now seeing the body in a more structural way. As a body connected to other bodies, as a body embedded and interactive with other technologies and the Internet in particular.²⁶

A crucial aesthetic dimension of this work is marked by the friction between the body and the technical systems, and the empathy with which the audience observes this body which looks, at the same time, like a willingly involuntary puppet and like a tortured individual. Yet the denial of physical pain and suffering in Stelarc’s discourse—no doubt fueled by his experience in Buddhist meditation since the 1970s—is a crucial aspect of his artistic practice, like the involuntary jerking of the leg in the Parasite performance, or the deformation of the skin in the Suspensions. Thus the goal of Stelarc’s extensions is not actual technical improvement of a dysfunctional or obsolete body. Rather, they are designed and performed as signs of the limitations of the human body, as signs of its hollowness and its malleability. The Stelarc cyborg is a retro cyborg that does not so much overcome the human body as evoke the empathic and emotionally painful realization of the tension and friction between the body and its environment.

In his artistic practice Stelarc strategically undermines an understanding of the human body as the home of a conscious subject. He inserts the body and its parts into arrays of input and output devices, of robotic apparatuses and sensorial interfaces which act not so much as prostheses—which would refer to a centrally positioned body-self in control of its physical extensions—but as media: We see him write with the Third Hand, we see his body move according to control signals sent through the Internet, and we observe, in a more recent project, how the Extra Ear (since 1997) on his forearm him hears and passes on its perceptions.²⁷ The notion of the “hollow body” which is so central to Stelarc’s discourse can thus be read not only as the body as a void vessel that does not contain a conscious self, but as a medial body, a body that operates like a medium which transfers, processes, and stores data.

The apparent tension between this technical conception of the body as medium on one side and the visual presence of a middle-aged man’s body with a bald patch on the other, strapped into excessive hardware installations and tangled cables, causes the mix of fascination, surprise, and sympathy that is characteristic of the reactions to Stelarc’s art practice. The ability of this body medium to transfer, process, and store is as strongly determined as any other medium by the particular technical and physiological structure that constitutes it. It is not only a body that uses technical appliances as prostheses, but also a body that is itself a prosthesis which complements a technical system which it is integrated into, a prosthetic body. The artist insists that what he is working toward is an emptying of the body, a subtraction of subjectivity: “It’s not so much an agent desiring to be invaded by technology but rather a body that positions itself to be indifferent to invasive probes.”²⁸ The aesthetic specificity of his project resides in the fact that this invasion is not a clinically clean occurrence, but a conflictual, at times dysfunctional event in which the critical encounter between body and technology can be observed as a spectacle.

Control, Information

In the examples of Stelarc’s performances mentioned earlier—from the mechanized Suspensions to the networked Involuntary Body performances—the notions of control and information play crucial roles. Both these concepts are at the heart of the theory of cybernetics, which considers the analysis and construction of dispositions in which feedback mechanisms serve to control and modify the behavior of technical, social, and natural systems.²⁹ In his own terminology, Stelarc distinguishes between a “voluntary” and an “involuntary” body—i.e., a body that can or cannot control its own actions—and sets this aspect of steering individual actions apart from the more general aspect of the “willing body,” a body that chooses to expose itself to a situation in which it may be made to perform involuntary actions.

Generally, the projects have been structured to be performed and experienced by the willing body, which is the artist. Sometimes people have seen that, sometimes not. There is a body and there are its attachments. They function, coupled, to construct architectures of extended operations. The body inhabits a local space but can also project its presence elsewhere. The body speaks here but can also be heard over there. Tasks are performed in proximity but can also be mimicked by remote surrogate robots. Transduced, physical actions extend into virtual task environments. This body functions effectively. We constantly and seamlessly slide between the physical and the virtual, the proximal and the remote. That’s what technology coupled to the body constructs. It’s a terrain of operation that is bounded neither purely by the body physiology nor by body scales.³⁰

It is part of Stelarc’s project that, in his performances, he excludes the possibility of an “unwilling body,” a body that would be forced to perform against its will. By working only with his own body, he bypasses the ethical question of power over somebody else, even though the philosophical paradox of a “willing and involuntary” body begs the question of subjectivity, which Stelarc would like to sideline as well. With reference to the Movatar project which proposed control of body movements by a virtual entity, Stelarc commented in 2000: “I wanted the effect of Alien Agency, possessing and performing with your body. I’m reconciled to the fact that in a complex technological terrain where there’s multiplicity [sic!] of feedback loops, it’s no longer meaningful to ask who’s in control.”³¹

The actions of the body, whether voluntary or involuntary, are induced by “information” which, in cybernetic systems, distinguishes intended or effective signals from unintended noise. Stelarc’s conception of information is borrowed from such a cybernetic understanding in that it is understood as deriving not from human will but from systemic, quasi-natural effects of technology: “It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc. brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated. … The most significant planetary pressure is no longer the gravitational pull but rather the information thrust. Gravity has molded the evolved body in shape and structure and contained it on the planet. Information propels the body beyond itself and its biosphere. Information fashions the form of the postevolutionary body.”³²

From this conceptualization arose the ideas for performances like Ping Body, in which the body’s movements are effectively controlled by signals drawn from unpredictable fluctuations in the electronic networks, i.e., by information derived from hypercomplex technical events. Yet the body that the audience observes during the performance remains determined by gravity: standing upright on the stage, trying to keep the balance as the limbs jerk involuntarily, surrounded by equipment that is all firmly placed on the ground. This image is not one of a “body propelled beyond itself by information,” but one of extreme tension between incompatible systems, an image of incompatibility and impossibility between body and “the information thrust.”³³

In their interpretation of how the notion of the human was transformed by the historical advent of cybernetics, Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner have highlighted the replacement of a mechanical by a cybernetic set of parameters: “Cybernetics differed from older conceptions of technology or science in that for it, mechanics, energetics, and thermodynamics were no epistemological categories, even if entropy did in fact play a role in cybernetics. It was rather oriented toward information and communication, logics and symbol processing. Thus cybernetics changed the theories by which the social, the political, the economic, human thought, and the philosophical interpretation of the human were worked through.”³⁴

Stelarc’s work straddles the mechanical and the cybernetic. He stands on the threshold of a cybernetic conception of the body. While in his discourse he often gestures across that threshold, his physical performances play at the border. This position on the threshold is neither a sign of inconclusiveness nor failure, but marks the special status of the Stelarc project.

Working on the Mechanical Body

The relationship between body and machine addressed in Stelarc’s work evolves along two main trajectories, one referring to the “classical,” mechanical machine, and one to the information-processing, “transclassical machine,” to use Gotthard Günther’s terminology. This second trajectory of the cybernetic body we will follow in the next section; here we will look first at the historical context of scientific management and the conceptualization of the human body as a utilitarian part of industrial production, discussing instances in which such a new understanding of the human body was translated into aesthetic conceptions by artists.

The modern history of the human body has been studied and described extensively.³⁵ Many of these studies have departed from the work of the French philosopher and historian of knowledge Michel Foucault, which describes how the physical body became a site of knowledge and of power and, from the eighteenth century onward, how the disciplined human body was a crucial factor in the establishment of modern regimes of work, and of social relations in general.³⁶ In the nineteenth century, the human organism was increasingly conceptualized in technological terms, and new scientific discoveries in areas such as physiology, experimental psychology, and ergonomics were translated into parameters of energy, efficiency, and performance of the working “body machine.”³⁷ Much of this research was predicated on the representational and analytical possibilities offered by the new, visual medium of photography, notably the chronophotography developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. In the scientific research of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hugo Münsterberg, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Aleksei Gastev, among others, the new findings were applied to the “scientific management” of labor, with the aim of reducing fatigue and improving human performance in industrial production. The methods of scientific management measured the dynamic, spatial and temporal interactions in human-machine systems, with the aim of optimizing and standardizing the technical tools and installations, as well as the position and movements of the human body, and the operational interaction between body and technics in the labor process.³⁸

Aleksei Gastev, a poet who had already joined the struggle for a socialist revolution in Russia before the First World War, became an activist of improved industrial production. He founded, in Moscow in 1920, the Central Labor Institute (CIT) which, based on Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ research in the United States, sought to bring scientific management to the young Soviet Union.³⁹ Gastev’s work is exemplary for the entanglement of economic, physiological, ideological, and aesthetic aspects, which in turn had repercussions in the field of art. He was convinced that in order to build up Soviet industry and to modernize existing production sites, it was necessary to radically transform the way in which work was conducted:

The world of the machine, the world of the mechanism, the world of industrial urbanism is creating its own collective bonds, is giving birth to its own types of people, whom we must accept just as we accepted the machine, and not beat our heads against the gears. We must introduce some corrective factors into its yoke of iron discipline; but history urgently demands of us to pose, not these small problems of the protection of personality by society, but rather a bold design of human psychology in reliance upon such an historical factor as machine production.⁴⁰

The boldness of Gastev’s claims responds to a critique against the Taylorist system which he was advocating, a critique that was put forward forcefully by Communist and Soviet trade unionists. Gastev had suggested that “even a machine, in the literal sense of the word, will manage living people. Machines from being managed will become managers.”⁴¹ For his critics, such a prospect was unacceptable, and they demanded that both the wider economic context and the psychology of the individual worker and his protection also be taken into account.⁴² In 1924, this conflict was resolved in favor of Gastev’s rather more technicist Taylorism, a trend which would become even more forceful in the years from 1929 onward when Stalin’s government intensified its industrialization program.⁴³

The discussions about Taylorism between Gastev and his critics—which are mirrored by similar debates about the implementation of principles of scientific management in the United States and other industrializing countries—are a reminder that the relation between body and machine remained problematic throughout the twentieth century, and that only in the most radical extropian dreams was the reference point of the human body given up completely. Different body-machine constellations proliferated as conceptions like those of the prosthesis, the robot, and the cyborg existed side by side, pointing to the parallel developments of the extension, the replacement, and the fusion of the human body by and with technical systems. Hence Gastev’s “order” to Soviet youths:

Youth! Enter into the iron rows of training!

Regard the machine, the tool!

Create the machine, the organization!

First intensive attention!

Then the deed!

