10 Stelarc is an Australian artist who has revolutionized our thinking 20 about being online, about the interface of body and technology, and 30 about the distinctions between humans and software agents - among 40 other things. This article is a series of fragments stemming from a 50 long-term interest in Stelarc's work; it isn't a review per se. For 60 more information on Stelarc, go to www.google.com and enter his 70 name; as of this writing, 5770 sites will come up. Meanwhile, what 80 follows is a wandering through issues of real and virtual subjectiv- / ity, 90 Stelarc the dispersed and central focus of attention.

*/ a messy article. take The Cybercultures Reader (Bell and Kennedy): representative/canonic Stelarc on the cover, with the only images in the book, carrying the body of net art, net.art, in the post-(cyber)bodies section. Canonic, because clear, emblematic, and lucid work, a work whose doubts might be buried in the protocols themselves. on one hand, an isol- ated unique work (oeuvre, here); on the other, a work slipped among human, virtual, and technological interfacings. a work of simultaneous machinic and fleshly insistence: the alter/altar ego presenced uneasily on your machine, unnerving in a manner oddly reminiscent of Andy Kaufman's tele- vision network comedy performances. /*

<-- a work which grows with, towards the future - a body of work changing in relation to changing technology, miniaturization, nanotech, increased computer firepower. a work which is therefore never completed, responsive to technological innovation and growth, an increasingly immersive work - the periphery or the shadow of the body in or among computers or in or among nets. his recent Movatar piece (developing) engages him as an (off- line) agent of an (online) agent: a clear model for future developments of virtual subjectivity. From Stelarc's "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems, Images as post-human entities" in ibid.: "Consider though a virtual body or an avatar that can access a physical body, actuating it to perform in the real world." this begins to take care of interface issues from a phil- osophical viewpoint; now philosophers will have to learn protocol ethos and aesthetics. i mean this literally. elsewhere Stelarc states "The nature of both bodies and images has been significantly altered. IMAGES ARE NO LONGER ILLUSORY WHEN THEY BECOME INTERACTIVE." in the next article in ibid. (Mark Dery, "Ritual Mechanics") Fakir Musafar is quoted: -->

# "Where I think Stelarc is missing the point is that ... [w]e've gotten to the point where we can synthesize magic, technology and science. You listen to the babblings of the best physicists we have today, [and] they sound like the alchemists used to." well, i don't think they do, but with the entrance of magic (or magick) into (what passes for) the equation, issues of fetishization come up. think of the dirt/bone/fingernail fetish or the wood/feather/tar fetish and immediately the categories of the imminent and unclean appear (something Parmenides brings up to Socrates as "mud"); filth, Kristeva's abject, breaks virtual/real and any other schemes down to _there,_ where holes and bodies are intertwined with old technology, dark aspirations, gleaming cabinets of viscera and far-future storage capabilities. categories are sloughed like snakeskin. there's an uneasy aura to Stelarc's work, conditioned in part by his past body-sus- pension pieces (with hooks through the skin); one might say that bodies float free (as in dreams) but always at a cost (as in dreams). #

[- "My concern about post-modernist deconstruction and appropriation is that it ultimately becomes so self-referential that it falls into an incestuous discourse and spirals back into itself and doesn't plot an alternate or new strategies and trajectories. That's what's so intriguing about new technologies." (Stelarc in Live Art Letters, #3 Feb. 98: "Obso- lete Body/Alternate Strategies - Listening to Stelarc," Robert Ayers.) Stelarc's OPTIMISM - an exhilaration centered on the indefinite explora- tion of networkings, opened futures into opened futures. it's the next step, and then and then - eliminate the exoskeleton (there goes robotics) (there goes Panamarenko) - great loopings in the worlds - great openings - you can see them beyond & among the clouds & where the pixels end, when the pod won't move any farther, when the screen enlarges walls & mountains to rectangles of bloated pixels & you're begging for greater bandwidth & you've got to build more & add more apparatus & add storage STORAGE - -]

