Wired has a profile of performance artist Stelarc, whose extreme body modifications predate the modern grinder movement by several years. He’s probably most famous for the third ear that he has on his arm, which is partly surgically constructed and partly cell-grown.
“At present it’s only a relief of an ear,” Stelarc said. “When the ear becomes a more 3-D structure we’ll reinsert the small microphone that connects to a wireless transmitter.” In any Wi-Fi hotspot, he said, it will become internet-enabled. “So if you’re in San Francisco and I’m in London, you’ll be able to listen in to what my ear is hearing, wherever you are and wherever I am.” […]
William Gibson, a friend of Stelarc’s, once wrote: “Stelarc’s art never seemed futuristic to me. If it were, I doubt I would respond to it. Rather, I experience it in a context that includes circuses, freak shows, medical museums, the passions of solitary inventors. I associate it with da Vinci’s ornithopter, eccentric nineteenth-century velocipedes, and Victorian schemes for electroplating the dead — though not retrograde in any way. Instead, it seems timeless, as though each performance constitutes a moment equivalent to those collected in Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Man-Machine in the Industrial Revolution — moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction.”
Wired Underwire: For Extreme Artist Stelarc, Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future
Meanwhile, doctors have grown an ear on a woman’s arm. I was a little confused by the story, but I think what they’re doing is growing the ear on her arm with intention of moving it to her head later.