First intensive attention!⁴⁴

And hence Münsterberg’s conception of the coevolution of human and technology which mutually constitute formative environments for each other: “No machine that a human is supposed to work with can survive the struggle for technical existence, if it is not, to some degree, adapted to the nerve and muscle system and to the possibilities of perception, attention, memory and will of trained individuals.”⁴⁵

On a pragmatic as well as an ideological level, the centuries-old struggle between anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism, between the shaping of machines after human models, and the shaping of humans after the affordances of machines is never decided conclusively, but partially and heuristically. La Mettrie’s conception of the homme machine is a case in point: while the description of the human body as a machine is in itself mechanomorphic, La Mettrie does not call the overall (anthropomorphic) shape of the human body into question. Similarly, Fritz Kahn’s illustrations of the human body and its functions from the 1920s and 1930s propose techno-logical explanations for physiological processes, but they do not suggest the necessity for reconstructing the human body according to more rational, technical principles.⁴⁶

More important than the aspect of mimesis is the form of coupling between different systems, the circuiting of human bodies and technical systems. Anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism thus seem appropriate as processual and relational terms, not as descriptions of static facts. Both terms describe the adaptation of the human and the technical system to one another, they stand at either side of the technical interface—be that a simple tool, a complex machine, or a computer screen.

The struggle which also affected the political implementation of scientific management was about whether human bodies and human behavior had to be adapted to technically optimized machines, or whether both technical design and human behavior had to be adapted in a way that was a compromise between the requirements of each. What is still a problem for Gastev, i.e., the struggle over the humanistic dimension of technology and the moral imperative to rank the well-being of humans higher than the functionality of the technical system, is superseded when computer-based systems increasingly cut out the human worker and manage the full production process as a cooperation of machines with machines.

In 1922, a “Laboratory for Biomechanics” was opened at Gastev’s Central Labor Institute. Nikolai A. Bernstein, an influential expert on human body movements whose findings still play a role in robotics research, worked there until 1925 and helped to foster the scientific management researchers’ understanding of the physiological basis of human movements. Using the same term, the Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold developed an understanding of “biomechanics” as a theater method in which the actor would not generate meaning by expressively displaying the inner feelings associated with a role, but rather by repeating formulaic movements which referred to preconceived and predetermined meanings.⁴⁷ Meyerhold’s biomechanics was thus a training program for optimal behavior that was targeted not at industrial production but at the cultural modeling of individuals.

The German Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer, who praised Meyerhold’s theater work for its revolutionary aesthetics, had developed his own Triadic Ballet from 1916. It was premiered in 1922 and was only rarely presented afterward, notably in 1926–1927 at the Bauhaus in Dessau and other venues, and in 1932.⁴⁸ The most striking feature of the Triadic Ballet is the elaborate costumes which Schlemmer developed as abstractions of human body forms and which forced a limited repertoire of movements upon the dancers.⁴⁹ Schlemmer’s main interest was in “humans in space.” This space is determined by its shape and its size. The human, without whom for Schlemmer “true theater” is not possible, is at the same time “an organism of flesh and blood” and “a mechanism of number and measurement.”⁵⁰ Its movements are directed either by its emotions or by the mind. The space of the stage “complies with the laws of an invisible network of the lines of planimetric and stereometric relations.”⁵¹ Where Meyerhold flatly rejected the validity of an emotionally guided, expressive form of acting, Schlemmer maintained that both an exterior and an interior motivation were acceptable, a dynamic guidance either by the spatial laws or by the imaginary space built by the actor’s charisma, because the cubist-abstract space was “only the horizontal-vertical scaffold of this fluid system.”⁵²

From this analysis of the relationship between human and space, Schlemmer derived four different types of costumes. His biographer Dirk Scheper summarizes:

When the laws of the encompassing cubic space are determinant, this results in a spatial-cubic costume construction which Schlemmer calls “Walking Architecture” [wandelnde Architektur]. When the functional laws of the human body in relation to the space are applied, it means a typification of body shapes and leads to the “Jointed Doll” [Gliederpuppe] which dominates the dances and demonstrations on the Bauhaus stage. The laws of movement of the human body in space translated into a costume result in the so-called “Technical Organism” [Technischer Organismus].

Finally, “the fourth basic type of a stage costume [‘The Signs in Man’ (Die Zeichen im Menschen)] visibly expresses in a costume structure what Schlemmer calls the metaphysical anatomy of man.”⁵³

While Schlemmer insists on the central importance of the human being for his aesthetic considerations, he also acknowledges the contemporary drive toward mechanization which impacts the human body: “Machine and technics afford a mechanization of contemporary life which cannot be ignored and which makes the machine of man and the mechanism of the body so insistently palpable and obvious.”⁵⁴ For Schlemmer the opposing forces of machine and body, of abstract space and organic space, are copresent, and it is a matter of artistic creation to work with this confrontation.

Schlemmer’s text for the 1925 Bauhaus-Buch about the Bauhaus stage contains two drawings that illustrate the two different principles of a relationship between human body and surrounding space. The first drawing, of the “laws of cubic space,” shows the view into a cubic space with multiple straight lines connecting important coordinate points (figure 5.6). The black outline of a small human figure, standing at a fifth of the overall height of the drawing, is positioned centrally on the bottom surface, on a line marking the first quarter of the depth of the space. The figure masks two other points of multiple intersecting lines, halfway back and at the rear end of the space, but at the point where its feet are positioned only two lines meet orthogonally. While the figure seems inscribed into a rational geometric structure, there is also, especially through the curved outline of the body, an obvious discrepancy between the figure and the surrounding space with its spiked angles.

Figure 5.6 Oskar Schlemmer, *Laws of Cubic Space* (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in *Die Bühne am Bauhaus* (1925), 13.

As a complementary image, the “laws of human movement” are illustrated by a drawing that shows a human figure placed centrally on a surface (figure 5.7). There are only three straight lines, a vertical one that marks the middle of the drawing and the central position of the figure, and two horizontal lines, one at the height of the figure’s sternum, the other at the height of the right knee. From the central point of the sternum, twenty circular lines, spaced at slightly increasing distances from each other, radiate out and fill the entire rectangular surface of the drawing with a regular pattern. The human figure is drawn as an outline and stands about half the height of the overall drawing. Its balanced, slightly curved pose uses the right leg as a supporting leg, the left leg being stretched to the side freely. Both arms are raised a little below the upper horizontal line, the right arm straight and supporting, the left arm bent and with the palm of the hand open and turned upward. The head is bent down with the face turned to the left side as though it was looking at the lower arm and hand.⁵⁵ Additional lines that start at different body parts of the figure, its head, arms and hands, hips, legs and feet, project outward like rays that extrapolate the potential movements of the body. All of these projecting lines reach the drawing’s frame.

Figure 5.7 Oskar Schlemmer, *Laws of Human Movement* (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in *Die Bühne am Bauhaus* (1925), 14, bottom.

Three coordinate systems are overlaid in this drawing: the orthogonal order of the straight lines, the circular order radiating out from the body’s center, and the rays that project outward from the body parts. If the first drawing emphasized the static inscription of a figure into a given, abstract space, this second drawing describes a spatial configuration that only exists in relation to the body’s posture and movements, which determine or constitute the coordinates of space in the first place.⁵⁶

Compared with Meyerhold’s biomechanics and Gastev’s scientific management of labor, we can see how Schlemmer’s dynamic coordinate system describes multiple floating points that are not fixed in specific positions, yet precise in their definition of spatial relations. The different body parts become addressable individually and dynamically, and as a corporeal configuration (figure 5.8).⁵⁷ Schlemmer’s conception of the human body and its articulation in the Triadic Ballet and other stage experiments thus forms a bridge between a mechanical and functionalist view of the body and a utopian imagination of what a new, an avant-garde body might look like.

Figure 5.8 Oskar Schlemmer, *Dancing Human* (*Tänzermensch*) (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in *Die Bühne am Bauhaus* (1925), 14, top.

A more radically utopian vision of such bodies was suggested by the Russian artist El Lissitzky in his 1923 designs for the figures—they cannot really be imagined as “costumes”—of the opera Victory over the Sun. Ten years after the prewar premiere of this futurist play by Aleksei Kruchenykh, Kazimir Malevich, and others, Lissitzky produced a series of graphic representations of its key figures. In these designs, he suggests a suprematist overcoming of the human body, in analogy to the opera’s depiction of the overcoming of nature by modern man. In the nine drawings of the series, some figures are more conventional and static in posture and depiction (like the Sportsmen, the Cowards, and the Grave Diggers), while others combine static and dynamic geometric elements to form complex, somewhat irrational mechanical contraptions (Announcer, Troublemaker, Guard). All figures are made up of abstract visual elements, like rectangles, triangles, squares, circles, and circle segments. Some elements or configurations resemble parts of the human body (heads, legs, arms), due either to drawn details or to their shape and structural placement. In some areas, the drawings suggest a spatial depth of the elements, which adds to the compositional tension and dynamics of the drawings and hints at a form of realistic three-dimensionality and technical pragmatism, implying that these constructions could at least in theory be put together from wood and metal parts.

Two drawings stand out from the series and seem to have received special attention from Lissitzky in their design: the New One (or The New Man, in German Neuer) and the Time Traveler (or Globetrotter (in Time)), both of which figures are assigned particularly important, positive roles in the opera’s libretto. Lissitzky’s New One is an abstract rendition of a human figure with head and trunk, two arms and two legs, which are shown in the form of a dynamic X-shaped cross (figure 5.9, plate 11). The figure appears to make a long stride toward the right, the forward and upward movement supported by the stable position of the foot on the bottom left, and the open gesture of the arm toward the upper right. A centrally placed red square that marks both the middle of the overall drawing and the left (i.e., rear) part of the trunk, and two black and red five-pointed stars at the oval-shaped head, iconographically refer to the political and artistic revolutions of Bolshevism and to Malevich’s suprematism. While the figure in Schlemmer’s drawing of the “laws of movement” is caught in a homogeneous and evenly distributed, pushing and pulling meshwork of potential forces, Lissitzky’s New One shows a constructivist body in a directed, vectorial movement that represents a determined ideological thrust.