<!-- he's among centuries, among theatricality and 19th-century melodrama, Wagner, Beuys, the diorama, spectacle (one might think of a futurebook Spectacle of the Society, no?) - among mechanisms, especially hydraulics (back to the Freudian model, applied to the motility of the body), elect- ronics, pure MECHANISM - but also among virtualities (multiple presencings of bodies, interiors and exteriors of bodies, inversions and transforma- tions of bodies) -->

#REM Brian Rotman's Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In - just as it was almost safe to sinter the other way around, turning byte and bite into ash and powder - towards the elimination of the transcendental - i'd also say the technological sublime. Stelarc poses all of this in clear models, deficient, if at all, in considerations of gender - Irigarayan flux replaced by confined air or liquid, fluid mechanics transformed into digital horizons. the returning, re-turning, of the body is that of the theoretically ungendered male, as in "mankind's technological progress," although one references Sandy Stone and The Cyborg Manifesto (Harraway) as well. in other respects (sinter), he considers the body in pain, but the pain is chosen, existential, necessary; it's not the surplus pain of fibromyalgia or cancer, the unaccountable pain of war or wounding, the accountable pain of thirst and hunger (as if agencies were disposed among accountancies). the pain is related to what suspends or moves the body; it is a residue or byproduct, but one can't over look the effect of pain on the exaltation or fascination of the spectator. REM#

*// "PHANTOM LIMB/VIRTUAL ARM: Amputees often experience a phantom limb. It is now possible to have a phantom sensation of an additional arm - a virtual arm - albeit visual rather than visceral." (Stelarc in "From Psycho-Body" ..) teledildonics theoretically extends virtuality to full- skin contact; bandwidth increases enormously beyond that of an addition- al arm, robotics. i keep coming up against issues of flesh and bandwidth - robotics, cyborg paraphernalia, works vis-a-vis a mapping of points or nodes - not surfaces, certainly not the panoply of surfaces that consti- tutes the real body in real space (it would take a riemannian topology to even approach this. even the abstract mappings, then, return to an earlier, nineteenth-century, era of formal (cartesian) geometries; pro- sthetic arms reflect, for example, the arm-holders in some early mach- ines (used well into the twentieth century) which had a human operator; she (usually) would assemble, for example, parts to be punched out; the punch would descend; the arm-holders would pull her arms out of the way; the punch would ascend; the arm-holders would release her. one waits for a new and radically different ontology, one based on pure dispersion (yet somehow romantically embedding the full flesh of the body), networking, absorption and integrations of others - of pure alterity. in other words, there is a dream afloat, of womb-returning, of perfect security and comfort, of losing oneself and living forever online. in this dream, the Other is defused in fusion; there are no strangers ... Stelarc crosses his body with early-early tech; parts are left behind; he'd perhaps leave the whole behind; i'd bring the hole back in *//

## interviewing Stelarc in Albany, 10/16/00. "Don't be so surprised!" followed by the world-famous laugh. i can't hear my questions at the beginning, but they concern pain. i feel idiotic; i _insist_ on the relationship to pain, "I won't admit to that." he explains about the need to support rather than suspend the body. "The skin would become kind of a support structure for the body itself." the first suspension event actually occurred in Japan, after one in Adelaide was canceled. there were 27 of these. the performances came after a series of sensory deprivation events, in some of which he stitched his mouth and eyelids shut. there was "something psychologically difficult" for him to insert the hooks (for the suspension events) - something related to the way the hooks "slithered through the skin." levels of difficulty: inserting the hooks, connecting them to the cables, putting the tension on them. Stelarc says "the body" instead of "my body" constantly here. "The body is seen as a kind of evolutionary object, architecture of awareness." he doesn't see the body as "a kind of individual" or "site of the psyche." And as a performance artist "It gets kind of boring to say 'I did this and I did that.'" i continue to wonder about this, the insertion of an anti-shifter as "the" actually defuses the individuation of "my," creates again a kind of distancing. but there is also a beauty in this trope; so much performance art is centered (to whatever depth it may aspire to) on _the_ body of _the_ performer, and perhaps we really don't need those heroes. there's an enormous generosity in "the body" which could be anyone's here. ##

