Perth artist Stelarc grows ear on his arm, plans to connect it to internet

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Perth artist Stelarc grows ear on his arm, plans to connect it to internetBy Courtney Bembridge Updated Wed at 3:29pm

It has been 20 years in the making and involves the growth of a human organ, but for Perth-based artist Stelarc, it is just another project.

The Curtin University professor is growing a human ear on his arm.

"People's reactions range from bemusement to bewilderment to curiosity, but you don't really expect people to understand the art component of all of this," Stelarc said.

"I guess I've always got something up my sleeve, but often my sleeve is rolled down."

Stelarc first conceived the idea in 1996, but it took another decade to find the medical team willing to make it a reality.

There won't be an on-off switch ... the idea actually is to try to keep the ear online all the time.

Stelarc

They were recruited from around the world to insert a scaffold underneath his skin.

Within six months, tissue and blood vessels had developed around the structure.

"The ear is pretty much now a part of my arm, it's fixed to my arm and it has its own blood supply," he said.

The next step is to make the ear more three-dimensional — lifting it up off the arm and growing an ear lobe from Stelarc's stem cells.

From there, a miniature microphone that can wirelessly connect to the internet will be inserted.

"This ear is not for me, I've got two good ears to hear with. This ear is a remote listening device for people in other places," he said.

"They'll be able to follow a conversation or hear the sounds of a concert, wherever I am, wherever you are.

"People will be able to track, through a GPS as well, where the ear is."

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Hear for art

Stelarc, who is the head of the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory at Curtin University, said the project was a sign of things to come.

"Increasingly now, people are becoming internet portals of experience ... imagine if I could hear with the ears of someone in New York, imagine if I at the same time could see with the eyes of someone in London."

And if you were wondering about his privacy, Stelarc said he hoped the microphone would stay on 24/7.

"There won't be an on-off switch," Stelarc laughed.

"If I'm not in a wi-fi hotspot or I switch off my home modem, then perhaps I'll be offline, but the idea actually is to try to keep the ear online all the time."

The microphone has already been tested successfully, but it had to be taken out because of an infection.

It is hoped that will not be a problem second time around.

Body modification in Perth

While Stelarc's project is unique, the concept of body modification is becoming more widespread in Perth.

Joeltron runs a piercing studio in the city and has been professionally piercing for 11 years. He has watched the industry grow.

"With the introduction of the internet a lot of things have changed drastically," Joeltron said.

"Instead of us being a very small community that really just kind of briefly spoke to each other when we saw each other, there's Facebook groups talking about where to go to get heavy modification done, there's a lot more websites that show quality work.

"There's definitely been an increase in awareness of these sort of modifications and also where to safely get them done."

He said heavier modifications like tongue-splitting and implanting things underneath the skin were not technically legal in Perth, but people still sought out the services.

"It's one of those things that's kind of on the hush-hush. There are travelling practitioners that do this kind of stuff, there are people who do it, it's just not generally something that is publicised," he said.

"Primarily because it is a heavier mod, it's something that shouldn't be taken lightly.

"The heavy stuff is still very underground."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-11/perth-artist-grows-ear-on-his-arm-plans-to-connect-to-internet/6689794

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1. Was there anything especially fascinating that attracted you to the art of technology when you were first introduced to it?

当你第一次接触到科技艺术时，是什么特别有趣的东西吸引了你？

Technology generates unexpected information and surprising images. It augments and extends our experience of the world. Using technology allows us to better interrogate what it means to be a body and what it means to be human.科技会产生难以预期的信息和令人惊奇的景象。它可以拓展我们对世界的体验。使用科技让我们有机会更好地思索人类拥有躯体意味着什么，而作为人类本身又意味着什么。

2. What inspired you to get a third ear? were you nervous and doubtful at first upon getting a permanent modification.

什么东西促使你安装了第三只耳朵？当你第一次对自己的身体作出永久性改变的时候你紧张彷徨过吗？

After engineering a Third Hand, having performed an Extended Arm and with Exoskeleton (a 6-legged walking robot) I wanted to construct a soft prosthesis, one that becomes a permanent part of my body. It took 10 years to find the funding and the 3 surgeons to realise the project.尝试过第三只手，扩展手臂和6腿行走机器人来扩展骨骼后，我想建构一个可以成为我身体一部分的软性假体。我花费了10年的时间来筹集基金，进行了3次手术才得以完成这个项目。

3. Do you ever regret becoming a cyborg?

你会为成为一个“电子人”后悔过吗？

Oh, the word cyborg is inadequate. The projects and performances I do certainly explore what it means to be a cyborg. But a hospital patient on a life-support system at a hospital is a better example of a cyborg body.哦，虽然我所做的项目和表演毫无疑问的揭示了成为一个“电子人”意味着什么，但用“电子人”来形容我是不恰切的。在医院里依赖生命支持系统的病人可能是一个更好的“电子人”的例子。

4. Did many troubles come with getting a third ear? does your third ear signals clash with your normal ears' signals to the brain?

