Critical Analysis on Artist Stelarcs Work - Paper Example

My analysis for this paper focuses on the art work The Third Hand created by Australian based artist Stelarc. This art work is found in the book Stelarc: The Monograph (Culture of electronics: Practice, Theory, and practice). Stelarc himself is the subject of this art work. The subject matter of this art work is a cyborg; Cyborg is a hybrid creature that is structured by different parts consisting of both an organism and machine. Stelarcs third robotic arm is attached as a third appendage to his body. His robotic arm and hand are moved by the signal from his abdominal and leg muscle. The counter movements are controlled made by an electrode that is attached to his limbs. Stelarc further on goes ahead to utilize wires for sound transmission. This art work is physical because the artist attached technologically sophisticated prosthetics (to use as third robotic hand and arm) to his body. He used the real technically advanced prosthetics to develop the human body.

The size of this artwork is about a height of Stelarc. The artists nudity contrasts with the wires, the node and mechanical hand which surrounds his body. Stelarcs incarnadine skin color contrasts with the gray mechanical hand, the wires and node that are attached to his body. This depicts a distinct difference in texture between that of the natural skin texture compared to the mechanical arm, the nude and wires. They dont go along together naturally; showcasing aspects of incompatibility. The texture of skin seems softer and fragile to the viewer while that of technological prosthetics looks a bit hard and unnatural. The black background color during experimentation aids the viewer to focus on the mechanical prosthetics attached to the artists body; this makes technical prosthetics more outstanding.

Stelarc has taken pictures with different poses. So there are some significant transitions in body shapes and expression. He also holds up his two arms as if his they were surrounding a bid round object to show whole wire, node and mechanical hand structure. Stelarcs extreme experiments have risen him legendary status through his voluntary surgeries and robotic third arms which he hooks onto his flesh as prosthetics and suspensions. For close to two decades now, his body has been a canvas for every aspect of art for that awesome human experience. The risks involved in his experiments are diverse; at one point, he ingested a sculpture into his stomach for projection through video which had the potential to kill him. Stelarcs determination and success is exceptional as he pursues to see his dreams realized.

Stelarc existed like a science fiction model on the streets of Berkeley. Stelarcs project Third hand has risen him to the status of being the most celebrated artist globally within the boundaries of the tech field. By utilizing his body as an exhibition space and medium, he has become a phenomenon that could never have been thought. He has achieved all this by employing the internet, prosthetics, medical instruments, robotics and virtual reality. Stelarcs experiments have always been intense, posing no chance for survivability to the viewer.

Stelarc has always had massive imaginations as to what the human body could accomplish. He even wanted to recreate the human ear into a 3D skeleton in which a wireless microphone could be inserted into and later on connected to a transmitter. He perceived the ability to make this entire blueprint internet-enabled through a Wi-Fi hotspot. This experiment defined a new scope of study for the human generation; if someone was in London and the other in California, then it was possible for the first person to listen in on what the second person was hearing and vice versa. Stelarc did not merely speculate on what the future held for the generations to come, but he described all his art using the engineering language through the construction of engineering interfaces. All this was geared towards the articulation of meaningful discovery.

Stelarcs experiments on a social and cultural scale involved connecting the human body to a more distributed and global awareness. Imagining of a sensory experience boundless by location, Stelarc perceived a body performing tasks by different distributed signals. For example, seeing with eyes of a person in Montreal, hearing with the ears of a person based in London and yet having a right arm remotely prompted by a person based in California. Imagine all these actions being remotely transferred to a person in San Francisco to perform a single task.

Stelarcs works present a determination in both body art and performance art. Through Stelarcs works, the human body achieves an existence level as a tool for technical and physical experiments to help realize its limitations. Stelarc envisioned a state in which the body would be considered as an evolutionary structure instead of the loaded centuries that were full of prejudice. He defined technology in completely different terms; citing it as the true definition of what it meant to be human. He saw a future in which through powerful, accurate and precise technologies, the body could attain the modular design it had once lacked in a long time. He saw the limitations of the human body as being biologically inadequate and strived on a quest to liberate it. Stelarc attributed all his success to the information era.