TED Talks

Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

Aimee Mullins: The Opportunity of Adversity

Todd Kuiken: a Prosthetic Arm that “feels”

Dean Kamen previews a new prosthetic arm

Amy Purdy: Living beyond limits

Other links

Animated Bodies on Pinterest

MoMA Interactive Exhibition: Talk to Me

Artbrain.org: Journal of Neuro-Aesthetics Theory

Body Image: The Lower-Limb Amputee, James W. Breakey, PhD, CP

New Scientist: Gallery – Prosthetics with aesthetics

Australian performance artist Stelarc (Stelios Arkadiou) explores the limits of the body and its potential invasion and transformation by technology. Stelarc’s performances have moved from the theatrical, skin-hooked body suspensions of the 1960s and body imaging of the 1970s to an exploration of the relationship between the body and technology in the prosthetic work of the 1980s and 1990s. The artist’s practice explores two trajectories: first, the augmentation of the natural body through technological resources; second, the body as becoming obsolete or “biologically inadequate” and the subsequent need for a technological reorganization of the body (Caygill 46).  Navigating the technologically enhanced body, his focus dwells on the body’s obsolescence and disappearance. According to philosopher and social theorist Brian Massumi, Stelarc’s statement regarding the body’s obsolescence is less a proclamation of the death of the body and more a challenge of its potential, explaining that “the body’s obsolescence is the condition of change” (Massumi qtd. in Fernandez 107).

Exploring the possibilities and limitations of an existence where the body becomes the object for physical and technical experiments, Stelarc’s work considers the body as an extendible evolutionary structure, enhanced by technology. In a 1992 interview with L’Autre Journal, Stelarc states: “Tools have always been considered outside of the body. They have extended perception, enlarged the vision, and generated other models for the world. Today technology is no longer exploding out from the body […] but is imploding and sticking to the skin. It is imploding and entering into the interior of the body.” (qtd. in Caygill 46)

Through the use of medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the internet, Stelarc explores alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. From a fundamental physiological approach, he is attempting to radically redesign the body, regarding the prosthesis as an integral part of a reorganization and advancement of the bodily structure promised by technological developments (Caygill 46).

Stelarc’s Third Arm has become the best-known and longest-used performance object for the artist. Originally designed as a semi-permanent bodily attachment, Third Arm weighs approximately 2 kilograms and has been described as a prosthetic addition to the body rather than a replacement. This prosthetic device would come to symbolize a symptom of excess rather than a sign of a missing part. Contributing to cyborg discourses on the body, Third Arm is a mechanical human-like hand attached to the artist’s right arm as an additional hand, with grasping and pinching capabilities, a 290 degree wrist rotation and a tactile feedback system to mimic a sense of touch (Stelarc).

As an example of prosthesis, Stelarc’s Third Arm described as the amplified and involuntary body, is perhaps the most direct in appearance to the medical prosthesis, and exhibits the potential of bodily additions and extensions. However, Third Arm appears to neglect the terms of those who incorporate and live the prosthetic reality, who neither sense a lack, nor something added on to their bodies. Instead, Stelarc views the body itself as prosthetic, a site for radical experimentation, challenging the perception of a previous bodily whole and following Massumi’s logic that “the object can be considered prostheses of the body provided that it is remembered that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing.” (Massumi qtd in Fernandez 120).

The postmodern world promotes the blurring of boundaries, new inventions and relationships between otherwise disparate ideas or subjectivities.  As contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti has argued, technology, at the heart of the process of hybridization, results in the powerful image of the posthuman[1] (214).  Stelarc explores the concept of the posthuman (and is perhaps himself posthuman, by using his own body as subject) through ideas of progress, self-awareness, and modern technological advancements determining a natural progression to a better life, constantly transforming identity and the body.  Experiments through bodily modification demonstrate the future potential of the expanded human, re-defining identity and improving human capacities in order to become a crossbreed of the technological and organic body.   Foucault describes the posthuman as “living forms [that] may pass from one into another, the present species are no doubt the result of former transformations, and the whole of the living world is perhaps in motion towards a future point […]” (Foucault qtd. in Baron 9). What Stelarc performs through investigations and developments of different technologies “is the way in which technology escapes the control of its inventors to produce unseen and unforeseeable changes and possibilities […] and thus a future – for the self, the human, for the body and for technology – which can be neither programmed nor predicted” (Hall 139).

In this preliminary investigation into the appearance of prostheses in artistic practice, I have had to acknowledge various terms and potential problematic content. Historical and medical definitions of the prosthesis have bound both the device and it’s visibility in social and cultural contexts to a discourse surrounding disability, loss and trauma. Challenges from the prosthetic community to engineer and design better prostheses, alongside the image of the improved, modified human body has propelled the prosthesis toward a multitude of new possibilities and metaphorizations of prosthesis as emergent technology.   With figures such as Aimee Mullins shattering the public perception of the disabled body, and the image of posthumanism presented by Stelarc, contemporary discourse surrounding prosthesis-as-extension and prosthesis-in-art provide potential re-figuration.