artists as "early warning systems"

Artists, he said, can be “early alert warning systems,” generators of “contestable futures — possibilities that can be examined, evaluated, perhaps appropriated, often discarded.”

The long sleeves of Stelarc’s black jacket conceal the notorious “Ear on Arm” project, in which a “biocompatible scaffold” was surgically inserted into his left forearm in 2006, creating the shape of an ear in an arduous ongoing process.

“At present it’s only a relief of an ear,” Stelarc said. “When the ear becomes a more 3-D structure we’ll reinsert the small microphone that connects to a wireless transmitter.” In any Wi-Fi hotspot, he said, it will become internet-enabled. “So if you’re in San Francisco and I’m in London, you’ll be able to listen in to what my ear is hearing, wherever you are and wherever I am.”

One upcoming art piece, Stelarc said, involves engineering an insect-like microrobot that will climb up into his mouth. Unlike the stomach sculpture project, this device will not be swallowed. “It will have a little webcam mounted and an LED light source,” Stelarc said. The performance will be streamed on the web.

“It’s kind of a visual gesture, a performative gesture of the increasing intimacy of machines and the human body,” he said. “The body itself will be the new landscape for our machines.”

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/stelarc-performance-art/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous

Despite the effort to be able to display bioart — through licensing or logistical issues — the results can be incredibly powerful. Merely moving lab instruments into the context of an art gallery can be enough to provoke debate. Should these things be on display at all? Is it denigrating living organisms? Is it better to display animal cells than human cells?

‘We have to be careful of human arrogance. We need to be post-humanist.’

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/07/bioart/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous