book - The MIT Press - ISBN 0262195186
The body's evolution, from an outer world's atavistic interface to an over-stimulated multisensorial apparatus, has been a huge research field from the early nineties. The body's mutation, in fact, is central in our imaginary, and it conceptually comes from the unstoppable proliferation of the incorporeal media. Stelarc is the artists that has literally embodied this phenomenon, experimenting on its own flesh functional technological grafts. The artist's inspired process is perfectly defined in the William Gibson's foreword as the: "moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction." This disjunction is one of the indelible scars of the contemporaneity. Stelarc is a poet and scientist of contemporary times and his body, that he himself defined as 'obsolete', and others has defined as 'posthuman', is the end of the religious principle of body's inviolability. Moreover he made a mutual correspondence between his body and his art, and this led to his iconic definition (as it can be seen in the Zoë Khamsin Kennard's tribute Stelarc Ken). This monograph collects a wide range of his work interpretations and definitively dismember the artist's concepts and its organic sublimation.