In the pursuit of a new body geography, of a new map of perceptions to sort anew the system of perception of reality, Stelarc brought forth the human body and its transformations, incorporating the prothesis and turning them into additional organs. We stand at the end of physiology, is Stelarc’s statement, because we stand at the end of natural evolution; technology generats ideas, human memory is bound to decline and to separate from man, who will live in a new evolutionary habitat. The body often finds itself hardly fit to its environment, weak, slow, ill-equipped for the technological world, worn out by time. Furthermore, the body lacks a modular project for simple troubleshooting. The only way out of all of these inadequacies is a thorough re-design: such an endeavour would be the grandest of human accomplishments. The re-design will result in an body autonomous, self-sufficient, cerebrally more capable; a better equipped body, apt to stand any atmospherical or gravitational condition. Damaged parts won’t have to be repaired, merely replaced. Fetuses will be on an artificial life support systems, since the womb won’t be required for conception and feeding; better set for physical labour, bodies won’t get old and will attain immortality through continuous renewal and reactivation (Stelarc, pp. 70-71). A creature both organic and mechanical, of unlimited potentialities, stranger to human sensitivity but a “sentient thing” nonetheless (Perniola, p. 68), a post-human entity, subject solely to technological evolution: this is Stelarc’s aim, maybe. Or is it?
This is what we questioned him about.

Do you think human brain could be reproduced by technology? Or  a brain reproduction might be improbable because man himself projects this technology?
Well, an artificial intelligence means just that. But perhaps the best way to describe it would be an artificial life. In other words intelligence is not simply what happens in the brain (or in a computer) but rather what is generated by the body of a human or a robot interacting in its environment. In other words an intelligent entity needs to be appropriately embodied and embedded in the world. If it can effectively and appropriately respond to particular situations then we might consider it intelligent. Interesting behaviour is the result of what happens between you and me in the medium of language with which we communicate, in the social institutions in which we operate, in the culture in which we have been conditioned and the technologies that we have constructed. The complexity of our behaviour is not simplistically due to an internal agency, but rather by the complexity of our interaction and environment.

Do you still say that natural evolution is replaced by technological one? How much technological evolution could do for obsolete body? Will it “save” the body?
The issue is not about saving the body, but rather what kind of embodiment is necessary to amplify our awareness and better operate in the technological terrain in which we now inhabit. It’s not that the body evolved but rather that the process of evolution results in a body that now augments and amplifies itself with its instruments and machines.