Stelarc The Monograph

by Smith, Marquard; Gibson, William

• ISBN13: 9780262693608
• ISBN10: 0262693607
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-28
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

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." Although there have been hundreds of articles written about Stelarc since he began performing in the late 1960s, Stelarc: The Monographis 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.

Author Biography

Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London. He is a Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

William Gibson is the author of many books, including Neuromancer and, most recently, Pattern Recognition.

Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London. He is a Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Jane Goodall is Director of Research in the College of Arts, Education, and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney.

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory at the University of Victoria.

Marilouise Kroker is Senior Research Scholar at the University of Victoria.

Amelia Jones is Grierson Chair in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press), Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject, and Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.

Brian Massumi is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press).

Julie Clarke has written widely on the posthuman and the visual arts.

Stelarc is a leading international performance artist.

Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London. He is a Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Table of Contents

Foreword: "The Body"	p. vii
Preface: The Conception of Stelarc: The Monograph	p. ix
The Will to Evolve	p. 1
An Itinerary and Five Excursions	p. 33
We Are All Stelarcs Now	p. 63
Stelarc's Technological "Transcendence"/Stelarc's Wet Body: The Insistent Return of the Flesh	p. 87
The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason	p. 125
A Sensorial Act of Replication	p. 193
Animating Bodies, Mobilizing Technologies: Stelarc in Conversation	p. 215
Time Line: Projects and Performances	p. 243
List of Illustration Credits	p. 247
Index	p. 251
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