From: Mike Gigante Subject: ART REVIEW: Stelarc's performance at the Great Australian Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 09:19:20 +1000 Organization: RMIT Advanced Computer Graphics Centre, CITRI, Melbourne The performance artist Stelarc gave a series of performances on Wed 15th July at the World Congress Centre as part of the Great Australian Science Show. In his performance, Stelarc was wearing a pair of instrumented gloves, one for tracking and grasping, the other for gesture based command/control/interaction. He used them to control a virtual, anthropomorphic robot arm with extended features (such as continuous rotation and extensible segments). Stelarc is well known for his performances that include a "third arm", a mechanical attachment that is controlled by sensors attached to his skin and activated by muscle twitches. He also uses body amplification to produces sounds from inside his body. His performances on Wednesday, added the control of an enhanced robot arm to his performance, the arm could "go fractal" by replacing finger joints with smaller instances of the hand. The performance was entitled GRAFT/REPLICATE: Event for Virtual Arm, Amplified Muscles and Third Hand The software to support this event is an extension of a research project on gesture-based control for teleoperation of anthropomorphic manipulators. This work was described in a paper at the recent BCS conference "Virtual Reality Systems" in London (May 1992). ("Using Gestures to Control a Virtual Arm", Papper, M., Gigante, M.). The programming for the performance was written by Mike Papper, Craig McNaughton, James Boyle, Dean Hansen and used a highly modified (Robert Webb) version of the MR toolkit from the University of Alberta. Mike