Author: Smith, Marquard ; editor:
Title: Stelarc: The Monograph
Description: Cambridge [MA], MIT Press, (2005). orig.boards. 28x20cm, xiii,256 pp. Small tear to dustwrapper. Binding corners rubbed.. Minor rubbing. An ink mark to bottom page-edge. VG, dustwrapper. ¶ 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" - Publisher's description.

Keywords: Performance Art, Technology, Stelarc, , , , , ,