Here Come the Warm Jets

On Stelarc and cultural goo

Stelarc: Suspensions

I’m off to see Stelarc do his thing tonight at the Northcote Social Club. He’s showcasing his latest wearable tech: wrist synths triggered as part of a noise-rock gig with BOLT Ensemble.

Stelarc’s a legendary performance artist who has extended the limits of the body for as long as I can remember. When I was ten, I saw photos of Stelarc hanging by hooks through his flesh for the infamous Suspensions project. My parents were horrified. Breathlessly, they said the photos were taken in Melbourne, as if a rare disease had been found. I was shocked, amazed. You have to understand, in the mid-70s Melbourne was a cultural wasteland. In that airless milieu, Stelarc was as confrontational as it was possible to be. Naked, pierced, bleeding, with enormous sideburns sprouting from his head: Stelarc predicted the future while critiquing the present. I’ve never forgotten that moment.

I marvelled at his elastic skin, his ability to block out pain, the uncanny nature of his proto-posthumanism. Since then, he’s had a third ear grafted onto his arm, he undergoes voluntary surgery on the regular and he performs with cyborg prostheses wired to his body (and from his body to remote human controllers via the webernet). When I did my PhD during the Golden Age of Cultural Studies, Stelarc was everywhere, a touchstone for theorists, cyberpunks and artists.

This year, Wanton Sun will publish a collection of my short stories from 1995 to 2025. Among them is ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’ (title ripped shamelessly from Eno). I wrote it after seeing Stelarc perform in 1996. You can read it below. It’s among the first fiction pieces I ever wrote. I’m very fond of it. It’s very playful. I was doing the PhD at the same time and everything was percolating: Eno, UFOlogy, Stelarc, Phil Dick, Virilio, Robert Anton Wilson, Ballard, Baudrillard, Cronenberg, Haraway, Giger, Blade Runner, cyberpunk, body modification. Everything and anything was grist for the Cultural Studies mill.

I was so excited to be exploring all of it, and it shows in this jaunty romp through time and space.

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Here Come the Warm Jets

Originally published in Minutiae #2, 1996

A collage I made for the original publication

The astronaut yells soundlessly, a cry of desperation, for the mission has failed, and he is lonely (their testing equipment doesn’t work, and his deadbeat colleagues remain in the orbiter, refusing to descend). All around is cold, grey and lifeless. He spies a golf ball (Hot Dot, choice of the pros, left by a sports nut from a previous mission) and kicks it with his enormous moon boot. It drifts high, hanging like a tiny Death Star.

Eyeing the horizon, he spits, ‘Miserable bloody devoid piece of rock.’ Of course, there’s no life on the Moon, nothing. Not that anyone really expected to find anything worth a damn, but still, why go into space without a questing nature? Too many of his fellow astronauts just want to clock in and clock out. They may as well be bus drivers.

He cries bitter tears, American rage and fury misting the inside of his helmet, blotting out his vision and the Moon’s dead heart—that cold, cold surface. The tiny Earth is reflected in the mirror-glare of his visor, delicate and jewelled, then he too smalls, just a figurine on a vast dusty plain now, vanishing as we pull back and pan left, searching for something new and radical and otherworldly, a cosmic trigger to release us from this maze of death.

On the back side of the Moon, we find what we need and store the findings. Suspicions confirmed, a sighting recorded (coded as a DNA sequence suspended in light, trapped in a nuclear-proof container).

We return to the weeping spaceman, now on his knees, his head upturned, howling at the black hit of space. If only he could know what we know, but the phenomenon only reveals itself to adepts. This guy, he’s too emotional, too needy. It’s never going to happen for him.

Relocating the Earth on his visor, we zoom into the helmet and the planetary reflection, drilling down into the southern hemisphere, then the parched red continent, then the southernmost tip, landing in “the ass end of the world” as the comedian Seinfeld called it: Melbourne, Australia, a region unloved by even its leader (a humourless chap reminiscent of Starkian big wigs leaving for the stars, leaving the planet to drown in its own shit).