<-!- "Most of these suspension events were done in remote locations or private gallery spaces." ..."personal history becomes intertwined with all of this." Stelarc was a squash coach in Japan; he also did yoga for twenty years. for some reason, i find this fascinating - whether or not it connects formally to his work. yoga helped him "do these actions with a certain calm." he doesn't tense up, try to resist what was going on. we're still discussing the earlier work. "I've never had an out-of-body experi- ence." not expecting transcendence, he didn't get it. "The idea was to see the body as a sculptural medium which was situated in a space with other objects." i'm thinking of the piece Sitting / Swaying Event for Rock Suspension, Tamura Gallery, Tokyo - 11 May, 1980, Stelarc suspended naked, sitting in mid-air, held there by hooks (as usual) - the other ends of the cables going to a ring of rocks surrounding him, also in mid-air. "The process was extremely difficult" from the insertions to raising the body to releasing the rocks which acted as counterweights. "All of these per- formances were pretty much one-off." why do i recount this here, including a performance in Japan in which the hooks were accidently inserted back- wards, had to be taken out, and reinserted, to fair pain? because of an insistence on simultaneous language and body - an insistence in which the flesh, for the spectator, is up-front and personal. one moves through this fullness across the apparatus, the cables, taking consciousness and mind (if it were separable from the body, or at least connected somewhere beyond the nodal points of the body) along; the cables - wires - are everywhere throughout Stelarc's work, and they're not far behind, as well, any Web art, net art, hyperlink or net.art, as well. connections and potential connections, with their protocols and embeddings, are everywhere in new media work; even cdrom work possesses the appearance of slippage, linked files, transmissions. -!->

REM Marina Abramovich, Ulay, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci. Stel- arc lived in Japan 1970-89; he was "removed from both the American and European art scenes." "I love Buto." Stelarc is close to it; he mentions his interest in Noh, Bunraku, Kabuki, but the influence has never been direct. "The focus on the western side of substance and material and the focus on the eastern side of process" - and i cut him off, foolishly, with a another question. "I would write the kanji on the windscreen and as I was driving I would try and match up" (laughter). "I loved the fact I could just simply switch off, that I didn't have to speak to people all the time." "It was my father's ill health that I went back to Australia." "The first things I made in artschool were helmets and goggles" that created a "kinetic sound and light environment for the body." "I made a film of the inside of my stomach, lungs, and colon, about three meters of internal space, between 1973- 1975." "The third hand took five years to construct." an "oscillation between physically difficult performances and technologically complicated ones." "Sometimes the suspension events were amplified. Sometimes my third hand was attached." "The third hand is going to be sold by internet auction last week of October/first week of November (2000). I've got a new arm that slips over your right arm, with a manipu- lator at the end of it." "This new manipulator has thumb and wrist rota- tion and each finger is a gripper in itself." REM

** "Switches that you're able to preprogram complex sampled movements." "You play the hand like a keyboard." "That's counterpointed by my left arm which is involuntarily jerked around by eight channels of muscle stimula- tion." muscle stimulation is critical in much of Stelarc's work - a translation from voluntary net/work into involuntary body/labor. what is the exterior of the body? the interior? is mind in interface and wire? is it remote? the _remote_ presence is also critical, sensing the other; i wonder if there is a faceless alterity that doesn't devolve into Big Brother. **

