1 “The Science of Stelarc” conference paper Curtin University, June 19 2013 Elizabeth Stephens University of Queensland Correspondence welcome: e.stephens@uq.edu.au Wonder Machines: The Strange Science of Stelarc The novelist William Gibson, while noting the Stelarc is “perhaps the calmest person I have ever met,” recounts that he himself was left deeply disturbed by witnessing one of Stelarc‟s performances. He writes: I sat in a small darkened theatre. . . mesmerised by one small dark screen on which some sort of terror was manifesting. . . . I imagine now that I was watching Stelarc in performance with his robotic third arm, but what I recall experiencing was a vision of some absolute chimera at the heart of a labyrinth of breathtaking complexity. I sensed that the important thing wasn‟t the entity that Stelarc evoked but the labyrinth that the creature‟s manifestation suggested (William Gibson, “Foreword: The Body,” Stelarc: The Monograph viii) Inside the labyrinth of Stelarc‟s performances, what we might think of as the Stelarcarium, one certainly finds no paucity of strange and compelling sights of the kind calculated to fascinate and repel a visionary of the dystopian future such as Gibson: here one might see the fleshy and vulnerable body of the artist propelled forward by the jerky movements of a giant, metallic six-legged exoskeleton; here, a disembodied arm, augmented by an ear, alone in the centre of a gallery, transmitting