安装第三只耳朵给你带来很多麻烦吗？来自第三只耳朵的信号会不会与你正常耳朵听到的信号在你的大脑里冲突？

There was a serious infection after the second surgery. I almost lost an arm for an ear. The ear is not for me. I have 2 good ears to hear with. The extra ear is a remote listening device for people in other places.第二次手术的时候我严重感染，差点因为这只耳朵损失了我的一只手臂。我有两只完好的耳朵，所以，第三只耳朵不是给我自己用的。事实上，第三只耳朵的信号是传输到位于其他地方的远程监听设备的。

5. What are your thoughts on the success and progress of your suspension projects? are you planning to further advance them?

你对你的悬空项目的成功和进展有什么想法？你还会再进一步做类似表演吗？

I will not continue to suspend myself. But recently in Oslo I did a suspension that I have never done before using 5 bodies. The counterbalanced bodies, the turning, spinning and amplified breathing was a very strong performance. 我不会再悬挂我自己了。不过最近我刚在奥斯陆（Oslo）做了一个以前从未做过的表演，在那里我们同时悬挂了5个人体。这个表演展示了人体之间的平衡，转动，旋转和扩展呼吸，非常棒。

6. What would you predict for the future of cyborgs?

请问你如何预测“电子人”的未来？

We are increasingly expected to perform with Mixed Realities. The body is already a contemporary chimera and cyborg of meat, metal and code. There will be a multiplicity and proliferation of cyborgs with different forms and different functions. 我们期望更多的混合实体的表演，在我们的表演中，身体已经是一个由肉体、金属和代码嵌合的电子机械机体。未来将会出现更多的具有不同功能与形式的多重且可生长的电子机械机体。

7. Your third ear, arm, and exoskeleton projects all are able to modify the body. would you think the human race would benefit from relying entirely on mechanical help?

你的第三只耳朵，第三个手臂和扩展骨骼项目全都可以改造人类的躯体。你认为人类可以从完全依赖于机械的帮助中获益吗？

In addition to mechanically augmenting the body we will increasingly intervene genetically. And the realm of the post-human may no longer reside in bodies and machines but rather in intelligent avatars in electronic media.除了机械地扩展人体，我们也不断在增加用基因改造人体的作用。后人类领域将不再局限于肉体与机械，而更多的是基于电子资讯的智能人物。

8. If you could invent anything to help the human body either directly or indirectly, what would you invent?

如果你可以直接或间接地发明任何用于帮助人类躯体的东西，你会发明什么？

A colony of nano-sensors and nano-bots that provide a more adequate early alert warning system for the body. Able to detect pathological changes in temperature, chemistry and be able to internally repair the body at a cellular level. 一个纳米传感器和纳米机器人的克隆体，这个克隆体可以给人体提供更为精确的早期预警系统，它可以检测到病变引起的温度和化学变化，并且能够在细胞层级进行内部身体修复。

9. Is there a quote, either yours or another person’s, inspires you while doing your works?

有没有你的或者别人的什么名言，激励你从事这项工作？

William Gibson said that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.威廉.吉布森说的一句话：“未来就在那里，只是分布不均”

(2012-12-11 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4a82b12e01019rlh.html

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When Growing an Ear on Your Arm is Art

Getty Images Model reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci's design for an aerial screw.

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

Leonardo da Vinci made no distinction between art and science—and the two fields are converging again

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In 2007, the Australian performance artist Stelarc started growing an extra ear on his left arm through a series of operations that are still ongoing. The ear is actually made up of his own stem cells woven into a biodegradable frame. Eventually a Bluetooth device will be inserted and Stelarc will be able to hear and communicate through it.
Stelarc’s work focuses on body enhancement, exploring the radical changes our bodies will undergo in the 21st century. He also created “Exoskeleton,” a 1,300-pound prosthetic machine with six legs driven by 18 pneumatic actuators. Stelarc climbs into the middle of this huge device and pilots it with arm gestures. It is a harbinger of how technology and humans will increasingly merge—a future in which cyborgs (or robotic machines) will be operated by our brains, while the rest of our bodies will become obsolete.
In these experiments, Stelarc creates a brand new art form using science and technology in ways that are artistically pleasing, or aesthetic. Our notions of science and aesthetics are two concepts that have been undergoing redefinition for centuries.
I’ve studied the connections between art and science for 30 years, a passion first sparked while I was growing up in New York City as a kid interested in science in a city with some of the greatest art museums in the world. A few years after earning a doctorate in physics, I decided to focus on a question I was constantly asking myself: “What is the nature of creativity in science?” In studying the original German-language papers in relativity and quantum theory by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and others, I was struck by the importance of visual imagery and aesthetics in scientists’ creativity.
In the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci made no distinction between art and science. The imaginative submarines and helicopters he designed and drew were as much art to him as the “Mona Lisa.” A century later, in 1687, Isaac Newton’s magisterial laws of motion led to the “Age of Reason,” in which the search for truth resided in science and art was relegated to mere ornamentation. It was not for another 300 years that art and science began to move closer again. The rise of industries fueled by spectacular developments in science and technology—the electrical dynamo, photography, and cinematography—plus scientific discoveries such as x-rays, radioactivity, and mathematicians’ explorations of multi-dimensional spaces inspired scientists and artists to new heights of abstraction.
Einstein was inspired to discover special relativity in 1905 by his desire to remove the asymmetries in nature implied by how scientists interpreted equations in the physics of that era. He found these asymmetries “unbearable” because he believed passionately in a pristine beauty in nature that he thought ought to be reflected in the mathematics of a scientific theory. In fact, Einstein introduced beauty — simplicity in explanations, a sense of proportion in equations — as a guideline in scientific research.

