Stelarc
Two separate events became interconnected when Stelarc and the French video/installation artist, Dominik Barbier came to Brisbane. The first was extremely well attended, but the second because of the last minute confusion about dates which coincided with that great annual folk festival, Show Day, went practically unnoticed.
For those few of us who were able to attend both, they offered different ways in which contemporary human kind grapples with the onslaught of technology. Both dealt with the ways in which technology can extend and transform the range of human experience, and in the case of Stelarc restructure the body. I can't help feeling that for Stelarc technology is an alien and threatening phenomenon which can only be brought under control by internalising it into our body, but a further development of the age-old process of anthropomorphosis by which human kin attempts to make sense of its internal and external worlds.
Barbier, in contrast, wears his technology comfortably. Television and the use of computers in the manipulation and creation of video images are an integral part of his world. Barbier seems to me a true child of post-modernism where television becomes the experience, not merely the simulator. With Barbier, the technology is used as a tool, as a tangible extension of our bodies. Perhaps still representing an older generation love/hate relationship with technology, Stelarc merely updates the Frankenstein syndrome, that is, to exploit technology to keep the human race at the centre of the Universe.
Stelarc, in spite of all his sophisticated gadgetry represents the past. He is part of that ancient Faustian, alchemical tradition of human kind of wanting to transform itself from creature into creator by breaking into and
Stelarc, Amplified Body/Enhanced Image, Science Expo, Tsukuba 1985. Photograph: Takatoshi Shinoda.
