ESSAY - No senses or all senses?
Celia Quico, Toronto,  July 1998

No senses or all senses? So, are the new technologies expanding our senses or not? In our information age, is "THE BODY OBSOLETE", as Sterlac proclaims? This "post-human" Australian artist is on the cutting edge (literally and in all senses) of the body art "scene".

One of his most recent works, "Fractal Flesh", made him the first human in History to be teleoperated: "In Fractal Flesh ---Split Body : Voltage-In/Voltage-out, a performance that took place November 10-11, 1995 at Telepolis, an art and technology festival organized in Luxembourg by the Munich Media Lab, Sterlac plugged himself into muscle-stimulation circuitry controlled by a Mac. The Mac, in turn, was connected, via the internet, to Paris's Centre Pompidou, Helsinky's Media Lab, and Amsterdam's Doors of Perception conference. By pressing a color-coded 3-D rendering of a human body on a touchscreen, participants at the three sites jolted the artist's (literally) wired body into action. Blipped across the net through a high-speed link to the computer space, their gestures triggered Sterlac’s muscle-stimulators; low-level bursts of voltage, zapping through electrodes attached to his limbs, caused both arms and one leg to jerk involuntarily intoraised or extended positions. (1) (continua »»)