Figure 5.9 El Lissitzky, *New One* (*Neuer*), from the series *Victory over the Sun (Sieg über die Sonne)*, Kestner Mappe, sheet 10 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

For the figure of the Time Traveler, Lissitzky proposed a more abstract, hovering constellation of elements that are loosely arranged along a vertical axis (figure 5.10, plate 12). The bottom end of this axis is defined by a black circle, upon which several brown and gray rectangular and triangular shapes are piled, with a head and a double facial profile at the top. Jutting upward to the right from the black circle is a line construction that resembles the lightweight wing of a contemporaneous airplane, and centrally positioned is a gray propeller composed of two truncated segments of a circle. Unlike the New One, this figure has no clear direction; the elements that point to the right (airplane wing, triangle, facial profile) are evenly balanced by the diagonally positioned rectangular shapes that seem to pull the fragile construction to the left. This impression is enhanced by a small detail at the bottom: the point where the triangle and the airplane wing meet the black circle is not at its apex but slightly to the left of this, which seems to put the whole figure in danger of sliding down toward the left of the circle. While the New One appears to be both standing firmly in the present and moving ahead into the future, the Time Traveler seems to be poised in the present, wavering between past and future. Its image resembles Paul Klee’s drawing of the Angelus Novus (1920) which, in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation, fearfully stares into the past as it is being blown into the future by the storm of progress.⁵⁸ In contrast, Lissitzky’s Time Traveler appears to be traveling into the future lightheartedly and untroubled, like an airplane that (in Kruchenykh’s libretto) brings back news from “the 35th century, where there is force without violence, and the rebels fight with the sun, and although there is no luck, everybody looks happy and immortal.”⁵⁹

Figure 5.10 El Lissitzky, *Globetrotter (in Time)* (*Globetrotter (in der Zeit*), from the series *Victory over the Sun* (*Sieg über die Sonne*), Kestner Mappe, sheet 5 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

The designs by Lissitzky and Schlemmer are not explicitly technical, but they are based on a technological imaginary that has made the transformation and the technological inscription of the human body conceivable to an extent that was, in the arts, not possible before the twentieth century. In Schlemmer’s drawing of the laws of movement we may recognize an entanglement into a matrix of forces that prefigures Stelarc’s concepts of the Amplified Body—extending its physical properties into a medial space that turns the body itself into an interface, a medium of such forces—and of the Involuntary Body which is forced to move with the tides and shifts in that same matrix. With Lissitzky, Stelarc shares the rhetorics of a utopian optimism and the desire to supersede the “old” human body and to find new, desubjectified figures with, literally, hollow bodies. This lineage that comes from the nineteenth-century physiologists and experimental psychologists, from Marey, Gilbreth, and Gastev, is more relevant for an understanding of Stelarc’s work than, for instance, the “machinelike” representations of human bodies in Fernand Léger’s paintings, or the aesthetic rendering of movement in Kazimir Malevich’s Knife Grinder (1914). Both of these appear folkloristic, to use an expression by art critic Eduard Beaucamp, in comparison with the technological modernism of the constructivists.⁶⁰

A different case is that of Raoul Hausmann, whose photocollages and sculptures reflected, among other things, on the experience of the maimed and prosthetically repaired bodies of First World War veterans. Works such as Mechanical Head (1919) or the collage Tatlin at Home (1920, figure 2.4) don’t suggest an engagement with a structural reconceptualization of the human body, but are rather metaphorical treatments of the new and often involuntary body collages on display in the streets of Berlin at the time. Similarly, Hausmann’s work on typography and optophonetics was an exploration of the potentials and limits of the human body and “the permanent psycho-physiological auto-instruction of human beings.”⁶¹ For Hausmann, there was no turning back to an image of wholeness; it was necessary to adapt to the new constructivism of bodies:

We want to be transformed … through mechanical consciousness, by the bold inventions of the forward-pushing engineer. Why can we no longer paint like Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Titian? Because man has completely changed in his consciousness, not only because we invented the telephone, the airplane, the electric piano, or the revolving lathe, but even more so because man’s psychophysics has changed with his experience. The naïve anthropomorphism has come to its definitive end.⁶²

Hausmann’s own attempt at overcoming such a “naïve anthropomorphism” was his research on the optophone, a prosthetic device that—in his unfulfilled vision—would extend human perception by coupling the visual and auditory senses, with such practical applications as helping to guide blind people in open and closed spaces. However, it is not clear what Hausmann technically had in mind for the optophone, and his gestures toward the obsolete conceptions of the human body remain metaphorical.

The genealogy of Stelarc’s work suggested here is meant as an exemplary line of research into the history of the relation of art and technology in the twentieth century in general, and of the role of the human body in it in particular. It is a genealogy that is artistic rather than scientific, given that Stelarc’s body-machine assemblages are not useful but dancing, jerking contraptions. His body’s behavior may sometimes seem as involuntary as that of a laboratory rat, but it never resembles the analyzed and measured bodies of the laboratories of labor. Instead, there is a performative lineage that connects Stelarc’s work to Meyerhold and Schlemmer, and there is a lineage of the mobilization of sculpture which relates it to Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, to Calder and Tinguely in the twentieth century, and thus to the nineteenth-century capturing of time and movement in photography and sculpture by Marey, Muybridge, and Auguste Rodin. It expands the kinetic aspect of machine aesthetics by mobilizing not a mechanical object but the human body. After physically and discursively reducing its degrees of freedom, the body is remobilized by technical installations that impose the effects of electronically relayed automatisms on it. Combining a mechanical conception of the body with an automatic conception of technology, Stelarc’s work marks a field of tension between body and machine that first emerged in the nineteenth century, between Marx’s analysis of the human-machine relation in the labor process and the attempts at its optimization by the Gilbreths and others.

The chronophotographic work of Étienne-Jules Marey not only formed the media-technological basis for the research into the scientific management of labor, but also provided an important, iconic representational form for the measurability of the human body and its mechanomorphic potentials. This iconic example resonates in the photographs that Simon Hunter took of Stelarc when he was first posing with the Third Hand in 1980,⁶³ as well as in Toshifumi Ike’s 1984 triple-exposure photograph of Stelarc with the Third Hand, holding a white ball that reminds us of the white balls and other markers used in motion-tracking experiments ever since the 1880s.⁶⁴ Even more striking is a photograph by Minoru Watanabe documenting Stelarc’s Event for Amplified Hands (1982). Here, the number of exposures is difficult to gage. The arms are captured in a multiplicity of positions, and the entire body is shown in a blur and appears as a ghostlike angel.⁶⁵

Whereas these instances mostly concern the mechanically conceived physiology of the human body, other examples of research point forward to the exploration of body-mind relations in which the technical system involved is both the interface between the two and the environment in which their interaction is played out. One of the strands of late nineteenth-century research into experimental psychology concerned the analysis of handwriting and hand drawing.⁶⁶ They were understood as expressions of the relation between mind and body, and were studied both for their pathology and for their pedagogical potential. The exercises that J. Liberty Tadd and others did with children around 1900 resonate in Stelarc’s iconic performance of Handswriting ‘Evolution’ (1982) when he wrote the nine letters of the word “Evolution” simultaneously with his own two and the prosthetic Third Hand.⁶⁷ In another performance, Event for Three Hands (1981), Stelarc stood facing a blackboard, holding a piece of white chalk in each of the three hands and drawing segments of circles by moving his arms up and down.⁶⁸ The resulting drawings may remind us of some of the costumes in Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which in turn echo the chronophotographic images from labor research. But besides this analytical program of physical movements, Stelarc’s action also seems to be inspired by an educational program in which the human body becomes a physical interface for cybernetic systems, a program whose precursor are Tadd’s exercises for children who are trained in the free and two-handed drawing of circles.

Another stage in this development was experiments with telematic devices in which body and robotic parts were coupled in visuotactile information systems like those conceived in preparation for space flight. In the 1930s, the Polish-born space pioneer Ary Sternfeld moved from France to the Soviet Union in order to further pursue his research into a field that he was the first to call “Cosmonautics.” In 1938, Sternfeld patented a technical system called “Android” that he had been working on for a decade and that allowed for the transmission of information about the movements of a human arm to a remote, robotic arm which was modeled after a human arm and whose joints were equipped with servomotors (figures 5.11, 5.12). This early telematic device was intended for future space missions to the Moon and to Mars, when complex operations might have to be conducted at great distances.⁶⁹ The construction drawings of the Android system in the patent application strikingly resemble Stelarc’s drawing for the Amplified Body and Involuntary Body performances, in which sensors take measurements of certain states of the body while transducers translate incoming data into impulses that activate specific parts of the prosthetic device (figure 5.4). Only in Stelarc’s case, the human body can be both the source and the recipient of such impulses, collapsing the two functions that Sternfeld had imagined to be located at the largest conceivable distance—between Earth and Mars—into a single, integrated system.

Figure 5.11 Ary Sternfeld, Android (1931), drawing. USSR Copyright Certificate No. 57746, applied April 9, 1931. Archive of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow.

Figure 5.12 Ary Sternfeld, Android (1938), drawing. USSR Copyright Certificate No. 67162, applied September 3, 1938. Archive of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow.

Extending the Cybernetic Body

Besides the historical lineage just described, we must also consider the more contemporary context of cybernetics in which Stelarc’s work has evolved. It is not conceptual and analytical in the same way as, for instance, the artistic practice of cybernetic artists of the previous generation, like Gordon Pask, or Roy Ascott. Instead, it exposes the human body to an apparatus-based approach, so that the question that the abstract kinetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer asked about the automation of behavior is directed at the body-machine relationship. Two themes are central to this inquiry: one is the motif of the cyborg, or the becoming-technological of the body; the other is the related theme of the encapsulation, or the subsumption and ultimately the disappearance, of the body in technological environments.

The Body without Organs and the Cyborg

In his exegesis of Stelarc’s works, Brian Massumi interprets the suspension Event for Support Structure (1979) as a “veritable ‘first,’” as a kind of “Ur-suspension.” He claims that “it is of this event that all others were multiples,” even though, as Massumi affirms, it was not chronologically the first such event. Stelarc’s own description of Event for Support Structure is, as always, terse and unemotional: “The body was contained between two planks and suspended from a quadrapod pole structure in a space littered with rocks. The eyes and mouth were sewn shut. Three stitches for the lips, one each for the eyelids. The body was daily inserted between the planks and in the evening was extracted to sleep among the rocks. Body participation was discontinued after seventy-five hours.”⁷⁰

A documentation photograph reveals some further details: it shows the artist lying naked on his back on the lower wooden plank, while the upper, identical plank is placed above the body (figure 5.13).⁷¹ The distance between the two planks is fixed by means of six long screws, positioned at the corners and in the middle of the length of the planks. A steel wire is threaded through each of the screw eyes poking out just above the top plank, and all six wires are suspended from the same central hook that hangs from the peak of the wooden pole structure. The artist’s head is turned to its left slightly, presumably because the nose would otherwise be squeezed by the top plank. The breast seems to be the highest protrusion of the body; apparently it was not pressed down, suggesting that the body is not squeezed between the planks. The left hand is carefully placed on the left hip.

Figure 5.13 Stelarc, *Event for Support Structure* (1979), Tamura Gallery, Tokyo, July 9–15, 1979. Photo by Yuichi Konno. Yamagichi Archive, National Art Center, Tokyo. Courtesy of the artist.

