Artist Lecture: Stelarc: The Cadaver, The Comatose, & The Chimera: Avatars have no organs
Thursday, October 8, 2009, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Henry Auditorium
FREE: Henry Members / 911 Members / UW Students, Staff, and Faculty
$5 General Admission
Cadavers can be preserved forever with plastination whilst comatose bodies can be sustained indefinitely on life-support systems. Cryogenically suspended bodies await reanimation at some imagined future date. Donated ova are now fertilized by sperm that were once frozen. The dead, the near-dead, the un-dead and the yet to be born now exist simultaneously. These phenomena and others have brought us, in the mind of the artist Stelarc, to the age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera, a newly-dawned epoch that will be the subject of this lecture.
In a career spanning four decades, Stelarc has made art by employing medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a third hand, a stomach sculpture, and _Exoskeleton, a 6-legged walking robot. Currently he is surgically constructing an extra ear on his arm, which will become internet enabled.