S T E L A R C: In considering the body as an architecture of operation and awareness in the world, one begins to question how altering the structure might adjust its awareness. Not to undermine evolution but rather to proliferate alternate possibilities. And perhaps one has to say that the body is no longer about organ-ization at all. There are two strategies one might take. Modularizing the body to facilitate replacement of malfunctioning components. And hollowing out the body to make it a better host for its technologies. Not only machinic technologies of life-support but also interfaces for alien agency. The Hollow Body is a node, a nexus for an organ-ization that extends and inflates in the electronic space of the internet....

The Hollow Body recedes from the human horizon. It exposes itself and finds itself wanting. Obsolescence is it's realization and it is the condition that enables its emptiness. Not an emptiness of despair but an emptiness from which expectation arises. Not an emptiness of inflation but an intense emptiness that inverts as it energizes. The Hollow Body is a body with it's organs orbiting it. Outering it's organs facilitates their connections. Re-wiring the body, re-mapping its functions cannot occur in the compact and complex wet and soft environments of the skin. The future of the body is outside itself. It is not so much an issue of the fragmented or fracture form, but rather of an extruded awareness into electronic space and modulated time....

Obsolescence, invasion, the involuntary and alien agency are the experiences of the Hollow Body. Thus it's effect is not one of closure but rather of collapse. A hole is an enclosed space. A defined emptiness. In it's electronic immersion notions of smooth space and accumulated time are undermined. Collapses between things occur through connections and communication. With multiplying feedback loops, we generate increasing collapses between bodies and within bodies. Skin, the site of social exchange and body boundary is a meaningless interface when information penetrates space between bodies and within bodies....

The Hollow Body is not about constructing other surfaces but about a strategy of strange otherness. Of collapse and inversion. Surfaces and boundaries are not so relevant when talking about systems that extrude and extend and multiply vectors of operation and awareness. I guess what is necessary is to rewire and reconfigure the body, concerned not so much with the integrity of its form but rather the multiplicity of its functions. The Hollow Body is a condition that questions not only it's internal structure but also the notion of what it means to be human....

It's not only about the invasion of (w)holes. At a nanotechnology scale these invading machines will be embedded and will inhabit cellular spaces. These bits of technology will no longer be inside the body, but rather will become cellular components of the body fabric. This is made possible not only through increasing biocompatibility of substance but of microminiaturisation of scale. If we cannot see, if we cannot sense these nanomachines, then in a way these technologies aren't merely invading the body but now constitute it as functional and internal components. Not internal in that they occupy holes, but internal in a more fundamental sense....

As a site for multiple and remote agency, as a site for extended operation, the body functions as the Hollow Body. Not a mal-function but rather a multi-function. Beyond it's biological boundaries and the local space in which it inhabits. No longer as a biological body with organization, but as one of Fractal Flesh, of split physiology, of hybrid form and functions, interfacing the actual with the virtual. The virtual as an extended operation beside and beyond the imaginary. The virtual is the domain of the imaginary made operational....

The Hollow Body is drained of desire....