In his text, Massumi compares the Event to other suspension performances and highlights the sensorial disconnection from the outside, poetically meandering around this suspended and sewn-up body, and its gravitational passivity:

If the transductive suspensions in which the body began to extend into image and sound were counteractions of the body’s objectivity, the sewn suspension goes one step further, countering the organicity of the body. A body that can express nothing, not even incipient let alone possible action, is supremely dysfunctional. It is what Deleuze and Guattari call a body without organs. On hold. Sewn and suspended, the body folds in on itself to the point that it is not only no longer an object or an organism, it is even stretched to the limit of things.⁷²

The characterization of the body in Event for Support Structure as a realization of a “body without organs” is surprising. This concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a psychological metaphor for the full, open potential of a body, beyond its segmentation into limbs and organs, into a determined, organized and functional structure.⁷³ Massumi interprets Stelarc’s piece not as one that originates in and leads to a hyperarticulation of limbs or a cyborgian extra-organization, as in the Involuntary Body projects, but as one that has its degree zero in a performance of disarticulation during many hours of the passive and sensorially disconnected body lying alone, between suspended planks, or among the rocks on a gallery floor.⁷⁴

Deleuze and Guattari extensively develop the concept of the “body without organs” in their writings, especially in the two parts of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and Milles Plateaux.⁷⁵ They take the cue for this concept from the surrealist theater artist Antonin Artaud, who strove for a radical questioning of the human body and its performance: “The body is the body / it is alone / and needs no organs / the body is never an organism / the organisms are the enemies of the body.”⁷⁶

Deleuze and Guattari applied the notion of the “body without organs” to describe a psychic state in which the body is not segmented and organized. The “organized” body is segmented by “machines” which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding, are “systems of cutting,” systems that cut, interrupt, and redirect flows. Like other machines, the “desiring-machine” cuts a flow and extracts from it, and through this cutting it separates an organ-machine from a source-machine.⁷⁷

The example often used here is that of the child sucking the mother’s breast: there is initially no need to think of child/body/mouth/nipple/breast/body/woman as separate organs; but a withdrawal of the breast can form a cut which engenders the desiring-machine that, in turn, constructs the mouth and the breast as separate organs. “The body without organs is immanent to the desiring-machines. It is the unorganized mass which forms the base of their functioning. In contrast to the desiring-machines, the body without organs is ‘full’. It is unproductive, unfertile and unconsumable.”⁷⁸

Desiring-machines and body without organs are pitched against each other: “The desiring-machines move toward the body without organs and try to form an organism there. The body without organs defends itself against the organism, i.e. against that organization of organs, which functions in the sense of a totalization, an integration, and a harmonization.”⁷⁹

This conflict between the desiring-machines and the body without organs results in three different machine types: the “paranoiac-machine,” the “wonder-machine,” and the “bachelor-machine.” The “paranoiac-machine” is created by the reaction of the body without organs against the desiring machines, against “having an organism made for itself. … What the body without organs is fending off is the harmonization and the hierarchization of its organs.”⁸⁰ However, “the rejection of the desiring-machines is not directed at the organs themselves. The body without organs also attempts to attract the organs to it. It tries to appropriate them, to attach them to its surface and to let them function in another, ‘unorganismic’ order. The paranoiac-machine of rejection is replaced by a perverse machine of attraction, the ‘machine miraculante’, the wonder-machine.”⁸¹ The bachelor-machine—a concept worked out by Deleuze and Guattari on the basis of the mythical appropriation by Michel Carrouges of the original description by Marcel Duchamp—constitutes yet another relation between the body without organs and the desiring-machines: unlike the paranoiac-machine, it does not reject but attracts the desiring-machines; and unlike the wonder-machine, it is inhabited by a subject that “experiences the relationships between the distinct points on the body without organs as intensive states.”⁸²

The historian of science Henning Schmidgen further pinpoints the difference between wonder-machine and bachelor-machine:

The wonder-machine is determined by the attraction of individual organ-machines on the part of the body without organs. … The organ-machines engender intensive feelings which are realized outside the “organismic” body and outside of genital sexuality. The wonder-machine is characterized by the fact that these excitements are involuntary, “wondered.” This is different with the bachelor-machine. At first both machines seem to be the same. Here and there, the experience of surprising and intensive states. However, in the bachelor-machine there is a subject that experiences these affects, and is no longer only bewildered but affirms the intensity in a sort of sudden sense of evidence: “So that was that!”⁸³

What can we then make of Massumi’s interpretation of the body in the Event for Support Structure as a body without organs? The characterization makes sense on a certain metaphorical level: the immobilized body between the two planks, the suspension of gravity, the reversion of eyes and mouth—organs of seeing and speaking—into unsensing body surface. But how does the state of the body change when it is not immobilized and isolated, when the suspension is done by means of hooks in the skin, when the body is attached to prosthetic and transductive impulse devices? Are the other suspensions really just “multiples” of this event? And do we really experience a suspension of organicity in the sense of the body without organs, or rather an engagement with the desiring-machines that can be interpreted, depending on our understanding of the ontological status of the artwork and the artist, as a paranoiac-machine, a wonder-machine, or a bachelor-machine?⁸⁴

It is important to keep in mind that, even though the body without organs is an initial condition of the newborn infant, Deleuze and Guattari do not conceive of it as a primary state that is then overcome once and for all. The “organization” of the body can be worked against at every stage of life and in multiple ways, as the extreme aesthetic practice of artists like Artaud testify. As Massumi puts it: “A return to the body without organs is actually a return of fractality, a resurfacing of the virtual. Not regression: invention.”⁸⁵

The body without organs is not a concept or an entity or a given state, but “an experiment, an exercise” (Deleuze and Guattari). For Massumi, Stelarc’s project is that of “a transformation of the very nature of the body (as opposed simply to adding permutations on its actions as the object it already is, with the organs it already has).”⁸⁶ This transformation is instantiated in the reinterpretation, in the Suspensions, of the body’s relation to gravity by shifting its support from the feet to the constellation of hooks-in-flesh, or in the multiplication and externalization of the organicity of the body in the Amplified Body and Involuntary Body performances. Are these transformations offered by Stelarc’s projects answers to the question “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?”⁸⁷ Massumi asks a related question, though with a different inflection: “What subsequent extensions might then unfold? The problems are re-performed, exhaustively, in a non suspension series of experimentations with prostheses (including the Third Hand, Extended Arm, Extra Ear, Exoskeleton) and then in a further series of cyborg experimentations where the body takes its place in a cybernetic network rewiring its motional limits in radically new ways (Split Body, Fractal Flesh, Stimbod, Ping Body, Virtual Arm, Virtual Body, Parasite, Movatar).”⁸⁸

Massumi’s comment on the potential of utility that can emerge from such experiments strikingly recalls Sternfeld’s Android robotic arm system, here projected as an extrapolation from Stelarc’s prosthetic works: “When a way is invented to attach the robotic arm to a computer and remotely control it—now then there are possibilities. It really could be used in hostile off-world environments, for equipment repair or mining. It could fulfill so many wondrous functions. Why, it would be a necessity in any extraterrestrial extension of the body’s sphere of movement.”⁸⁹

But Massumi insists that the development of the body is not only a necessity for futurist visions of space travel, but a condition of evolutionary development in general: “The body’s obsolescence is the condition of change. Its vitality is in obsolescence. We are all astronauts. We are all moonwalkers without organs, taking small perceptual steps into the future on virtual legs. … The body without organs that Stelarc sews himself into is not so singular after all. Or rather, it is so singular, but the singular accompanies and conditions any … of these particularities into the general. The body without organs—the reversion of thought and perception-action into pure sensation—is a constant companion of the organism, its future-double.”⁹⁰

Massumi sees this development in Stelarc’s work as being directed “toward the cyborg”⁹¹—a figure that appears, at first glance, as the polar opposite of the body without organs: the “cybernetic organism” is cybernetic and thus inscribed into regimes of calculation, control, feedback, and predictability, and it is an organism, i.e., an assemblage of articulated elements with defined functions, totalized, integrated, and harmonized—to use Deleuze and Guattari’s formula of the organism that the body without organs rebels against. The term was first used, in 1960, by US Air Force contractors who were speculating about adjustments to be made in order to extend the physical capabilities of astronauts.⁹²

Yet the cyborg is not only a cybernetically conceived, perfectly integrated biological and technological system; it also carries the heritage of romantic automata and paranoid robots that try to escape their own functionalist and utilitarian desiring-machines toward dedifferentiation. Nowhere was this alternative lineage of the cyborg argued more forcefully than by Donna Haraway in the “Cyborg Manifesto”:

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment.⁹³

The conceptual register is entirely different from Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Massumi’s in their footsteps, as is the agenda of her text. Haraway was arguing at the time within feminist debates that struggled with redefinitions of what it means to be a woman, and with the power structures through which the social dominance of men was implemented. By some feminist critics, technology was regarded as one of these structures. Haraway sought to argue against this interpretation, and for an embrace by women of technology in general, and the figure of the cyborg in particular:

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.⁹⁴

Together with the concept of the bachelor-machine which Deleuze and Guattari adopted from Michel Carrouges, and the notion of “becoming-woman,” first introduced by Guattari in the 1970s and elaborated together with Deleuze in Mille Plateaux, Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a transgender figure opens up Stelarc’s project to the discussion of its gender aspects.⁹⁵ The elision of the gender issue from Stelarc’s discourse may be taken as a symptom of the gender coding of technology. But in a more strategic sense it could also be taken as a pointer for the question that Stelarc implicitly raises regarding the status of the male body. The Stelarc body is not a heroic masculine figure but deficient and rather “helpless,” in constant need of support.

Scenarios for Encapsulated Bodies

Echoing a central dogma of scientific management, Stelarc once remarked: “We have to design bodies to match our machines.” His own artistic contributions to the relationship between humans, machines, and the environment are, as we have seen, not without historical precedent, either in scientific, technical, or theoretical terms. The association with developments in air and space flight, and the concomitant realization of certain unfavorable “technical” deficiencies of the human body, epitomized in the Event for Support Structure, point us toward a whole series of scenarios for body encapsulations, proposed by such different authors as the suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, the artist and critic of cybernetics Oswald Wiener, and media theoretician Vilém Flusser. These conceptions are neither precursors, nor alternatives, nor complements to Stelarc’s own work, but they can serve as external reference or sounding points which help to both contextualize and rethink the Stelarc body as realized not only in his discursive practice but also in projects like the Stomach Sculpture, Parasite, the Suspension pieces, or Movatar.⁹⁶

An early twentieth-century model for the new human body and a fantasy about a body-machine assemblage was put forward by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich in a text written in 1920, entitled God Is Not Cast Down.⁹⁷ Malevich ranks among the key figures of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s and is famous for the invention of suprematism and for painting the icon of that exclusive art movement, the Black Square. Unlike the constructivists, e.g., Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova, with their belief in political and social utilitarianism, Malevich held on to an autonomous and spiritual conception of art. This he explained in a number of writings, among which was the text under consideration here, God Is Not Cast Down. This text was published as a brochure in 1922 when Malevich was head of the art school in Vitebsk and formed, at the time, part of a heated debate about the role of art in the new, postrevolutionary Soviet society.