^ "I have thought of two remote bodies that would be in control of half of the other's body." "Your suggestion is intriguing, the idea that via the internet, via a website with vrml and a surrogate body as an interface, one can construct an extended loop of operation within one body." i begin asking about the performance aspects of the work - on one hand, concerned with internal issues and experience, and on the other, work that's theatrical, really designed for an audience. "I think what we would call the theatrical aspects, I wouldn't see as that to the extent that the performance isn't really structured for an audi- ience." i make another interruption here, Stelarc laughs. "What I'm saying is that the intent is not, as it is with most theater, to enter- tain an audience. Most people can't stay for very long; the sounds are amplified excruciatingly loud." "The idea is how can one visually and acoustically can one manifest this operation of the body and third hand" ... he talks about the performance i saw in Perth - Wagnerian, intense, driven, sound occupying the entire enormous room, splashes of video cuseeme on the walls, enormous depths of sonority, Stelarc re- sponding to external muscle play. it was overwhelming. he talks about sound-video-body-interplay as theatrical elements making manifest what is going on - but not theater. he's clear about that. i continue inaud- ibly on the tape. i hate, now, listening to my interruptions. "When I first saw Buto it reminded me of seeing bodies as some sort of post- nuclear zombie-like entities, where the way they functioned was not a purely internally driven state of operation, but was inextricably connected to the other bodies in the space, the contour of the perfor- mance area, and so on." ^

/* now i am given the mic for some reason, and we're talking about karaoke. at one point Stelarc sang Waltzing Matilda. i begin with an (audible) question. i talk about (re: above) robotics in general as 19th century - Cruikshank's images, etc. once you're past the input stage, information stage - then i begin talking about Merlin Donald's notion of the mind transformed (Stelarc interrupts; i hear "outmoded" from the other side of the room) carrying intellect outside the phys- ical body - databases as literal extensions of neural networks for example. i talk about internal and external a distinction no longer worth making, that the mind is inside and outside, etc. i say to him his work has an odd split - on one hand diorama 19th-century and on the other 21st century epistemology - Andy Hawks' "mind in the wires." i turn the microphone back to Stelarc. "Firstly the idea that the technology is dated, firstly we have to remember that as an artist this person is not interested in sci-fi explanations of what might come but" what one can do now. "At the moment I'm not going to be able to clone my own body, to create nanomachines to insert, to grow other organs." "I can only do what is possible, what's accessible, what I can experience now. So to that extent I'm using technology that's not necessarily at the cutting-edge, but technology I can construct with the help of others, and that I'm experiencing now." "People are in- trigued by the mechanics of the things." "These technologies that I use aren't as clunky as people make them out to be. When the first third hand was constructed, I was invited to give talks at JPL in Houston. Even now, the third hand is the most sophisticated commerc- ially-available prosthetic device." he talks about the stomach sculp- ture, a site-specific work inserted into his stomach - one references perhaps automatons, etc. - but only references; the technology is not old-fashioned. in the distance, i press my case; luckily, i'm inaudi- ble. */

"" i feel Stelarc begins with body; i begin with mind. i think mind is an imaginary inhabitation, which is not to say unreal, but irreal, problematic. Stelarc for me exemplifies behaviorism with mind follow- ing, following suit; but it is a behaviorism of explicit cognitive functions as well - it would be able to absorb, for example, the work on scripts and goals in classical AI; it also dwells in Winograd's microworlds - as well as in his later discussions of failure. in fact, one might carry Stelarc's approach to "the mind is a muscle" (i forget who said this), a comment out of dance - and there are great similari- ties between his work and dance; i think of Cunningham's choreography which often stems from computer programs, bending the dancers' bodies into computed forms at variance from "natural" attitudes and possibil- ities. (now i will listen to more of the interview, embarrassed and pressing forward.) "If we're going to argue that certain technologies are obsolete, we can also argue that the body is obsolete." we can't rid ourselves of our bodies altogether. it's that "this body" - its operation in an intense information environment where machines function at incredible speed - the question is, do we retain this biological body as it is (as a prosthetic body) or do we think about more "intim- ate" interface. in the past, prostheses were ergonomic. now we should think about redesigning the body to fit the possibilities of machines instead of the other way around. "What I don't agree with is this notion that we can start talking about minds and mental operations as seemingly disconnected from bodies." "Projecting and extruding aware- ness - does not cut the physicality of the body off from the mind." "What are we pointing to when we are pointing to the word 'mind'?" "Some sort of floating intelligence which is nowhere located." Stelarc is critical of this, of course. listening now, i find i agree with him, or do i? i can't hear what i'm saying. the apparatus is poor at a distance, the earphones are picking up buzz from the plasma screen... we talk about the recent Book/Ends conference here in Albany. ...continue

