Experimenta Social presents Australia’s most innovative performance artist, Stelarc. Exploring the intersection of technology and the human body, this special in-conversation event will discuss how embodiment, agency and even aliveness become problematic in a time of circulating and fractal flesh.

The human body is increasingly navigating spaces from nano-scales to virtual non-places, stretched beneath and beyond its skin and the local space it inhabits. We live in a world of floating signifiers, in which the body, Stelarc tells us, experiences itself as a hollow body, with an extruded self — an experience of intense emptiness that is an inevitable outcome of an age of excess. Stelarc’s practice demonstrates that, in this flickering world between presence and absence, between digital and biological time and space, the body can only resort to performing with a posture of indifference.

Experimenta Social is presented in partnership with ACMI X, and supported by Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO.