Already by the end of the sixties, Stelarc is exploring the limits and the evolutionary abilities of the human body. He considers it as insufficient and obsolete in the context of current technological evolution. He is experimentally attempting an osmosis of humans and machines towards a new entity, beyond humans and machines, the Metabody.

If we rest upon only what Stelarc does during his performances, we would understand nothing at all of the work of an artist of whom it has been said that he incarnates the philosophical movements of the millennium's end. What might this sententiously mean? That to approach Stelarc's work we need to forget the simplistic science fiction which is trapped within stereotypical lines of thought, and to overcome some of the perceptual shortcomings --congenital to our way of thinking--, such as:

• The dualism through which we are accustomed to perceive concepts, according to which our world consists of pairs of separate and opposing qualities, such as, for example, "good"-"bad", "mind"-"material", "man"-"machine".
• The linear and cyclic perception we have of phenomena, in attempting to categorize and achieve to "put an order to chaos", by setting a beginning, a mid-point, an end and a rhythm to these phenomena.
• The relationship between aesthetics and the acceptable perception of "beauty" in various places and times through our five senses and through the countless empirical prejudices of human line of thought.

In attempting to approach Stelarc's work we need also to adopt a global perception of research and creativity, which does not set any hermetic boundaries between Art and Technology, Science and Myth, Living and Non-living entities. The use of medical methods and tools, the suspensions through hooks piercing the skin, the prosthesis or implantation of artificial organs to the body are in Stelarc's work experimental methods and processes, they are not an end in itself.

Of course, the reasonable question that arises is where are the boundaries between Science and Art in Stelarc's work. I guess that Leonardo da Vinci's (1452-1519) multifarious genius created a similar confusion in his time, when he was designing flying machines and was counter proposing an experimental methodology to scientific authority. Today, at the beginning of the information era, where the main commodity will be the digital information, Stelarc belongs to those who manage to break the vicious cycle of provocative or nostalgic fetishism that recycles the perplexity of contemporary art.

Besides the use of methods borrowed from Science and Technology, Stelarc's work belongs to the domain of Art as it explores the foggy boundaries of realities and myths relating to the ways that humans perceive their body, living at the edge of a digital and analog world.

The idea and implementation of a fractal flesh receiving stimuli from Internet information flow falls within the domain of myth --the boundaries of which are continuously changing. Fractal flesh and the Metabody introduced by Stelarc point out the rupture of limits between the partial and the whole, becoming an integral entity. In Movatar, the digital and the fleshly body meet in Internet, operate interactively, are interfused in it along with information flow, announcing in a way the advent of the absolute (post-Internet?) self-concious machine --for which the body is preparing itself.

But we should not make the mistake of perceiving Stelarc's experimentations as a model proposal for the human of the forthcoming millennium: one thing that it isn't is a proposal to massively create cyborgs. It is an exploratory-experimental approach to the symbiosis of the intelligent machine and of the adapted human body in a virtual context. For the moment, this is achieved through experimental synapses of neurons and sensors. It is very characteristic that Stelarc does not introduce methods of genetic mutation but only reversible engineering improvements, aiming to change nothing but the "cell" of human entities towards the cyborg. Stelarc's reply to a journalist's question about the nature of cyborg is very characteristic: "If you had a mechanical limb or a pacemaker, would I consider you less human?"

The improvement of the capabilities of the perishable and finite body through prosthetics is an old and persistent dream of humans, as many ancient and contemporary myths suggest. It was indeed a dream long before the human body had proven itself insufficient to manipulate a modern fighting aircraft for which the pilot's reflexes are very slow. Frankenstein is one of the most popular modern mythical figures, who passed from death to life using scientific processes, by stitching together parts of death bodies which got autonomous movement from an electric discharge between sky and earth. Icarus is the most known hero of ancient Greek mythology having attempted a kind of primitive prosthetics to achieve the then unreachable but archetypally desirable flight from confinement to freedom. It is also worth mentioning that several ancient myths referring to the killing of a body through dismemberment and its resurrection through reestablishment of its members, contain narations of a sort of primitive prosthetics to bodies that would resurrect unsound in limb. When Demetra has by mistake eaten the shoulder of Pelops, whose body was offered by his own father Tantalus as a blasphemous feast to the gods, Hermes, the shrewd god of communication, replaced the missing part of the body during the resurrection process with a piece of ivory. The myths also refer that when the dismembered body of Osiris was reestablished and resurrected by his sister and wife Isis, she recast his genitals that were eaten by a fish with the help of Anoubis.

Art deals with the relationship of humans to myth. As it is free from methodological and wilful limitations, it can use intuition and science, the holy and the blasphemous, archetypal desires, fears and guilts, at will: immortality, incorruptness, transgression of the laws of gravity pulling matter down to the ground and, correspondingly, the fall from paradise, the flight trajectory for the godlike human, the transgression of material limitations.

Being blasphemous by its own nature, Art attempts the deification of humans by substantiating the unreachable. But the more Science and Technology are evolving, the more the limits of unreachable, thus of Myth, are receding. Even the notion of Reality, acting as a counterpoint to Myth, is redifined nowadays with the advent of Virtual Reality worlds. Virtual Reality becomes tangible through human senses, as the "old" Platonic one. But the digital worlds, created by intelligent machines, appear to be disproportionally big, chaotic and extremely fast for human reflexes. Finding the desired piece of information residing within the information chaos of Internet would require endless wondering, beyond human lifespan, if there were no intelligent search engines. So, why not adopting the idea of extending the existing human body capabilities in a way that will make human entities smoothly respond to the capabilities of machine entities? After all, this idea is nothing but a warning of the unavoidable changes in the body's microcosm in relation with an open-ended, hyperlinked, networked macrocosm.

What seems that will be changing in the near future in the relationship of Art to tangible and empirically perceivable nature is that, what was before limited to mimesis of nature and negation of this mimesis, is now exploring the sphere of simulation.

Stelarc, by sumitting his body to extreme interactive contests with machine entities, is totally participating in this process, subsuming his own body within it and not remaining an external observer of a system --the digital worlds-- where the current cosmogony is taking place.

As far as the inherent in his performances violence is concerned, it is the violence of delivery. The natural delivery (ensuring the biological continuation of living entities) and the virtual delivery in Stelarc's performances, leading to the symborg, share a common ultimate goal. The old body is confronting time and, reacting to its own decay, is reproduced through the union of two entities, as a hybrid, qualitatively diversified from its old form. So, the Metabody is born (where the "meta" prefix has not the meaning of temporal attribution but that of qualitative evolution). It is, maybe, the new human body in a very interesting turn of its history, where all alternative paths for our species are potentially probable.