Stelarc e a comunicação: a túnica inconsútil das corporeidades

Abstract

Trying to analyze in a semiotic view the Stelarc’s artistic production, the current research seeks elements that can legitimate the symbolic interpretation, hence fanciful, imaginary and utopian, of performances, observing them as signs of the human evolutionary process in the fight against obsolescence. Brian Massumi, in opposition to this reading, suggests the literal and restricted observation of the performative space. The analysis, based on Peirce’s Semiotic, follows three stages: the first one, descriptive, stays on the sign features. The second, intends to outline the object, which prolongs from the performative space until the contiguous reality and overlaps the posthuman futurity. On the third one, the interpretative effects on the firstness, secondness and thirdness are observed, laying emphasis on the legisign as founder of the connected corporities, which are the base of a suggestion to a classifier framework when, considering the cyberspace relational aspect, emphasizes the way how the social contacts in Stelarc are settled and how they influence the subjectivity. The proposal completes Massumi’s pattern based on the automatism acting force body transduced action. In Stelarc, the relationships are priorly tactile, visceral, where the body becomes arena of expression of the hybrid, collective and fractal behavior. Under the pragmatic aegis, the Stelarcian interpretants will be analyzed in its power of changing the interpreter’s world perception, and his/her habits of feeling, action and thought. The artistic sign capacity to motivate the growth of the concrete reasonableness will be scrutinized, by stimulating the Summum Bonum search, which is established by the aesthetic and executed by the logic, under the ethic leading. Finally, the research identifies elements that confirm the symbolic reading that follows objective criteria supported by both, the features and the referentiality of the sign, added to the interpreter’s collateral experience. This current research has considered the theories of Peirce, about Semiotic, according to Gambarato, Fernandes, Serra, Tienne and Santaella; of Hall, Freud, Lemos, Marcondes Filho, Rüdiger, Maffesoli about subjectivity and socialization; of Kerckhove, Lévy, Santaella and Domingues, as theoreticians of the cyberculture; and of Leão, Fernandes, Dery, Goodall, Jones, Kroker, Smith, Massumi about the Stelarcian universe.