Above, Mexican tattoo star Mary Jose Cristerna, known as the "La Mujer Vampiro" ("the female vampire"), poses during a tattoo exhibition, Caracas, January, 2012.
Cristerna shifts "freak" to art.
her design surface ---> skin,
her design ---> self
her message ---> body/design performativity
Cisterna is not alone: Orlan is her inspiration.
orlan is an internationally recognized French artist. She is not tied to any one material, technology, or artistic practice. She uses sculpture, photography, performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics (she has created a robot in her image that speaks with her voice) as well as scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology... to question the social phenomena of our time.
another important body artist is STELARC, since the 1970s
A skin expander was implanted in my forearm. By injecting saline solution, the silicone implant stretched the skin, forming excess skin that was then used to construct the ear. I then had a second surgery to insert a tissue-reconstruction scaffold and the skin was suctioned over it. Over six months, cell growth occurs in the porous scaffold, fixing it in place. The third surgical procedure will lift the helix of the ear, construct a soft earlobe and inject stem cells for better definition. The final procedure will implant a miniature microphone that, with a Bluetooth transmitter, allows a wireless connection to the Internet, making the ear a remote listening device!
seems weird, yet, this is art. STELARC is re-designing his own body.
here's STELARC wikipedia's bio:
Stelarc is a Cyprus-born Australian performance artist raised in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, whose works focus heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centered on his concept that "the human body is obsolete". Until 2007 he held the position of Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, England.
stelarc wearing his "third" HAND
one more. here's a short writeup about THE HAND:
The hand was completed in 1980 in Yokohama. It was based on a prototype developed at Waseda University. It was constructed with the assistance of Imasen in Nagoya. It has been used in performances by the artist between 1980- 1998 in Japan, the USA, Europe and Australia. It has become the best- known and longest-used performance object for the artist. Originally it was designed as a semi- permanent attachment to the body, but because of skin irritation from electrode gel and the weight of the hand, support structure and the battery pack (approx. 2 kgms), it could not be worn continuously and thus it became a special performance device. A prosthesis not as a sign of lack, but rather a symptom of excess. The Third Hand performances, with amplified body signals and sounds, have contributed to cyborg discourses on the body.