In the 40-page essay, Malevich, in his typical meandering style, speaks about the role of art in a society that used to be dominated by religion and is now increasingly under the rule of industrialization. The three key topics of his discourse are “art,” “church,” and “factory,” and his main aim is a reconciliation of the concept of “God” with the experience of modernization.

Of particular interest in our context are two sections toward the end that deal with the transformation of the human body through technology. In section 30, Malevich lets “the factory” speak as follows: “I redesign the world and its body; I change the consciousness of Man.”⁹⁸ The factory assumes God’s omniscience and eventually becomes the mouthpiece of God himself: “I will open Man’s eyes and ears and will let his speech resound in many spaces, I will build up the technique of his body in a perfect model. … After all, the world is only a failed technical attempt by God, which I will now bring to perfect completion.”⁹⁹

Modern industrialization was understood at the time to bring about a fundamental transformation of both the social and the physiological organization of human life. Studies of scientific management, closely related to the Taylorist factory system, were in full swing. Here the adaptation of the human body to machines for the sake of production efficiency was not science fiction but science.

Malevich connects these ideas about the industrial transformation of the human body to his argument about the emergence of a new conception of humans. Whereas the Christian church had sought to save the soul by separating it from the body, thus making the soul immortal, the factory—in Malevich’s conception—reverses the body-soul relationship, ignoring the human soul altogether and instead turning the body of the human worker into the soul of the machine system:

[The factory] prepares a new body for man as spiritual power and the result will resemble the man that the church divides into body and soul. An armored weapon, an automobile, represents a small example of what I have been saying. If a man sitting in it is still separate from it, it is because his particular body that man has put on cannot fulfil all functions. The man himself, as a technical organ, can fulfil all the functions necessary for his soul, and therefore the soul lives within him and leaves him when the functions are no longer fulfilled. If an automobile could perfectly fulfil all man’s needs he would never leave it. The features of the latter are found at a larger scale: for example, the hydroplane—air and water are united in it, and when everything has been [technically] provided for, man will leave his new body no more. … Thus the factory and industrial plant intend to lead man to a new mechanical empire, changing his body, as well as his soul in a new set of clothes or tools; in that empire man can be imagined to exist in the form that the soul is imagined to exist in the human body today.¹⁰⁰

Malevich describes a technical apparatus that, like an automobile or an airplane, encapsulates the human body and forms a complete prosthetic shell for the body, one that, ideally, man would never have to leave again. Malevich’s text remains oblique as regards the adaptive changes that the human body would have to undergo, but we can assume that he had Gastev’s methods in mind, which were developed at the Central Labor Institute in Moscow, founded in 1920, the same year Malevich was writing his text.

A similar device—not a vehicle this time, but one whose sole purpose is to fully contain a human body and, over time, to gradually take over the body and mind of its inhabitant—was imagined in the mid-1960s by the Austrian artist-philosopher Oswald Wiener with his idea of the “Bio-Adapter.” At the time, Wiener was a leading member of the Vienna-based “Wiener Gruppe” of artists, while his day job from 1958 to 1966 was in data processing for the Italian office machine and computer company Olivetti.¹⁰¹

Wiener’s 1966 text—presented as a fragment, or work in progress, in its first publication of 1969—describes different functional and theoretical aspects of the Bio-Adapter, how it constructs certain experiences and how it, for instance, deals with unavoidable temporary failures. The description, grounded by a humor that oscillates between irony and sarcasm, singles out certain experiences as conducive to adaptation, namely ecstasies, and sexual ecstasies in particular, to whose induction Wiener devotes a specially long and detailed section. The Bio-Adapter is described as a “happiness suit” (“Glücks-Anzug”), and likened to an artificial “uterus.” It is there to counteract deficiencies both of the rapport between the human individual and its environment, and of the psychic makeup of the human subject itself:

It is [the Bio-Adapter’s] purpose to supersede the world. That means it will take over the heretofore inadequate function of the “existing environment” as transmitter and receiver of vital messages (nourishment and entertainment, metabolism and intellectual exchange), and will be more appropriate for its individualized task than was the so-called natural environment which was common to “everybody” and which is now obsolete.¹⁰²

The following description of the deficient human being sounds similar to descriptions that Stelarc has repeatedly given to justify the technical improvements of the obsolete body. Wiener writes:

Outside of its adapter, the human being is an abandoned, nervously activated and miserably equipped lump of slime (in terms of language, logic, thinking power, sensory organs, tools), shaken by the fear of life and petrified by the fear of death. After putting on its bio-complement, the human becomes a sovereign entity which no longer needs to cope with the cosmos and its conquest, because it now ranges distinctly higher than the cosmos in the hierarchy of possible valences.¹⁰³

Thus, the Bio-Adapter is placed “between the insufficient cosmos and the unsatisfied human.”¹⁰⁴

The gradual adaptation of the human “bio-body” to the Bio-Adapter takes place in several stages. In a first phase, the Bio-Adapter simulates the living environment that the inhabitant is acquainted with through a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile interfaces. Gradually, in the second phase, the old body functions are taken over by the Adapter and replaced by modules that can generate experiences much more suited to the wishes and desires of the inhabitant. “Mechanical aggregates become unnecessary and are dismantled by the adapter and converted, or transferred to the storage (where the cell tissues of the bio-body are also kept). … Gradual sucking up of the cell organization by the electronic circuit complexes of the adapter.”¹⁰⁵ In this second phase of the adaptation, the goal is not simplification but improvement, complexity, and expansion of the consciousness of the inhabitant—who is alternatively referred as the “patient,” “inmate,” or “bio-module.”

Wiener’s text is a fantasy about a fully cybernated human body—pushing to the limits ideas of a complete replacement of the natural living environment by a highly individualized and simulated virtual world. “Consciousness,” the text says, “becomes the self of the environment.”¹⁰⁶ In the fiction of the Bio-Adapter, the data-processing machine enables the explosion of human consciousness—which itself is the limiting capsule¹⁰⁷—up to the point where the cyberneticized, expanded consciousness becomes self-contained.¹⁰⁸

Since its inception in the 1960s, the concept of the Bio-Adapter has been used and modified for a number of science fiction narratives. But whereas these mostly presume an extreme form of exploitation of the human body by alien or enemy entities, Oswald Wiener’s Bio-Adapter is conceived as a form of improvement of an otherwise deficient human body.

This of course reminds us of a trope that Stelarc frequently brings up in his discourse: the idea of the physiological and ecological deficiency of the human body, hence the necessity of its technical improvement—however preliminary and hypothetical the improvements may be that Stelarc himself implements on his own body. Stelarc develops a comparable fantasy when he describes the vision of a “skin” that, similar to the Bio-Adapter system, completely evacuates and replaces the body:

When I first looked at alternative anatomies for the body, I speculated about engineering a synthetic skin. It would be quite plausible to make a membrane permeable to oxygen so you could breathe through your skin. And if the skin also possessed some sophisticated photosynthetic capabilities, then it could produce nutrients for the body. So simply through a change of the skin, we could radically hollow out the human body. … And a hollow body would be a better host for all the technological components you could pack into it!¹⁰⁹

Images of such encapsulated bodies had been around ever since the nineteenth century, inspired by—at times speculative—submarines and diving suits, cars, airplanes, and space travel. A number of such examples featured, for instance, in Richard Hamilton’s 1955 exhibition “Man Machine and Motion,” where they still affirmed an autonomous individual, not a hollow but a full body, as the user or pilot. The same was the case for the automobile envisaged by Malevich which the driver would never leave, if all his needs were perfectly fulfilled by the vehicular capsule, and, in a different context, for the caravans that architectural theorist Reyner Banham hypostasized as a new standard of modern housing.¹¹⁰

Even in a short text that the German theoretician of information Max Bense wrote in 1970 about the relation of the automobile and the individual, the integrity of the piloting subject is ultimately preserved, even though it comes dangerously close to fusing with the vehicle.¹¹¹ The tendency toward fusion begins with the fact that at least the German language affords that “that which drives” can be either the human I or the car. Moreover, the car becomes increasingly receptive to dialoguing with human intelligence. The most important aspect of this coupling, however, is the gradual adaptation of the human driver to the car: “at some point, everything seems to be happening all by itself … I and the car increasingly merge into an almost surreal automat.”¹¹² In the course of the process of driving, “there’s almost a new form of existence that has been created: a machine analog to consciousness, a car analogous to the ‘I’, a perfect human-machine team, an existential partnership between disruptions and fear, between machinic actions and human reactions, between signals and impulses, between noises and decisions.”¹¹³ But, alas, sixty years after Marinetti’s ecstatic accident, Bense is careful to reduce speed in time: “But when the moment of the highest speed has arrived, realizing the perfect balance between precision and security, this difficult reflection has to be broken off. So we break it off. Becoming slower, the I discovers that it simultaneously sits and drives.”¹¹⁴

In contrast to such speculations which, despite their daring speed, maintained an affirmative concept of the conscious subject in control of gears and steering wheel, the evacuation of the body shell that Stelarc would perform from the late 1970s onward had begun ten years earlier in the prospectus of the Bio-Adapter, and, around the same time, in the erosive language of the American poet William Burroughs, whose imagined fighter pilot loses the self that Bense’s car driver manages to recover:

Consider the is of identity. When I say to be me, to be you, to be myself, to be others—whatever I may be called upon to be or to say that I am—I am not the verbal label “myself.” The word be in the English language contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage, the categorical imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be an animal. If you see the relation of a pilot to his ship, you see crippling force of the reactive mind command to be a body. Telling the pilot to be the plane, then who will pilot the plane?¹¹⁵

Such images of desubjectivation come to a head, just ten years later, in a text entitled “Toward a Map of the Body” (“Leibkarte”), in which the media theoretician Vilém Flusser develops the idea of a model of the human body.¹¹⁶ The purpose of this cybernetic model is to describe aspects of the relation between the body, the world, and the self, and to raise a number of questions regarding, for example, sensory perception, inside and outside, the body as a medium, the status of the Self, and death. This is how Flusser describes the basic features of the model of the “body map”:

Imagine a hollow sphere whose hollow space is tiny in comparison with its overall volume. This hollow sphere pulsates (whether it pulsates rhythmically or not shall remain open for now). The very thick walls of the sphere are organized with a high degree of complexity, and this organization of the walls is in question. The sphere exists in a context and finds itself in a feedback relationship with that context: the context partly flows into the sphere’s wall, partly the sphere’s wall expels secretions which coagulate as context. The context itself disperses toward the horizon, from which it is, however, set apart. This model can now be labeled: the hollow space in the sphere can be labeled as “myself” (or as “nothing”), the sphere’s wall as “my body,” the context as “my world,” and the horizon as “my death” or as “nothing,” or it can remain unlabeled. The purpose of the model is to serve as a coordinate system of my body experience.¹¹⁷

Flusser goes on to apply the model to different aspects of the human body and its interactions with the world. The deliberately reductive model makes it possible for him to think about and, in his own formulation, to think through the body. Five aspects of Flusser’s concept of the “body map” stand out and can also be posed as questions about the Stelarc body.

