Stelarc
I am quite embarrassed to admit that I only discovered Stelarc today. His name is written in several of my notebooks, but I never got around to googleing him. Quite an impressive fellow. For those of you who don’t know him, he had a ear constructed on his forearm out of biocompatible scaffolding and stem cells. This particular project is very complex. I’m just going to go ahead and do the next post on him.

Movatar — Inverse motion capture system
I think this was a concept that got pretty far along and fell to pieces just before implementation. There seems to be no photos of the actual artifact.
Let’s pretend like it is real.
Movatar is a system on inverse motion control. This is a cute way of saying the computer model is controlling the human. This is very pertinent to my vague exploration of PID TEMS control of my limb(s) in both a conceptual and a technical sense. The idea that this is not a machination of the human body but a reversal of data collection justifies some sort of contemplation. The actuator/sensor relationship seems more complicated than 1/other when you involve a bag of flesh. Allowing a computer the privilege of attempting to parse highly elegant human movements is seen as a noble pursuit; a way for the artifice to more closely embody the ‘perfection’ of human nature. Surrendering control of a breathing soul to a crude and ignorant machine strikes some sort of cognitive dissonance with the viewer. They are not reversible concepts at all. That’s prolly what he was going for.

I have spent hours looking at all of his work.

The Third Hand

He made a third hand. It is robotic. It is controlled by his brain by means of impulses from his leg muscles.