... "When the language designates 'I' for most people what this actually means for them is 'I' something spiritual something mental is using this body to exist in the world." "But language only says 'this body does this, this body does that.' It doesn't reveal a greater existence, a greater essence." "If I say 'this body thinks something' what this body is saying is 'this body's behavior is a manifestation of a complex history and interaction with other bodies and institutions at this point in history - it's not an internal homunculus that is doing the thinking. Nothing is doing, I mean when we think, there is nothing inside the body which is doing the thinking, it's the body's awareness in the world that's constructing its intelligence and awareness." "I'm much more sympathetic to a behaviorist approach than to a mentalist approach if we have to make a choice." "I'm talking about how mental phenomena are appropriated as if they are an internal essence or mind." "Language doesn't designate or clarify; it also confuses us." "The word 'I' does not designate an internal subject; it designates this body." am i writ- ing what here? i keep up with Stelarc's conversation, i collapse lines, phrases, coalesce without realization, try to do justice, i can't repro- duce tone, the sound of the laugh, the occasional gaiety in the room. there are others present, occasionally commenting, Nicole Peyrafitte, Azure Carter, Pierre Joris, i think perhaps others, but i'm not sure, there are cats certainly, the park outside, i worry about taking too much time up, we're all aware surely of bodies here, attitudes, affect, i find myself aware of Albany, the conference dispersing. i'd known Stelarc since Perth 96, then through the Incubation conference in Not- tingham, now here. there were hellos passed back and forth through mutual acquaintances. i don't know him well at all. what comes through is this generosity... ""

>>-- "To be an intelligent agent, I need to be both embodied and embed- ded in the world." i can't hear myself again, i do hear the mention of Lakoff and Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, the embedding of language in the body (Lingis would be another reference), i'm still hammering this point home, the primacy or latitudinality (at the least) of the body. we're talking about the California ideology, "this mix of spirituality and corporatism," this "yearning to escape the body, a lot of Internet experience is articulated in this way and it's very irri- tating." i'm mumbling again. now i'm really going on. is it myself or my agent who is speaking? is it my agency? --<<

$$ "I really think it's a problem how we speak about these things." $$

[> "The body has been augmented, invaded, and now becomes a host - not only for technology, but also for remote agents. Just as the internet provides extensive and interactive ways of displaying, linking and retrieving the body information and images, it may now allow unexpected ways of accessing, interfacing, and uploading the body itself." (Stelarc, Ars Electronica Facing the Future '99.) but it seems to me that this interview (now _that_ interview) is already messing things up - who said what, where, when. "When we speak, we speak in terms of convenience" - "as long as we recognize the process of language and the fact that seemingly speaking as a first person subject - there's no doubt it's something convenient and of an evolutionary balance" - "but how much that free will and free agency applies in the real world" - "associative chain of operation" - "my decision is part of that" - "but it's only a part of that complex interaction" - "knowing that you were here, that this might be a good conference to come to" - "someone had to invite me" - "that chance meeting in Perth" - "it's just that we function _as if_ we are minds in the world _as if_ we have free will and agency - it's to our advantage to function as if we have these things" - "a huge leap to appropriate the 'I' as if it were an internal homunculus" - i think i'm pointing out here, however, that 'the world has a certain style,' that the style is largely consistent, that it permits us to function. <]

