Rosemary Klich
Rosemary Klich is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent where she specialises in multimedia performance. She has published on the topics of intermediality, posthumanism, and remediation in theatre and her co-authored book Multimedia Performance is being published by Palgrave MacMillan this year. She completed a PhD at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a BA(Drama) and BCI(Hons) at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Her research interests include the notion of 'interactivity' in media and performance, acting with new technologies, and contemporary performance art. She is currently working on a monograph that will contribute a vocabulary, a history, and a typology of forms of interactive performance.
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is a senior lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, London. Her current book project, entitled Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance, investigates multimedia performance and contemporary subjectivity. She is an Assistant Editor for PAJ: A Journal of Art and Performance and an associate editor for theInternational Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.
Stelarc Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA- including new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. Stelarc has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in remote locations. For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis, Stelarc developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Recently for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON- a pneumatically powered 6-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures. Current projects include the EXTRA EAR- a surgically constructed ear as an additional facial feature that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an internet antenna, able to hear RealAudio sounds. And MOVATAR is an intelligent avatar that will be able to perform in the real world by possessing a physical body. It will have a sound feedback loop from the body giving the virtual entity an ear in the world. He has also completed an EXTENDED ARM- a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS- an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real-time. In 1995 Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from The Visual Arts/ Craft Board, The Australia Council. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed as a Senior Research Scholar for the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University, and in 2003 became Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University. In the spring of 2006 he was appointed Professor in the School of Arts at Brunel University.
