# LECTURES AND SYMPOSIUM /// Stelarc at the Architectural Association (February 2012)
Published
Australian Artist Stelarc recently gave a lecture at the Architectural Association in London entitled Circulating Flesh: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. For about an hour an half, he allows us to explore thirty years of his work entirely dedicated to the human body, its abilities, its limits and its potential voluntary transformation via technology. From his work in the 80’s in which he was hanging his body with hoists directly in his skin, to the more recent surgical operation that transplanted him a third ear on his arm, his work is as fascinating as disturbing to consider. In fact, this difficulty to approach these experiments directly applied to his body tells us much about our profound ignorance and taboo that we associated our own body with. It is also somehow shocking that we experience a stronger uneasiness when we see his work dedicated to his body transformation rather than this experiment he lead in the 90’s in which somebody was taking over his body’s behavior via a remote control sending nervous electrical signals. This latter work is indeed proposing the vision of potential terrifying futures…
Stelarc’s work is therefore as much interesting for its content than for the imaginary it opens on the way the body can be a terrain of experiments illustrating its characteristics. It thus participates to proposing a beginning of answer to the Spinozist problem (see previous article): What can a body do ?
Watch the lecture by following this link. (Thanks Frank)