*/* i talk about subsumption architecture. i ask him if he ever thought of taking the six-legged robotic walking machine and turning it subsump- tion. "The fascination for me was that the modes of locomotion would be controlled by arm gestures so that your bipedal walking gate would be translated into a six-legged insect-like machine." "Having a sense of what it's like to navigate the world with six legs instead of two, hav- ing to remap." "The body's not simply standing on the machine, the body gets wrapped up in the machine mechanism, one that's sort of integrated into the machine." "So that was the real reason of doing it." subsump- tion architecture employs the idea of constructing simple robots using insects as a model. in the 60s the idea was that if you had an intelli- gent robot, you had to have one with a big brain that could model every- thing around it. now you might have a robot with a limited or minimal brain, existing within an intelligent environment and so behaving intel- ligently. and this idea has excited me; i think about Merlin Donald again, and mind, not in the waters, but everywhere, and the residue of mind being in fact certain behaviors of part-time entities within the environment, which, again, extends, everywhere... "When you put that type of robot in the world you begin to notice emergent behavior. This seems intelligent behavior. Then there was the realization that the sophisticated behavior of the insect was the result of the complexity of the world it's embedded in." "If one sees human bodies in a somewhat similar way, their intelligence and awareness and operational possibili- ties are determined by the technologies they've constructed, the institutions within which they operate, their cultures, and so on." "There's a danger in going to one extreme or another." one might focus too much on the homunculus inside or on the other, "if we go into an operational holistic kind of viewpoint, you explain everything and nothing in one go." */*

--| "The shadow projection of the body on the machine creates this wonderful hybrid human/machine image." i keeping pushing my useless point about adding subsumption architecture to the six-legged robot. "What interests me are the ambiguities and slippages in the interface - I'm not interested in being totally virtual or totally physical - the interest is not on those sorts of realms of operations so on one hand I'm very interested in the virtual domain and how one might function within it and on the other how the physical body might interact with it. And with the Movatar performance, an intelligence avatar can access a physical body and perform with it in the real world. This body becomes a prosthesis in the world for an avatar." i'm mumbling again. i know Stelarc's got to go. "In a way it's neither art in the traditional sense or science in the methodical research sense. You're performing somewhere in-between those and you're exploring what's neither science or art in the traditional sense of those words." "Exploring the interface in a sense undermines either extreme." "It's neither virtual nor actual." ... "I haven't used the walking machine outdoors although we almost did." i'm mumbling, i can't hear myself again on the machine. i fade in and out. interviewing, querying, is problematic in the first place, a question of mastery, of playing to the wall, of simulated two-way conversation. phraseology and power swim like rivers beneath the surface. conversation about the wonder of Stelarc's laugh again. i love the optimism (in particular, in relation to the mournful air of deconstruction at the Book/Ends conference). now i'm louder, 'How much time do you have?' i ask. "I think she's coming about 12:15" he replies. --|

~~ i'm back yammering about intelligent agents transforming into minds beyond the julia bot on the internet, free-floating packets of information - and i relate this to the Movatar piece. i say i think this is a way for the Internet to play/display itself in the real world. 'Why do you keep insisting,' I say, 'on this materialist viewpoint of body and mind' - when your own work is developing a virtuality that doesn't have to have any specific or specified material performance. as if there is no originary point. "There seems to be this disconcerting desire to talk about the mental as if it's discounted from the physical - I don't think you believe in that yourself" 'no' "The interaction between humans and machines can generate images and information that could be artificially intelligent entities that proliferate, function, replicate, on the Internet. The prob- lem with these entities is - are they going to be slowed down enough - adequate interfaces with biological bodies that perform much slower - within the constraints and parameters of what we call the physical world - these packets of software code perhaps visualized" 'or maybe not' "in some way - are we going to have adequate strategies of interfacing with these entities, or not?" "It will get to the point where we will not be able to depict them in any meaningful way." "But I agree with you that at every different level of operation there are in a sense emergent possibilities that we can't necessarily predict by through just examining the underlying structure. It's just the seeming desire to escape from the body, increas- ing ephemeralization." "For these agents to exist, proliferate, they're still within an electronic medium. It's a way of talking about them that we have to be careful of." i say it's not an escape from the body as an escape from a naive materialism. i bring up the Soviet Union and diamat and the reflection theory and the political consequences of diamat, etc. how diamat floundered on cybernetics. Soviet philosophers weren't able to come up with a materialist ontology of cybernetic entities that worked - the nearest was the reflection theory. so there are consequences of going too far in one or another direction. (i'm all for compromise.) if the world is information, it's not all there and it's there. "But if we say the world is information, this can only be from an anthropomorphic view- point" 'absolutely' and he points out that information is such by virtue of interpretation - the "brute world is a series of events involving motion and mutation" etc. i bring up Clement Rosset, 'the idiocy of the real.' "I like that, a beautiful comment." ~~

