You can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/40514

Title: You can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ
Author(s): Tofts, Darren
Abstract: For many years Australian cybernetic artist Stelarc has pushed the boundaries of what we understand by the concept of the body. For Stelarc, the body is not fixed, but plastic, nomadic and immanent. This paper will draw on Antonin Artaud's notion of the 'body without organs' as a means of situating Stelarc's most recent and dramatic Extra Ear project within a broader critique of the concept of the 'interior' as it has been sanctioned within the pornographic imagination. Nina Sellars' recent photographic series of the Extra Ear surgery, Oblique (2008), will provide the context for an abstraction of sexualized notions such as enclosure and penetration that no longer have any need for organs or even bodies.
Publication type: Seminar, speech or other presentation
Research centre: Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences
Source: Presented at the Media, Multimedia and Communications research seminar, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, 26 November 2008
Publication year: 2008
Keyword(s): Artaud, Antonin, 1896-1948; Body; Cybernetics; Interior; Performance art; Photography; Sexuality; Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), 1946-; Stellars, Nina
Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology
Publisher URL: http://swinmediacomms.edublogs.org/research-seminars/