First, there is a distinction in German between two notions of the body: between Körper and Leib. Its relevance becomes clear when we compare the English version of Flusser’s text with the slightly later German version. The title of the German version of the text takes the term Leibkarte for the English “map of the body.” The term Leib refers to the living, conscious or soulful body, a body that is alive and, depending whether the term is used in theological or philosophical contexts, endowed with a soul or with consciousness. This understanding of Leib differs from the notion of Körper which implies an understanding of the body that is more neutral and objectifying. In the earlier, English version of the text, Flusser used the word “body,” so the fact that in the German version he chose the term Leib rather than the more neutral Körper indicates that he conceived of the body here modeled in the map as a Leib, i.e., as a conscious or soulful body.¹¹⁸

Second, Flusser’s conception of the body as medium introduces media-theoretical, epistemological, and ontological considerations about the status of perception and agency. This theme is closely connected, thirdly, to the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body, its relation to the world, and the porosity of the boundary between the body and its context or environment. The fourth aspect relates to the fact that Flusser suggests that the small hollow space, the void at the center of the model sphere, can be labeled as “myself” or as “nothing.” The question of the Self plays an important role in his interpretation of the model, and it is, I would suggest, also a very important question to ask of the Stelarc body. Who or what is it that would say “I” with regard to the Stelarc body? And is this Self continuous across the different performances, interventions, and extensions? Finally, Flusser discusses the notion of Death, and how it is built into the model—a theme that Stelarc at least at one point brushed away, musing about the relativity of death and how dysfunctional parts of the human body might be “not repaired but replaced.”¹¹⁹

Interestingly, Flusser does not relate the body map, the Leibkarte, to technological aspects, but uses the model only to discuss the human body in relation to the world in general. In a book about the development of technical images that he published in the mid-1980s, soon after the presumable date of writing the text on the body map, Flusser speaks elaborately about the relation between the human body and media interfaces, especially those used in the creation of electronic images and texts. The following quotation presents a critical, rather dystopian vision of the way human bodies might evolve in relation to technical media:

The scenario, the fable which I want to propose is this: humans will sit, each to him- or herself, in cells, they will play on keyboards with their fingertips, stare at tiny screens, and they will receive, modify, and send images. Behind their backs, robots will be bringing things to maintain and propagate their atrophied bodies. The humans will be connected to each other through their fingertips and will thus form a dialogical network, a cosmic superbrain, whose function it will be to put improbable situations into images by means of calculation and computation, and to bring about information and catastrophes. Switched between the humans will be artificial intelligences which dialogue with the humans through cables or similar nerve cords. It will therefore be functionally meaningless to want to distinguish between “natural” and “artificial” intelligences (between “primate brains” and “second brains”). The whole thing will function as a cybernetically controlled, indecomposable system: a black box.

The mood there will be reminiscent of what we experience in our most creative moments. The mood of excess, of adventure, of orgasm.¹²⁰

The ambivalence of these descriptions, which are typical of Flusser’s prose and which are deliberately nonmoralistic, may remind us of the moral ambivalence that Stelarc conveys when he speaks about his performance scenarios and contraptions that seem to oscillate between pleasure and pain, between scientific experiment, torture rack, and orgasmatron. Yet unlike Flusser’s fable of interconnected and artificially enhanced human cell inhabitants, and unlike Wiener’s fictitious concept of the Bio-Adapter, Stelarc’s contraptions are real, and they maintain a realistic conception of the human body as technological platform.

Apparently, there are neither direct references nor traceable connections between the proposals for encapsulated bodies by Malevich, Oswald Wiener, Bense, Burroughs, Flusser, and Stelarc. Each of the authors appears to have arrived at the respective models on his own trajectory, which suggests that such an encapsulation and evacuation of the human body is part of the repertoire of the technoculture of the twentieth century, like the automaton (the machine that mimics a human being), the dehumanizing mega-machine (devoid of all humane aspects), or the cyborg (the fused human-machine entity).

Seiko Mikami: The Body-Apparatus of Perception

The cybernetic conception of the human body resulted in visions not only of its hollowing out and its disappearance, but also of its segmentation. As an extreme opposite to the body without organs, the cybernetic body can be described as an assemblage of individual organs or parts. This organicity was, for instance, developed in models of vision of second-order cybernetics, from around 1960, that describe the construction of the observer and the world that he or she perceives.¹²¹ As an alternative to the generalized questioning of the status of the body in the work of Stelarc, we can turn to projects by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami which have addressed not the whole body but individual senses, coupled to their respective intra- and extracorporeal environments through feedback systems.

The aspect of sensory perception is conspicuously absent from Stelarc’s work. In his performances, “the body” is moved, watched, amplified, and invaded, but it is not considered as a watching, listening, or otherwise sensing body—eyes and mouth are, quite literally, sewn shut. This omission is consistent with Stelarc’s quest to hollow out the body: a perceiving body could be one that opens itself to reflection, and thus to emergent forms of consciousness and subjectivation—a feedback loop that Stelarc deliberately rules out. Yet by the same token his hollow body remains a whole body; it becomes part of heterogeneous body-machine assemblages, but it is not itself segmented into parts.

Research into the perceptual “apparatus” of living beings and its experimental segmentation was crucial for the modern reconceptualization of human subjectivity, and not only since the famous analysis of a frog’s visual perception by a group of Macy cyberneticians in the late 1950s.¹²² Ever since the research into perception of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, human perception has been conceived in such technical and constructivist frameworks—a research which not least led, as described by Jonathan Crary, to applications of photographic and chronophotographic media that would form an essential basis for the physiological research of scientific management.¹²³

Marshall McLuhan spoke of media as “extensions of man,” and considered these both as mechanical extensions of the human body and its limbs and as extensions of the perceptual faculties. Beyond McLuhan’s conception of such prosthetic media which extend an integral body, the coupling of “media” and “bodies” also implies an invasion of the technological into the body, or rather a cybernetic transformation of what we understand as the body through a recoding of its physiological functions as technical, or rather techno-logical, functions. The assemblages of perception by artists like Seiko Mikami and Ulrike Gabriel couple specific parts of the human perceptual apparatuses to technical systems and interfaces for visual and sonic display. They produce particular types of perception and open up reflections about how cognition and subjectivation are transformed by technically enhanced perceiving bodies.

The senses are, phenomenologically, always already a coupling of outside and inside: seeing means to see something, and by analogy hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting form the sensations of things outside the body.¹²⁴ Importantly, these sensations occur inside the body, so they belong, at the same time, inside and outside. Their reality, or rather efficacy (or operationality), is determined by the physiological and cognitive conditions under which the sense perception is made. A smell is, at the same time, the smell of an object, and it is a sensation that is, in this particular form, only experienced by a particular body. This dual, paradoxical structure forms the basis of subjectivation.¹²⁵

The Japanese installation artist Seiko Mikami realized several projects that proposed scenarios for extending and transforming the perceptual range of the human body, most importantly two installations that are based on the mediated observation of different aspects of perception: Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking (1996–2011) investigated the sense of seeing and the intuitive movements of the eye, while the project World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body (1997) focused on the sense of hearing and on internal body sounds.¹²⁶

In Molecular Informatics, the visitor dons a set of virtual reality glasses which are equipped with an eye-tracking device that records the movements of the pupils (figure 5.14, plate 13). These movements are translated, in near real time, into visualizations which are displayed by the head-mounted display. The user can see the traces of his or her own eye movement, observing his or her own act of looking, visualized as animated lines and shapes, like molecular chains probing into the depth of a virtual space. A number of factors, like direction and speed of the eyes’ movement, determine the movement and direction of the molecular objects in the virtual space. During exhibitions, the animation that the visitor sees in the head-mounted display is also shown in a large-size projection for the gallery audience, offering them the opportunity to observe the traces of the user’s visual perception.

Figure 5.14 Seiko Mikami, *Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking, Ver. 2* (1996). Coproduced with Canon ARTLAB. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

Through the visual feedback of the trace of the eye movement displayed in the virtual space, the gaze is involuntarily led to look “back,” to look at what it regards as its own trace. As the Japanese philosopher Sabu Kohso has observed in his essay on Molecular Informatics: “In this seeing/production of the virtual space, what is truly exposed is the uncontrollability of one’s own gaze—perhaps the most severe part of the ordeal. Indeed as a crucial lesson, the work reveals gaze, will and spirit, namely, the symbols of human intentionality, as something passive, something that is always affected by internal (corporeal) as well as external (circumstantial) conditions rather than actively affecting itself.”¹²⁷

The installation visualizes and externalizes, it creates a dynamic image of attention and awareness, and thus destroys the assumed natural congruence of will and perception, of perceptual intention and control.

Mikami develops a similarly deconstructive setting for the sense of hearing in the installation World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. Here the participant is seated in an anechoic chamber. By means of acoustic sensors, his or her heartbeat and pulse are tracked and acoustically recorded by a computer system. These sounds are then played back through a loudspeaker system in the chamber, so that the body hears its own internal sounds, with a slight delay, from a source outside the body. While the sounds are first played back without modification, a software running on the computer system gradually introduces changes, delays, drops, amplifications, accelerations, etc. to the digitized sound material. World, Membrane turns the resonant inside space of the body into a part of its external world. What initially appeared to be a straightforward externalization of internal sounds turns into a reinterpretation, even a reinvention of the acoustic potential of the body’s interior, plunging the participant into the gap between self and perception.¹²⁸

In both Molecular Informatics and World, Membrane, the technical installation has no autonomous agency; it is an apparatus, a tool for visualization, sonification, and the programmed modification of perceptual events. The installation externalizes body functions and constructs the body as segmented, as an assemblage that is a distribution of physiological processes and sensations, disjointed from an inhabiting self.

Seiko Mikami’s works are strictly interactive in that they use and factor current perceptual and sensor data, creating feedback loops of seeing, hearing, and sensing, folding what is being perceived, back onto the act of perception. They construct the body as part of a distributed interactive system, a cybernetic apparatus with a certain set of functions and describable characteristics which can be mapped from one surface (body, sensors) to another (visual projections, sounds). As though they were experiments continuing those on frog vision, and toward Oswald Wiener’s Bio-Adapter, these works by Seiko Mikami investigate not the flesh body but its perceptual apparatus and the self-reflexive construction of a world.

