Microbot V.4 is a new chapter in Stelarc’s conceptualisation of the obsolete body, addressing our fears, prejudices and visions of extending and upgrading the human body through modern technology. Microbot V.4 is a robotic and performative intervention into Stelarc’s body, thematising the increasing intimacy of machines and the human body, and envisioning a possible future in which the body(s) will be colonised by micro- and nano-sensors, devices and robots that will augment our bacterial and viral populations. Stefan Doepner has been researching, developing, conceiving and scaling up robotic exoskeletons for the last 10 years. New versions are being developed in the konS Robotics and Urban Transformation Laboratory, which operates under the auspices of MKC Maribor.
Microbot V.4 is part of a series of six bionic legged robotic platforms designed by Stelarc and built and realised by Stefan Doepner together with f18intitute from Hamburg. In 1998, they realised an exoskeleton of an insect-like robot with six legs and a diameter of three metres, which supported the artist’s body. It is currently exhibited in the basement exhibition space of the Cultural Incubator at Koroška 18 in Maribor. In 2006, Walking Head – a hexagonal autonomous and interactive platform with a displayed avatar head and a diameter of two metres – was created and moved by the MKC Maribor team to an exhibition in Sardinia in April 2023, under the auspices of the konS ≡ Platforms for Contemporary Investigative Art. If Exoskeleton allowed Stelarc to “inhabit” it and control the robot’s movements, in Walking Head the artist’s body is absent and replaced by an avatar. In the case of Microbot V.4, however, the robot will enter the artist’s body.
KOLOFON
Artist: Stefan Doepner
Idea: Stelarc
Electronics and programming: Lars Vaupel
Mechanics development assistant: Monika Pocrnjić
CV
Stefan Doepner, working in the field of technology-based art and robotics, explores today’s dominant acceptance, use and impact of technology on our everyday lives. He reinvents various technological devices and creates autonomous systems (robots) that disrupt our automated relationship with technology. The poetic and absurd objects and situations he creates show that modern technology, so automatically integrated into our everyday lives, is itself something outdated. Like Stelarc, he explores the relationship between the human body and technology through his own experience, and both artists reinvent obsolete technology throughout the entire creative process – from making their own technological tools to creating artistically embodied technological visions.
Stelarc uses his own body as both medium and exhibition space, employing robotics, prostheses, medical instruments, virtual reality, the internet and biotechnology. In exploring the possibility of extending and upgrading the (obsolete) human body with the help of contemporary technology, Stelarc rejects hypothetical speculations about possible futures and believes in the importance of bodily – real experience.