STELARC'S ANTHROPOMORPHIC MACHINE IN SCIENCE GALLERY, MELBOURNE

 

Stelarc’s immense Anthropomorphic Machine (Swarm, Science Gallery, Swanston Street, Melbourne, a stand-alone eight-meter-high kinetic sculpture was in stasis when I viewed it on Saturday morning.

It is an imposing poetic artwork that is aesthetically pleasing. It’s rigid internal structure is partially surrounded by an armature of inter meshed repetitive, insect-like connections, representing perhaps the neuronal nodes in a human brain or the hive mind created by the use of communications technologies. Kevin Kelly noted in the nineties at the birth of this vast system that we had become ‘mere neurons in the network’ (Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Fourth Estate, London, 1994, p.36). And we are. Mind to mind. Disconnected from a power source this stand-alone artwork is aesthetic, totemic, a sentinel. Powered up it becomes networked and reveals its potential as the disturbed hive swarms. Each individual node organizing into coordinated motion or action. In the hive mind no one individual is in control and yet through the chaos order.is maintained, action initiated. Insects are vectors not only of disease but also of information and in this pandemic time the growth of both is exponential. Life is viral. ‘All that is solid melts into air’ (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848). And all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain (Roy Batty, Blade Runner, 1982.)

This Anthropomorphic Machine reflects the virtual networked self, more alone than ever before because we have reduced face to face contact with others. As such it is significant that this object inhabits the Science Gallery for like Gaia, the large-scale Earth by UK artist Luke Jerram, that hung in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, it is an object to be experienced in its physicality in real life.

As I contemplated the artwork, its geometric shapes, its simplicity of form surrounded by a complex inter-meshed crown I was reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. A circle with the form of man spread-eagled within. His hands and feet extending to the circle’s edge. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio the Roman architect 1^st Century BC maintained ‘It is worthy of remark that the measures necessarily used in all buildings and other works, are derived from the members of the human body, as the digit, the palm, the foot, the cubit, and that these form a perfect number’. Plato called ten the perfect number (The Architecture of Marcus Vitrivius Pollio, London 1874). Indeed, the Doric order obtained its proportion, its strength and its beauty from the human figure. So, although Stelarc’s body is not part of this artwork (he is generally known for his performance work in which his body is physically part of the artwork and interacts with a technological prosthetic augmentation) the human body is referenced in regards to the hiss of the machine, its pneumatic rubber muscles, its stainless steel tendons, its mechanical eyes, its unseen mind, its breath of life.

Visually the circular base of the Anthropomorphic Machine with its six dark rising tentacles is reminiscent of Da Vinci’s drawing of lever and springs c.1497 and overall the sculpture is like his study for a flying machine c.1487-1480 (Leonardo: The Machines, Carlo Pedritti, Giunti Editore, Florence-Milan, 1999).

I congratulate The Melbourne School of Design, LIDS Architecture and the School of Computer Science for their collaboration with Stelarc to produce this eight-meter high construct of aluminum, rubber and plastic, which occupies a large space on the ground floor gallery and will no doubt delight those who see it in action.