Stelarc – The Monograph (Electronic Culture: History, Theory and Practice S.) - Hardcover

Smith, Marquard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262195186 ISBN 13: 9780262195188

Publisher: MIT Press, 2005

Synopsis

This is a user's guide to Stelarc, the international performance artist whose extreme performances explore the borderland between bodies and machines.Stelarc is the most celebrated artist in the world working within technology and the visual arts. He is both an artist and a phenomenon, using his body as medium and exhibition space. Working in the interface between the body and the machine, he employs virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, the Internet, and biotechnology. Stelarc's art includes physical acts that don't always look survivable - or, as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, "sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality."Stelarc's projects include Third Hand, a grasping and wrist-rotating mechanism with a rudimentary sense of touch that is attached to the artist and activated by EMG from other body areas; Amplified Body, in which the artist performs acoustically with his brainwaves, muscles, pulse, and blood flow signals; and the Stomach Sculpture, a device - or "aesthetic adornment" - inserted into the artist's stomach and presented through video.Although there have been hundreds of articles written about Stelarc since he began performing in the late 1960s, "Stelarc: The Monograph" is the first comprehensive study of Stelarc's work practice in over thirty years. Gathering a range of writers who approach the work from a variety of perspectives, it includes William Gibson's account of his meetings with Stelarc, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker's emphatic "We Are All Stelarcs Now," and Stelarc himself in conversation with Marquard Smith. Taken together, these writers give us a multiplicity of ways to think about Stelarc.

About this title

Review:

"With contributions from the critics and theorists who know Stelarc best, this book contains illuminating commentary on and analysis of his technoperformative work that is as compelling and as disturbing as anything found in the most radical of science fiction novels. Welcome to the world of Stelarc." - Steven Kurtz, Critical Art Ensemble"

About the Author:

Marquard Smith is Course Director of the Masters Programme in Art History at Kingston University, London, and editor-in-chief of the journal of visual culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0262195186
• ISBN 13: 9780262195188
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224