An Order of Pure Decision: Un-Natural Selection in the Work of Stelarc and Orlan

Abstract

Orlan and Stelarc both work with the body as the primary medium for their art and both, in their very different ways, are interested in redesigning the body. Their experiments depart radically from popular and traditional ways of imagining enhanced forms of human embodiment and, in a climate of intense speculation about the future of the body, their ideas offer some important provocations. As performance artists, Orlan and Stelarc explore embodiment through enactment in ways that evade the stock formulations of cultural anxiety and open up fundamental questions about the nature and meanings of the human body, questions that are too easily foreclosed by over-heated imaginings about the `posthuman' condition.

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