photo by Bruce Sterling

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Most people in Belgrade have never heard of Stelarc and just vaguely know of Ritopek.

I met Stelarc last week in Athens, where I listened to his literally heartbreaking presentation on the obsolete human condition and the body's failure to follow the technological arc of his cyber-desires.

He spoke of breaking the boundaries between death and life by preserving bodies in plastic, by repairing bodies with 3D fabricated artificial organs, of unborn future people grown in vitro outside the wombs of women.

The linear analog counting of our lifespans will cease; we will not longer tread a natural path from life to death... We must find a different, truer way of talking and living.

Humans have always feared themselves and their capacities, in past, in present, and in future: man is an obsolete body in the space of The Other.

Very postmodern: very posthuman.

We reach the outskirts of Belgrade, climbing hills above the Danube, heading through narrow roads with sharp stones, turning into trails over an abyss. We meet hippies and geeks doing the same thing on foot.

I see a huge tower and an empty white house in glass, with a huge deep square hole dug before it.

That's "Z-1," the new project gallery of new trends and performances, the effort of Serbian-New York artist Dragan Ilic.

Yes, that is where we will find Stelarc. Will Stelarc be (as is his wont) hanging from the tower nude, suspended from steel hooks through his own skin? Serbs have seen and done some remarkable things in the Balkans, even Superman's Kryptonite was found recently here, but Stelarc has never come to Belgrade to push the borders of pain, art and fantasy.

A very big turnout for the Cypriot-Australian artist: and they're very nice people from different backgrounds, of different ages, sitting around a big fire, watching the red polluted sun sink into the black shiny Danube. The full moon casts its spell of insomnia twice this month.

During Stelarc's gory, projected presentation, my pianist friend almost faints: from the commotion, she claims. She could only imagine herself playing John Cage piano pieces with three hands -- for Stelarc has three hands, a left a right and an artificial robot hand, and he has been known to write simultaneously with all three of them.

He is The Devil, she claims with a sweet little smile. She gets close to him, to touch his altered body. Stelarc has a deaf Van Gogh ear implanted in his left forearm. My friend whispers a couple of wishes into the artificial grafted ear of Stelarc: but mute and still without its planned microphones, the incipient third ear does not register her voice. Nor does her voice burst audibly from Stelarc's own mouth, as someday telephonic voices will do.

As we head downhill towards our homes, in a city packed with buildings, rats flats and humans, we speak of life, death and futurity. We remember our long departed friends and family, thinking: what if Stelarc were right? Who on earth would be able to live in a bustling crowd of deathless posthumans on our planet Earth so rapidly succumbing to ecological destruction?

But then, a new planet, much like earth they say, was discovered this very month. So maybe our handy getaway from the limits of being is right over there: twenty light-years beyond the moon.

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Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

- Sarajevo Mon Amour
- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Jasmina Tešanović: Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women 
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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