Kohso interprets Mikami’s work as an exposition of a phenomenological event in which the technological setting allows the observation of the construction of the self, “the mechanism itself as to how the self is formed in the process of seeing: … [Molecular Informatics should] be read as a work which tells us how technology and the self have always/already been interacting with each other to form our cultural apparatus. This work points to a realm where the self and technology are not yet completely separated, forming a drive to construct something unknown; we do not know when it started, but we do know that the drive of this apparatus cannot be stopped.”¹²⁹

Kohso then (somewhat idiosyncratically) introduces the concept of the “body without organs” and thus points to the radicality of Mikami’s project, which suggests that the human self is only conceivable as a flickering in the technological dispositive that the perceiving mind, technical apparatus, and the object of perception form: “All of these networks [brain/retina, information networks] are part of the one whole body at the same time that each of them assumes the others to be its bodies without organ.”¹³⁰ In conclusion, Kohso claims, “in Mikami’s work, the artist Seiko Mikami is just another machine, in the same way as we, the audience, are just perception machines.”¹³¹

Jonathan Crary has analyzed the beginnings of this machining of the human body in the nineteenth century, the period when “the body, including the observing body, [became] a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological. … Subjectivity [became] a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information.”¹³² Consequently, Mikami herself imagines a joint exhibition of her works that deal with the different human senses as “a museum (or even a mausoleum) of perception. But it is really a ‘ghost house’ (or an enclave of Geist) of perception.”¹³³

A McLuhanesque, subject-affirming media prosthesis that stands in relation to Mikami’s desubjectifying sound space as Bense’s driver does to Burroughs’s pilot is the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Personal Instrument (1969). It consists of some lightweight instruments that can be strapped to the head, the arms, and the hands of a user: a microphone component that is worn on the forehead, two earphones, and two gloves equipped with photosensitive cells (figure 5.15).¹³⁴ The sounds recorded by the microphone can either be played back directly by the earphones, or manipulated through audio filters which are controlled by the signals from the photo cells. By opening and closing the hands, moving them toward or away from light sources, the user can thus determine how much of the environmental sounds are emitted by the earphones. Fifteen years before Hosokawa’s diagnosis of the “Walkman Effect,”¹³⁵ the Personal Instrument allowed the user—which in Wodiczko’s case was only the artist himself—to isolate himself from an environment of offensive sounds.¹³⁶ Unlike Mikami’s World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body, this was a mobile and wearable contraption whose acoustic behavior and effects could be fully controlled by the user. The Personal Instrument thus affirmed rather than questioned the boundaries of an individual’s body and the perceiving self.

Figure 5.15 Krzysztof Wodiczko, *Personal Instrument* (1969–1972). Photo by Jerzy Surwiło, Warsaw 1972. Courtesy of Profile Foundation, Warsaw, and the artist.

The concept of transgression, which was so important in Mikami’s Molecular Informatics and its visualization of the constructive aspect of visual perception, was also explored by the German artist Ulrike Gabriel in her project Perceptual Arena (1993). This interactive installation used a head-mounted display that showed an abstract virtual world composed of multiple polygons. This virtual environment could be navigated by means of a data glove and a tracker that translated movements of the head into movements in the virtual space. Intensive exploration of a specific part of the virtual environment led to the growth and differentiation of the polygons in that area, whereas a lack of attention and superficial glances were translated by the system into the withering and ultimately the disappearance of the corresponding elements.¹³⁷

The position of the subject is reduced to the source of the gaze whose moment of reflexivity is that of a vectorial, visual projection into the virtual space. Viewed in terms of their projective potential, works like those by Mikami and Gabriel make it possible to imagine the trajectory of a “bio-mediated body” as considered by philosopher Patricia Clough, a trajectory that leads from the medial extension of the senses beyond the body as organism, toward a corporeal affectivity without a subject.¹³⁸

Deconstructing the Body

When he was invited, in 1993, to create a site-specific work for the Sculpture Biennial in Sydney, Stelarc proposed the realization of the Stomach Sculpture project, for which a metal capsule was inserted with a tube into the stomach of the artist. The idea was to show that the body was not the integral and impenetrable home of a human consciousness and subjectivity, but that its inside was just another site that could be used for different purposes, like for the presentation of an artwork.¹³⁹ Consequently, in 2005 Stelarc realized a project together with Nina Sellars, entitled Blender, for which both artists underwent liposuction and thus had different types of body tissue removed, which was subsequently mixed and put on display in a sculpture with a transparent glass sphere. The work questions the integrity of the body and the identitarian relationship which is usually associated with the body as a whole. While the Involuntary Body performances reflected on the functionality of the body, and Stomach Sculpture speculated about its spatiality and the tenability of a claim to interiority, Blender raises the question of the materiality of the human body.¹⁴⁰

Stelarc’s performances and projects radically question the human body as a site of agency and identity, and thus constitute one extreme of the relationship between the human body and technology. Control over the body is suspended and passed over to a technical system that is, within a range of possible impulses, both unintentional and unpredictable.

Another extreme position in the field of human-machine relations is marked by Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca project, in the course of which the Belgian artist built a number of installations that emulate the process of human digestion (figure 5.16). The project was under development from around 1992, and the first operational version was exhibited in 2000. It consists of a 10-meter-long installation whose central feature is a series of transparent glass containers which are placed in a row on 130-centimeter-high metal tables, and which are serially connected by plastic tubes. At one end of this row is a metal ladder that leads up to a platform from which food can be thrown into a first container. At the other end of the row is an apparatus that ejects the digested material in the form of a sausage from a rounded metal pipe. From here, the allantoid material drops onto a round sheet of metal that is turned by a motor, forming a moving display for what looks and smells like feces. The different glass containers are equipped with additional plastic pipes through which various chemicals and bacteria are added to the material as it travels through the different stages of this digestive process.¹⁴¹

Figure 5.16 Wim Delvoye, *Cloaca Original* (2000), 1157 × 78 × 270 cm, installation view, MUHKA, Antwerp. Copyright © the artist.

The problem of the terminology that can be used for describing the Cloaca installation points to the project’s core issue: what is the relation of this machine-based process to the process of human digestion? It is probably best described as an emulation, because what we can observe is the transformation of food into feces as it happens in the human body, and not a simulation—which would imply an abstraction and reduction of complexity. But is the resulting material “feces,” a term that is normally used for the excrement of living beings?

An important part of the public exhibition of Cloaca is the recurring moment when the machine is “fed,” i.e., when food is put into the machine to start another digestive process. The mix of foodstuff used for this is modeled on the normal diet of a human being. At times, these feeding sessions have been done routinely by gallery staff; at other times they have been celebrated as cooking and feeding performances with internationally renowned chefs.

The overall aesthetics of the project draws on a combination of the scientific laboratory, an industrial production line, and consumer culture. This combination is also reflected by the Cloaca logo designed for the project, which is a cross between the blue and ellipsoid logo of the Ford motor company and the wavy typography of Coca-Cola.¹⁴² In all models of the installation, the mechanisms are visible as the liquids and materials are held and moved along in transparent vessels and tubes. Importantly, the installation effuses a strong smell of feces which punctuates the voyeurism that the work elicits.¹⁴³

The technical drawings that accompany the installations show how specific physiological functions are mapped onto technical appliances, using details like chemical formulas, overall amounts, and throughput. The machine is thus mimetically coupled to the human body and its functions. The goal of the installation is not the efficient production of feces, in which case Delvoye could have looked for alternative methods. Instead, the project insists on anthropomorphic authenticity and puts the process of human digestion on display as a process that can also be performed by a technical apparatus.

But can we say that, unlike Vaucanson’s duck, this machine really shits? Christian Denker has described the process as both a “simulation” and an “imitation of biological processes,”¹⁴⁴ while Isabelle Loring Wallace writes that “what the Cloaca machines show us, at considerable expense and labor, is not digestion, but digestion’s facsimile, not shit, but shit’s representation.”¹⁴⁵ An important criterion for Denker is that Delvoye’s machine mimics only part of the functions of the human organs, while others—like the primary function of nourishing and providing energy—are lacking.¹⁴⁶

The psychological situation constructed by the exhibition of the Cloaca is particularly awkward in cultures in which the inspection of feces is a highly intimate act, if not altogether taboo.¹⁴⁷ It happens between parents and children, and possibly between carers and patients, and is a sign of the neediness of the person whose feces is being inspected. At the same time, the feces can give important indications about the conditions of health of the body, which make it a potential source of information for regulatory feedback mechanisms, like the need for medication or for changing the diet. As Kati Simon has remarked: “The work requires constant care … as if an actual human being were present. Cloaca can thus be seen as a cyborg, a hybrid form between man and machine.”¹⁴⁸ This analysis in terms of the concept of the cyborg may not be rigorous, but it is a symptom for the way in which Cloaca constructs a particular reaction by a human observer toward technology. According to curator Dan Cameron, Cloaca is “sort of frightening and funny, and it also stimulates deep anthropomorphic attachments. I know that the staff now refers to Cloaca as a baby—a large infant that needs care. It needs feeding, and we are concerned about its bowel movements because those are equated with the health of the museum.”¹⁴⁹

Such descriptions point to a posthuman provocation that echoes the Cartesian doubt: is the human body itself a shitting machine? Once again, anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism are twin descriptions of a representational situation in which human organism and machine are inseparably modeled on each other. The crucial effect is that of a symbolic emptying out of the human body that becomes a mere microbiological environment. As Delvoye put it: “For me, it’s life. This is a human being without a soul.”¹⁵⁰ This “human being without a soul” is a cyborgian successor of the obsolete and hollow body propagated by Stelarc. It is not a body without organs, but rather an organicity without a body.

Even in such negations, the human subject inhabiting a sensing flesh body remains the main point of reference, and the potential source of meaning—even for Cloaca’s virtual feces. This reference point is at least hypothetically shifted toward a machine subject in Stelarc’s Movatar project, in which the human body acts as a mere interface for a virtual entity—much like Sternfeld’s telematic Android robotic arm installed on a hypothetical spaceship on its way to Mars.

Similarly, the fictitious artificial intelligence Huge Harry, conceived by the Dutch artist Arthur Elsenaar and media theoretician Remko Scha, uses Elsenaar’s face as an interface to express emotions which make it easier for the human observers to relate to this otherwise immaterial form of existence (figure 5.17). The work is technically based on the electrical excitation of the facial muscles, famously explored by the nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. The electrocution of Elsenaar’s facial muscles causes them to twitch involuntarily and brings forth a variety of both yet-natural and rather unnatural grimaces. Of the examples discussed here, Elsenaar goes the furthest in questioning the sovereign integrity of the human body. His performances are theatrical in that the interaction with the machine is a simulation of what it pretends to be: the technical system is preprogrammed to activate certain areas of the face, while a prepared text is read out by a text-to-speech system. The possibility of how that interaction between the machine and the human interface might develop if it was in fact driven by an independent agency—maybe comparable to the Ping Body scenario proposed by Stelarc—is left to speculation.¹⁵¹

Figure 5.17 Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha, *Huge Harry: “Toward a Digital Computer with a Human Face”* (2000), lecture performance, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo by Josephine Jasperse. Courtesy of Arthur Elsenaar.

