Interview by George Petelin and Graham Coulter-Smith
GRAHAM COUTLER-SMITH A book has been published on you called Obsolete Body. I think that's an interesting concept: the Obsolete Body, and I'd like to quote some of the things you say in that book: you say the body's pleistocene programme is outmoded, information has gone beyond the body and brain which can't grasp nanoseconds or nebulae. The body must first transcend what you call planetary containment and be deployed into new evolutionary trajectories, which all sounds pretty amazing. So could you just elaborate on this idea that the body is obsolete?
STELARC Yes, well I think the idea of obsolescence is amplified by the information overload. In other words, we've accumulated so much information that it's impossible for any one individual to creatively absorb and process it all. On the one hand we've got this information overload, on the other we've developed technology that is much more precise, much more durable and is capable of performing at higher speeds than a lot of the functions of the human body. ln other words, there are both technological and information pressures that make the body obsolete, but the obsolescence is further heightened when technology accelerates the body to reach planetary escape velocity. I mean, literally the body is speeded up, leaves the earth and finds itself pretty much in an alien environment. In a zero environment, an extraterrestrial environment that's incredibly expansive, neither the sensory hardware of the body nor the cerebral capacity of the brain can cope with this new expanse of time space. Also the durability of the body, the life span of the body is an issue, if it takes 280 million years for the sun to make... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Stelarc, Performance MOGA, Brisbane 1987. Photograph: Leanne Ramsay