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Developments in technology, science, and mathematics were also of central importance to artists. Pablo Picasso’s breakthrough 1907 painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” contained the seeds of Cubism. Picasso interpreted X-rays, discovered in 1895, as revealing that what you see is not necessarily what you get, a keynote of Cubism in which forms are reduced to geometry.
Picasso’s Cubism led to Futurism and then to Surrealism. Yet these art movements used only the ideas of science and technology, not the media like actual X-rays or actual cinematography. All this changed in the second half of the 20thcentury when electronics became readily available. But artists could not use this material without help from scientists, which led to collaboration. The first major collaboration took place in 1966 when the scientist Billy Klüver brought together 30 colleagues from Bell Labs and 10 artists from the East Village, among them Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. This combustible mixture exploded in a series of performances called “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering.” Rauschenberg’s performance started with a tennis match in which the lights automatically dimmed when each player hit the ball, while Cage filled the auditorium with a cacophony of sounds collected from various sources such as hotel kitchens and police and marine radio bands piped in from around the city through telephone lines.

Today, artists can express emotions and depict nature by using tools that go beyond paintbrush and chisel. They can use data from airplane flights across the U.S. or insert a fluorescent jellyfish gene into a rabbit. I call the new art movement “artsci.”
In writing my new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, I conducted more than 80 interviews with prominent artists and scientists working in the new art form. Through these conversations, I came to the conclusion that 21st century art, science, and technology are fusing into a third culture—a new avant-garde. Eventually this fusion— “artsci”—will be known simply as art. This is a highly controversial conclusion because most artists and scientists believe that art is simply art and science is simply science and that’s it. Right now, even artists who recognize the importance of science and technology in their work consider themselves to be merely producing scientific illustrations rather than work that could lead to scientific discoveries.
But the art created in conjunction with science can sometimes even benefit science. The British dance/science/engineering group “danceroom Spectroscopy,” which I discovered after I finished my book, choreographs beautiful pieces around themes like molecular dynamics. David Glowacki, a theoretical chemist at Bristol University in England, and his team came up with a dance performance called “Hidden Fields” in which interactive digital art and physics transform dancers’ movements into what the group calls “energy fields” that create disturbances in computer simulations of molecular dynamics projected onto a background screen. The super-fast algorithms cooked up for bringing together the dancers’ movements with the simulations of molecular motion have ended up helping scientists manipulate chains of protein molecules. They want to understand how proteins try to cooperate or bond together because mishaps in the process can lead to diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and Parkinson’s. Using these algorithms is sometimes 10,000 times faster than simply asking a computer to try different chains of protein molecules until it hits upon an appropriate structure.
This is the future of art in our age of computers and algorithms. Painting with oils and other traditional art forms will persist, but I think they, too, will soon merge with science and technology in new and imaginative ways. For a taste of this future, check out an electronic art fair like Ars Electronica, held in Linz, Austria, every September. Ars Electronica shows works generated by science and technology, with new sorts of images and sounds that would be impossible without computers and algorithms. There are no paintings—in fact, they’re sometimes derisively referred to as “flat art” by proponents of artsci.
Appreciating the new art on display at the fair requires knowledge of science and technology, computers, and algorithms. At Ars Electronica in 2012, visitors to Seiko Mikami’s installation “Desire of Codes” became actors in a work of art in which ambiguity reigns. The installation is made of six ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras on robotic arms and 90 wall-mounted sensors. These data are mixed with pre-recorded images and sounds from actual surveillance cameras to create images on screens in which the exhibition visitors see themselves walking through cities such as Berlin or in the countryside, as if in a dream or an alternate reality. In this new artsci, there is no one unique “Mona Lisa.” This is an art that does not stand still.
Arthur I. Miller is the author of the recently published, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art. He is a professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He wrote this for “Open Art,” a partnership of the Getty and Zocalo Public Square.
TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. To submit a piece, email ideas@time.com.





Feb. 3, 2015 Zocalo Public Square @ThePublicSquare
http://time.com/3692990/art-science-converging-again/