STELARC Third Arm Helps Improve Your Ski-Boxing
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of September , 2008 at 12:06 am
If, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, you’ve been looking for a way to impress Earth chicks and do better at exotic (i.e. extra-galactic) sports, it might be worth getting yourself fitted with a third arm. STELARC (an Austrian performance artist) has the solution, with a robotic arm designed to be attached to one of your existing arms. The hand is controlled through leg and abdominal nerve signals, and features 290 degree wrist rotation, pinching and grasping motions, and some kind of simple tactile feedback system.
Now, from what I can tell, this thing is actually from back around 1992, or (gasp) earlier, and was only a performance piece. Even so, just imagine the possibilities… STELARC’s thesis is that our bodies are already just extensions of our mind, so adding technology to our bodies is a logical next step. Oh, and we’re zombies, too:
“Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntary conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words, we have always been coupled with our technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly involuntary and extended. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become – Zombies and Cyborgs.”
Hoooo-kay. There are a couple more interesting cyborg-y projects on the STELARC website (including a weird sort of hexapod exoskeleton thing), and if you do a search on YouTube you can find a couple (kinda lame) vids of some of the stuff in action.
[ STELARC ] VIA [ Gizmowatch ]
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Category: Cybernetics
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