The man made a third ear for himself to be used by the whole world - for the sake of art

Photo: Stelarc.org

GeekPicnic festival took place last weekend in Moscow. One of his headliners was Stelark, a 73-year-old artist, author of many performances and an honorary professor of arts and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.

He became famous in the 70s when he hung himself several times on hooks in museums and public spaces. In the 80s, together with a team of scientists Stelark developed a wearable exoskeleton with a mechanical arm that listened to muscle signals. For its time, the hand was one of the most advanced devices in the industry. About performances Stelarka wrote an essay by William Gibson himself - one of the fathers of cyberpunk.
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But perhaps the artist’s most famous project is an ear, which he surgically constructed on his arm and now plans to connect it to the Internet. We talked with Stelark and found out how the progress with the project is going.

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In 1996, a man named Stelark decided to “grow” a third ear on his head. He was fond of anatomy, was a professor of arts and robotics, and was famous for eerie performances. For example, once installed a miniature sculpture inside his stomach, which viewers could look at using the camera.

The project with the ear, like everyone else, Stelarc did not start for the development of medicine, surgery, science, transplantology and other utilitarian things. He did it for the sake of art, because first of all he considered himself an artist.

“The ear is a very beautiful design. I always thought that it should be part of a human face. But the medical community is conservative, even when it comes to neurosurgery and brain surgery. No surgeon will agree to conduct them if the patient has no pathological abnormalities. At the same time, we know that they are experimenting with old people, maimed and sick, because they can justify it by extending their lives, restoring hearing or sight, or treating Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. ”

In the 90s, the idea with the ear sounded even more impossible than it is now. But Stelarc began to look for people who will help bring the idea to life, and found it.

The ear on the hand is like?

According to the original plan, they wanted to construct the ear from cartilage material taken from the chest of Stelarc. Surgeons did not agree to go for it for the sake of art. Some showed interest, but later refused anyway. A little later, Stelark with several Australian scientists raised a copy of his ear on a scale of one to four. The artist's cells were placed in a bioreactor, where a three-dimensional structure could develop through rotation. In a sterile environment, the temperature was maintained at 37 degrees, and every three to four days the ear was fed with nutrients.

But this copy would not be suitable for transplanting into a human body. Many years have passed, and this technology remains experimental. “Now we can print tissue with the help of living cells of the patient, but the tissue is printed in layers, not a bulk structure. So far this is only the beginning of the way to produce parts of the human body, ”says Stelarc.

“To keep the ear alive, you need to establish a blood supply, and typing blood vessels is a big problem. Organs like the heart are even harder. It is necessary not only to create a structure, but also to place it in a nutrient medium with the required temperature, stimulate it with electricity, establish a blood supply, hope that the heart will start beating - and only then transplant it. ”

The project with the ear was developed only after a few compromises. The body decided to design on the arm, and instead of using real artificial cartilage. More than 20 years have passed since the moment of the idea, but the project has not yet been completed.

“This is not cosmetic surgery, where the surgeon is trying to give a different shape, for example, to your nose. There is nothing on the hand, and you have to build a structure from scratch, ”says Stelarc.“ This is not an easy process. It requires many operations and stretches for many years. Ten years I spent only on the search for funding and three surgeons who agree to participate in the project. ”

During the first surgery, a silicone implant was implanted under the skin to form a “leather bag” for the future ear. But the operation led to necrosis, and the place for "construction" had to be transferred again - from the outside of the forearm to the inside.

During the second operation, an ear-shaped structure made of porous biocompatible polyethylene was implanted into the arm. The pore diameter of this material varies from 100 to 250 micrometers, and thanks to them blood vessels, tissues grow through the structure, and the organ is firmly integrated into the arm.

Now the main surgical problem of the project is to grow a soft lobe on the third ear with stem cells and inoculate it to the shell. In some countries, such as the United States, this is prohibited. The procedure was carried out in Europe, but it ended unsuccessfully. “You are conducting an operation, and then you are waiting for a year - only to understand whether it has worked or not. And since this is an experiment, there are no guarantees. ”

The construction of the ear itself is another technically challenging aspect. Stelarc plans to implant a microphone in the sink to allow people to connect and listen to the same thing as he.