**\ "To come back to that very simple statement I made at the beginning is that the body is this kind of evolutionary architecture and biological apparatus of awareness and operation in the world. It extends its opera- tion in the world through technological bits and pieces, through instru- ments to detect alien information, through machines to increase its operational speed and so on. So in a sense technology is a strategy for increasing operational complexity" 'making the fit, a phrase David Bohm uses' 'i wonder if you couldn't say the body is _of_ the world instead of _in_ the world' and Stelarc agrees, referencing Merleau-Ponty and the notion of a contextualized body, and the sound fades out as the tape ends on side 3. side 4. who do you like. Wittgenstein, Derrida hard but impor- tant, Virilio and Baudrillard of the postmodern writers, McLuhan, Schop- enhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche who he finds seductive, Heidegger, Hegel (we have all had troubles reading Philosophy of Mind). i mention Kurt Goldstein and Alfred Schutz, i talk about relevance theory and Carne- ades, a primary reference. Stelarc mentions Daniel Dennett, "a philosopher of mine who I would sympathize with." "Off the top of my head I can't pull any other names." i ask about other artists that might interest him - he mentions Orlan who "does take the physical consequences for her ideas," Survival Research Lab, a performance artist out of Barcelona - Marcelee Artunez, then "someone I wired up, Arthur Elsinger, who has done a whole series of works dealing with muscle stimulation of the face." i say what fascinates me about Stelarc's work as opposed perhaps to these others - Orlan and SRL are spectacle in a sense, Cartesian - i say that Stelarc's work is messy, deliberately messed between epistemological regimes - i say this is where the future is, is going, will be the horizon of the 22nd century - "Even the construct of a cyborg, half body violently torn apart - a medical military model [he's talking about Terminator] - but there are other ways - the body swallows up its machines - the machines will be in- visible - also a third notion - unmodified bodies but wired up, connected to the internet." "We'll be able to physically hard-wire bodies." "One could access my body at any time in a completely wireless environment." i'm thinking of a fourth model, bring up Ananova, Kyoko Data, these con- figurations coming from the computer side, they're going to spread, dis- seminate, those creatures from the other side, becoming more and more autonomous. "Those entities would represent an interface between the human body and other entities that might not look human or even want to inter- act" - we're talking about agents again. **\

*/ i don't think i have any other questions. "I've survived" laughter, "without hitting each other with our microphones." "When you transcribe this discussion it's going to be replete with repeats and" and the voice has gone quite soft. but what i'm doing, it seems very different than what i thought i'd do. because i think to myself, it's in the errors, the repe- titions, that something else comes through in relation to the horizon of narrative, of virtual and real characters, of the saying and shaping of things. i'm surprised throughout the interview, throughout my reading as well, at the differences - the dichotomies of real/virtual or split bodies or even behaviorism / mentalism (or what have you) - when what i see is a mess, a messing-up of categories, as if clarity were a surface phenomenon or a residue at best. and i think - precisely in relation to this - of the efforts made, now, world-wide by various governments, to construct an early-warning system for the detection (and eventual elimination or re- programming) of near-earth objects which are on collision-tracks with the earth. i think about our fragility and, for me, the inconceivability of saying _anything_ with certainty, without a certain dis/comfort or dis/ ease accompanying the words and worlds. */

|~ and then i think, perhaps enough for this day, for the marrow of the world lies, increasingly, in the laying down, and taking up, of wires. ~|