Works like those by Stelarc, Delvoye, or Mikami have at times been criticized for lacking critical edge and being overly affirmative toward the technological scenarios that they present. Such a critique may be justified in individual cases or contexts, but on the whole they reflect positions rather similar to the analyses of the posthuman condition conveyed by critics like Rosi Braidotti or Patricia Clough. The artistic explorations of the changing relation between the human body and technology might therefore be seen in the tradition of Heinrich von Kleist’s text on the puppet theater, where the solution of the aesthetic crisis of representation, rather than being sought in some nostalgic backtracking, is projected forward into a new theatrical primitivism; or it may be seen as following in Haraway’s appraisal of the cyborg—which “is our ontology and gives us our politics.”

Notes

42. See Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy,” 387–390. The debate about the ideological impact of scientific management was fierce. As Bailes writes, Gastev’s opponents insisted that “a Soviet system of scientific management could be developed only on the basis of the class interests of the proletariat” (390). They “criticized the Central Labour Institute for its concept of ‘the narrow base’ which began by studying simple labour processes to the neglect of the more general aspects of production, and labour institutes in general for their pure experimentation and laboratory methods uncoordinated with the needs of the economy. The use of the stop watch as the sole means of determining work norms was an especially exploitative and uncritical application of Taylorism to Soviet industry. The most important problem of Soviet industry was to raise productivity without increased intensification of labour, and to raise wages in proportion to increased productivity” (389). Gastev, in contrast, “advocated nothing less than ‘Soviet Americanism,’ wanting to see Russia transformed into a ‘new, flowering America’” (385).

46. See La Mettrie, L’Homme machine; for Kahn see Uta von Debschitz and Thilo von Debschitz, Fritz Kahn (Cologne: Taschen, 2013). A striking example of the mechanomorphic transference between body and machine is Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalysis of Joey in “Joey, the Mechanical Boy,” Scientific American (March 1959): 3–9; see Henning Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen. Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan (Munich: Fink, 1997), 80, on Deleuze and Guattari’s references to the case, and the polemical critique of “Bettelheim’s Myth” by Stephen Thompson, “Joey the Mechanical Boy,” in The Transtechnology Reader (Plymouth University, 2010), 85–97. Another such case study is Félix Guattari’s Monographie sur R. A. (1956); see Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 94–97. Martina Leeker, “Digitale Operativität und Performance. Geschichte der Mensch-Computer-Schnittstelle im Moment ihrer Hinterfragung, noch bevor sie anfing,” Paragrana 14, no. 2 (2005): 26–27, has suggested distinguishing between the three logics of what she calls the “anthropomorphic histories of technology”: the “anthropomorphization of technology,” the “technologization of the anthropological,” and the “strict ontological distinction between human and technology.”

48. See Dirk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer. Das triadische Ballett und die Bauhausbühne (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1988). A reconstruction of the piece was realized by Gerhard Bohner in 1977 and revived by the dancers Ivan Liška and Colleen Scott in 2014; this reconstruction has been performed internationally over a hundred times since the 1970s. For the 1926 performance in Donaueschingen, composer Paul Hindemith wrote a piece of music for a small mechanical organ (see Fred Prieberg, Musica ex machina. Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik [Berlin: Ullstein, 1960], 18). On the cooperation between Schlemmer and Hindemith, see Friederike Zimmermann, “Mensch und Kunstfigur.” Oskar Schlemmers intermediale Programmatik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2014), 226–245; Zimmermann offers a very detailed, somewhat lyrical but well-founded and comprehensive study of the Triadic Ballet. See also Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 724–745.

75. I can here offer only a brief introduction, mainly based on the exposition in Schmidgen’s Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, which also offers a thorough discussion of the concept of the “machine” in Guattari, Deleuze, and Lacan. The terminology introduced here is complex and, even in Deleuze and Guattari’s usage, not always consistent (as Massumi remarks, the notion of the “desiring-machine,” so prominent in Anti-Oedipus, was for instance widely replaced by “assemblage” in Milles Plateaux; see Massumi, A User’s Guide, 82). This also implies not jumping too fast to associations when reading Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphorically rich prose; can their “hollow depth” (Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 35) be related to Stelarc’s notion of the “hollow body”?

84. With her insistence on the presence of the artist, Amelia Jones (in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph) implicitly insinuated that Stelarc’s project is that of a bachelor-machine, whereas he himself denies the aspect of subjectivity and would therefore probably settle for the notion of the wonder-machine. Elizabeth Stephens has described Stelarc as a “wonder machine” (see “Wonder Machines: The Strange Science of Stelarc,” paper presented at the conference “The Science of Stelarc,” Curtin University, Perth, Australia, June 19, 2013); however, she uses the term not like Deleuze and Guattari but in a more colloquial sense, with reference to concepts of wonder and strangeness that she borrows from Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

92. See Matthew Price, “Man Must First Conceive: A Critical Philology of the Cyborg,” unpublished manuscript, cited in Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, no. 21 (1994): 260, fn. 82. For the technical and social figure of the cyborg, see Chris Hables-Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge, 1995), and Antonio Caronia, The Cyborg: A Treatise on the Artificial Man (Lüneburg: meson press, 2015), which focuses on the genealogy of the cyborg in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and movies, but in the additions made to the second and third edition, after the original 1985 Italian publication, also introduces core strands of cultural-theoretical debates on the cyborg motif. For Guattari’s critique of cybernetics and Lacanian structuralism, see Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 17, 138, 163, 169. For an alternative characterization of Stelarc as “Interface Organism” (Interorg) that is neither interface, nor body without organs, nor cyborg, see Markus Hallensleben, “Vom Cyborg zum Interface Organism. Stelarcs und TC&As Extra Ear-Performance,” Paragrana 14, no. 2 (2005): 231.

127. Sabu Kohso, “This Thing that Sees: A Reflection on ‘Molecular Informatics’ by Seiko Mikami,” in Kazunao Abe and Yukiko Shikata, eds., Seiko Mikami: Molecular Informatics. Artlab 6 (Tokyo: Canon ARTLAB, 1996), 1 (4 pages, no pagination); an earlier version of this text is online at Mikami’s website; I quote from the edited, printed version. Kohso, in this text, develops a reading of Mikami’s work emphasizing the relation between the perceiving human subject and the technically enabled perceptions, relating his own detailed reading of the first, 1996 version of the installation to Descartes, Žižek, Lacan, and Heidegger. In Sabu Kohso, “Parables on the Morphogenic Substance,” in Seiko Mikami and Oscar Abril Ascaso, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking / LTM (Low-Tech Music) (Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación, 2004), he looks more broadly at Mikami’s work from Molecular Clinic 1.0 (1995) through to World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body (1997) and focuses on the constructive aspects of the connection between body and technology, referring to the theories of Deleuze, Crary, Wundt, Kant, Bergson, and Valéry, among others.

131. Ibid., 70. I believe that it is necessary to distinguish analytically between the perceptual process and “the body”; Kohso conflates these: “the bodies of the audience members, their retinal senses in this case [of Molecular Informatics], are both the subject to construct and the object to be constructed” (49). Similarly, I believe that it is imprecise to refer to the situation created in the versions of Molecular Informatics for two participants, in which the traces of their eye movements are visualized and intersect in the same virtual space, as “social” or “communal” (see 67–68). Of course the copresence of two participants and the intersection of the projected traces of their gazes construct a special setting; but in the same way that the interaction of two machine agents is not “social,” the coupling of the gazes through the simultaneous projection of their virtual traces into the same virtual space is a technical, not a social, event. This coupling is not a social encounter, since the experience of one’s own abstracted sensorial trace is only increased by the presence not of another person, but of another virtual entity roaming the virtual world on the beam of an involuntary eye, as it invades that fragile virtual space of the already segmented self.

133. Seiko Mikami, in Mikami and Ascaso, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking / LTM (Low-Tech Music), 38. Kohso, in his discussion of Seiko Mikami’s Molecular Informatics, refers to the split of the self-observing Cartesian subject from its body. He reminds us of a comment by Slavoj Žižek in which he identified Descartes with Deckard, the hero of Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, who—himself a human—considers the ontological status of the replicant Rachel; the precariousness of this status points to the Cartesian doubt about whether the thinking subject itself might be a figment of some machine memory: “the very notion of self-consciousness implies the subject’s self-decenterment, which is far more radical than the opposition between subject and object.” Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (1993), 15, cited in Kohso, “This Thing that Sees,” 3.

137. Gabriel had already used this principle of coupling the human body’s perception with a responsive machine environment in the installation Terrain 01 (1993). It consisted of a flock of 25 electronic bugs, each about 20 centimeters long and equipped with wheels, a light-sensitive surface, and an infrared sensor that prevented them from bumping into other objects. The bugs were placed in a round area with a 5-meter diameter, encircled by a narrow metal ring that the bugs could not cross. Above this terrain was a light installation of dimmable spots whose light was the energy source for the electronic bugs, and whose brightness was controlled by the second main component of the installation: a participant wearing a headband with a sensor with which brain activities were tracked. The more this participant concentrated his or her attention, the lower the brightness of the lamps and thus the lower the activity of the bugs. And the more relaxed and “disinterested” the participant was, the higher the measured brain wave activity, and the more active the bugs became. The Perceptual Arena project was developed by Ulrike Gabriel in 1993 at the Canon ARTLAB, where two years later Mikami developed her Molecular Informatics installation; other projects realized in the 1990s by Canon ARTLAB, curated by Yukiko Shikata and Kazunao Abe, included Knowbotic Research’s IO-dencies Tokyo (1997) and Polar (2000) by Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan. About Perceptual Arena, see http://www.t0.or.at/arena/arena.htm (accessed February 27, 2014).

150. Delvoye in Cameron, “Conversations.” In Delvoye’s own discourse, the Cloaca is not only a machine about humans and their ontological status but also a machine about art and art production. Other works in his oeuvre, which include decorated readymades, wood-carved machines, gothic-style architectures and vehicles in laser-cut steel, stained glass windows with X-ray images of intimately caressing human bodies, tattooed human and pig skin, show a distinct understanding of the workings of the art market, as do strategically placed references to artists like Piero Manzoni, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. “All this romantic idea of ‘making art’ will not be individual ever again, the world is no longer anthropocentric: the machine is in the centre. We will never be the centre of the Universe again.” Delvoye, cited in Alvaro De Benito, “Wim Delvoye: The End of Anthropocentrism,” Arte al limite (February 2010): n.p. For the blurring of the boundary between art and life, see also Denker, “Schöner verdauen,” 10.

5 Body Machine

Toward a Technological Conception of the Human Body

Chapter Summary