How to connect a microphone inside the body to the entire Internet

Getting a live ear with working electronics turned out to be more difficult than you can imagine. “Now people are watching sci-fi movies, reading about the latest research, and their perceptions are distorted. It’s not so easy to embody fantastic ideas in real conditions, ”says Stelarc.

“The problem is to put the microphone inside without external wires, put the batteries and the necessary fees. We are not talking about a small chip, which pays off at the box office, but about the whole Wi-Fi system. When you sew a microphone under the skin, you need to build something like an auricle above it so that it can perceive the sound. It is necessary to provide how to charge the battery inside the ear. Theoretically, it is possible, but to make everything tiny and fit inside the sink is a serious problem. It is very difficult, starting even from simply convincing the surgeon to get down to business. And we also planned to introduce GPS sensors so that the listener could understand where the ear is now. ”

Stelarku implanted microphone during one of the operations. For a while it worked fine - the sound was transmitted without wires and was quite clear, despite the bandages over the ear. But at that time, not all systems were wireless - the wires literally stuck out from under the skin. A few weeks later, an infection started on the arm. Surgeons urgently had to perform another operation to remove the microphone. At the same time, they miraculously kept their ear alive.

Is there a practical use for all of this?

Stelarc says he is not interested in practical and utilitarian use. “The artist is not a benefit. It's about the imaginary, the intuitive, the aesthetic gestures. "

But after the site for operations was moved to the inside of the forearm, science and medicine gained their benefit. In 1996, surgeons told Stelark that such operations had never been performed. “But it turned out that in the second operation, the ear design was created on the most anatomically safe part of the body. Since then, I have heard of three or four similar procedures. The ear was reconstructed on the patient's arm so that it could be transplanted onto the head - if, for example, the organ was lost in an accident or was completely absent from birth, ”says Stelarc,“ This is all interesting, but not so important to me. There is no need to justify the art of ascribing utilitarian achievements to it. ”

If artists do not pursue profit, then at least they are looking for meaning. The project with the third ear began as a reflection on the obsolescence of the human body and deliberately going beyond the architecture that evolution had created. Now the third ear of Stelark is an attempt to make an Internet organ and proclaim that the human mind is no longer localized within a single biological body. It can be distributed over the bodies of other people.

“The more I arrange the performances, the less I am sure that in general there is a certain mind in the usual metaphysical sense. Intellect is just a word. Wittgenstein once said that thinking is not necessarily located in the head, it continues in the lips when we speak, in the hands with which we write. You can not write a book only in my head. Thinking is a mechanical process of translating floating thoughts into words and then into a certain medium — onto a computer screen or a sheet of paper. And presence during an action is something that we ascribe to ourselves in hindsight. But what is important is not what is inside someone's head. What matters is what happens between us all. ”

One of the latest performances of Stelark is called RE-WIRED / RE-MIXED. During it, the artist was in the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Australian city of Perth for six hours a day, for five days in a row he looked through a virtual reality helmet with the eyes of a man in London, listened through headphones to a New Yorker, and wore a mechanical arm on his arm that was used by strangers could remotely control using a graphical interface. Video and audio broadcast on projectors for the audience performances.



“The idea of ​​performance is distributed consciousness. You trust your senses to people who are far from you, but at the same time you share your presence with them. The body feels divided and distributed, as if there are several consciousnesses in you. And that's what interests me. Why do we act as a biological body in only one particular place? Why not share your body with people from other places? Why not interact with the world through the eyes and ears of others? To some extent, we are already doing it. You are in Moscow, I am in St. Petersburg, but we communicate in real time using wireless technologies. And there was not such a big step left - to put the wireless technologies into your head. In the near future, neuroimplants will allow us to communicate without screens and external devices. We can talk to others within ourselves. Constantly".

Practical use is also in a certain sense a philosophical concept. Why should we move science? To live better and better? Or just to move on and on. In any case, if you ask yourself "why" several times in a row, the thought will come to a standstill or recursion, and there will be no answer. Perhaps - we need practical use to become happy in one moment. But Stelarc made only laugh at this thought:

“What do you mean by“ happiness ”? Most technological, evolutionary, social achievements are the result of physically difficult trials, risky procedures and experiments. And they have nothing to do with the concept of "being happy." Of course, if all these developments bring us some pleasure as a side effect - great. But to be happy - in my opinion, this is the last thing we should think about. ”

A full interview with Stelark will be released next week.