Ritual Mechanics: Cybernetic Body Art
Escape Velocity Excerpts | Published on October 12, 2004
In Chapter Four, we meet cyber-body artists such as Stelarc, who performs encrusted with implants and bristling with cables, dodging the unpredictable, potentially bone-shattering swipes of industrial robot arms. As well, we encounter D.A. Therrien, who stages hot-wired exorcisms in which nearly nude humans huddle in cages or writhe on electrified crucifixes while percussionists hammer rude tattoos on prostrate bodies, using electrified drum sticks.
Stelarc is the foremost exponent of cybernetic Body Art. In performance, he bears a striking resemblance to one of the Borg, the implacable cyborg villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Slowly contorting his amplified body, he unleashes an inhuman bedlam that sounds like a brawl between a shortwave radio and a geiger counter. The twin beams of his "laser eyes" stab into the dark; his electrode-studded arm is yanked upwards, puppet-like, by a burst of electricity while the robotic Third Hand attached to his other arm scrabbles at the air.
Stelarc dreams of a cyborged, "post-evolutionary" humanity, armored and endowed with pile-driver brawn by a robotic exoskeleton; fitted with an array of antennae to amplify its sight and hearing; and implanted with a brain chip or genetically engineered to expand its cortical capacity to supercomputer proportions. Such creatures might resemble the "Lobsters" in Bruce Sterling's Crystal Express—Borg-like posthumans sealed in "skin-tight life-support systems" whose greatest pleasure was to...open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared...or just sitting and soaking in watts of solar energy through their skins while they listened with wired ears to the warbling of Van Allen belts and the musical tick of pulsars.
Posted by Mark Dery at October 12, 2004 02:12 PM |