cyborg performance :: essays research papers

Explore the relationship between the personate and technology in the work of Orlan and StelarcA performer is essentially composed of two entities the self and the authority of the self. The human body is the physical manifestation of this represented self and is interpreted by the observer depending on its gender, age, colour, attractiveness, adornment and perceived disabilities (these perceptions often being culture-bound as well). In addition to this, the performer uses make-up and costume, and interactions with the performance space to affect the interpretation. For the focus of a performance space, what better place to start with than this powerful physical form?In performance, there is a tendency to perceive the actor and the body as a very separate entity to the concrete, technological elements of the stage. Orlan and Stelarc, contemporary performance artists, dispute this perception - Mcclellan (1994, para.14) describes them as the post-human Adam and Eve, suggesting that they are heralding in a new breed of performer, inextricably related to, and even created by, technology. This certainly reflects the role of the body and technology in current Western society - medical technology can create life in vitro and, defying nature, can alter its intrinsic transmitted makeup, and internet technologies can allow a person to project a fabricated disembodied persona onto the net to interact with others over vast distances. Orlan and Stelarc dig technological integration as a prerequisite to their work the questions lie in what it means to the self if the way in which it is represented (the body) is altered.In cartel aspects of endurance and durational performance art, Orlan presented the alteration of her own body in the surgical theatre. The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan is her most well-known piece of work, begun in 1990. However, she did begin execute in the 1960s when, even then, she demonstrated a subversive attitude towards the body. In 1964 she us ed her own body as a unit of step (Orlan-corps) to measure public buildings (Flande ed., Biography, www.orlan.net). This project continued into the late 1970s. The reduction of her body to a tool of measurement was the less extreme forerunner to the reduction of it as a canvas in The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. In both pieces, she objectifies her body, however in The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, the implications on herself and her audiences are utmost more controversial.A surgical textbook defines ideal beauty as that of a white woman whose face is perfectly symmetrical in extraction and profile (Balsamo cited in Auslander, 1997, p.