Alternative Anatomies with Stelarc and Nina Sellars – Virtual Futures at the Victoria and Albert Museum London
Very excited. En-route to the #V&A #museum to film Stelarc and Nina Sellars talk at #VirtualFutures Salon. Stelarc is an original 1990’s #VF contributor.
Renowned for pushing the boundaries Stelarc explores and interogates notions of identity and the post human. With a third hand and stem cell grown ear he could be described as a living cyborg…
The legendary art/robotics artist will be in discussion with Nina Sellars.
“The original Virtual Futures Conferences (1994, 1995, 1996) were often portrayed as technopositivist festivals of accelerationism towards a posthuman future – the “Glastonbury of cyberculture”, as the Guardian put it. However, hidden behind the brushed steel and silicon, the jargon, the charismatic prophets and the techno parties the mission was rather more sober and more urgent. They were an attempt to develop a new interdisciplinary approach to confronting the contemporary technologisation of first-world cultures.
The Virtual Futures Conferences (1994, 1995 & 1996) saw groups of renegade philosophers lock horns with the future based on the provocations of evidence provided by the emergence of the Internet. Their predictions were wild, exerted creative licence and were unfaithful to every academic discipline.
Soon these events evolved into a unique, international gathering where the morphing of cultural space was accelerated by the head-on collision of science, theory, music, fiction, and multimedia. Today the conferences continue to connect audiences with one of the most important intellectual and cultural developments of our times – the technological extension of the human condition.”
