This is a painting that I did of Stelarc's Partial Head project:Conceptualized from the scanned skin of Stelarc’s face placed over a three-dimensional frame of an Australopithecus (early human) skull, the partial face comprised tissue-engineered eyelids, lips and chin. Suspended between genotype (genetic constitution) and phenotype (physical characteristics) the partial face represents evolutionary progress or regression.
The face might be conceived as a ‘third face’, an(other) face since it represents both the human and not human animal. As a reference to cadaveric face transplant (See: Isabelle Dinoire below), this third face is understood as neither resembling the original person from which it was removed, nor the recipients face. In its dramatic, yet understated representation, the partial and tissue-engineered facial features intimate the deception of our human form based on any biological distinction between the human and animal, whilst paradoxically affirming the supreme role of the human animal in artifice and design. What is being played off here is not only the distinctions between nature and culture, the genetically transmitted and the socially constructed but the differences between genotype and phenotype.
Consider Stelarc's Partial Head alongside:
The face might be conceived as a ‘third face’, an(other) face since it represents both the human and not human animal. As a reference to cadaveric face transplant (See: Isabelle Dinoire below), this third face is understood as neither resembling the original person from which it was removed, nor the recipients face. In its dramatic, yet understated representation, the partial and tissue-engineered facial features intimate the deception of our human form based on any biological distinction between the human and animal, whilst paradoxically affirming the supreme role of the human animal in artifice and design. What is being played off here is not only the distinctions between nature and culture, the genetically transmitted and the socially constructed but the differences between genotype and phenotype.
Consider Stelarc's Partial Head alongside:
Orlan's continual transformation of her self image, via surgical procedures & computer imaging technologies
Nancy Burson's computer generated image, Evolution II, 1984
http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/burson_nancy.php
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