We have new, inexplicable orders, and they are simple: meet the people and seed what we know.

We pull up and into a crowded space reserved for black-clad piercers, scarifiers and tattooed undesirables. They watch in slack-jawed amazement a man called Stelarc, a radical performer and philosopher of posthumanism, who, in 1976, in this very space, was suspended from the ceiling by hooks embedded all over his body, his skin stretched like putty. In 1996, all that’s changed is the interface.

Stelarc calmly awaits, and the audience is hushed. A helper guards an industrial computer terminal marked ‘Stimbod: TOUCH-SCREEN interface/multiple muscle stimulator’. A type of mesh is pasted all over Stelarc’s naked body. The mesh is wired to the computer, and when Stelarc nods, the helper flips a switch, and our hero accepts the demands of the software. Stimbod sends electric pulses through the mesh, and Stelarc’s flesh receives them, jerking this way and that, an alien choreography. The mesh is studded with globes that burn as the pulses are sent, bathing Stelarc in multicoloured hues, sharpening his blissful communion with this digi-valved matrix.

The lights throw a distended shadow onto the rear wall, humanoid in appearance, with limbs and brain-box and all that, but from certain impossible angles, with wires and cables and mesh, it resembles Giger’s Erotomechanicon. Beautiful and eerie, yes. Creepy and unsettling all at once.

Stelarc wears mirrored contact lenses. The helper strafes them with low-powered lasers. Stelarc’s eyes deflect the beams onto the audience, allowing them to become complicit in his transformation. Software pumps in, bypasses the meat, filters out as pure light, but his tortured flesh emits too. After the electrical impulses enter his body and trigger the involuntary dance, they’re redirected through a synthesiser, emerging as shifting sheets of white noise, as hypnotic and moving as the sunspots and their solar score.

I detach myself from the communal vision machine and assume a hologrammatic human form. As the crowd disperses, I find myself standing next to my former colleague, Dr Bruce Cornell. He spots me and shuffles over, rambling on about his latest theory, as if he’d been waiting for this moment to speak (perhaps he too is a hologram, but with no human controller, programmed to call and respond by a bank of presets). Apparently, he has forgotten the philosophical schism that obliterated our once-shared research and forced us far apart in the intellectual cosmos.

‘It’s you,’ he says. ‘Now, as I was saying, Hoadley writes that the so-called Shard is a structure rising above the Moon’s surface by more than a mile. Computer enhancement demonstrates that the amount of sunlight reflecting from parts of the Shard indicates a composition inconsistent with most natural substances. Nonetheless, I strongly disagree with Hoadley’s conclusion—that the Shard is a highly eroded remnant of some sort of artificial structure made of glass-like material.’

I raise an eyebrow. ‘Oh really? Dr Cornell, are you aware that we are in the midst of a cover-up so enormous it makes Watergate look like a picnic?’

He regards me with professional detachment.

‘Yes, believe! The US government is withholding a stunning packet of details: there are four species of alien on the Moon, one of which is identical to us.’

‘No!’ Cornell shrieks. ‘But Robert Anton Wilson said to me just the other day, “Dr Bruce,” he said, “I suspect Bill Clinton is a man of integrity, despite being in politics. Is that the first sign of senility appearing in my ageing brain?”’

‘Well, he must be senile.’ I hand Cornell a book, The Sapiens System: The Illuminati Conspiracy, written by Donald Holmes, MD. ‘Here, read this document. This Holmes fellow links the Illuminati with the US Government and the government with alien slave traders! Good God, man, it even carries a Wilson introduction endorsing the whole sordid truth.’

Cornell splutters. ‘But…’

‘No!’ I bark. ‘Now, you listen. Hoadley’s inquiries have touched upon it but only NASA possesses the entire jigsaw. The highest levels of government know, all the original astronauts know, and they are damaged as a result. Neil Armstrong has shut up shop. A professional recluse, he refuses to ever mention Apollo. Buzz Aldrin became a chronic alcoholic, punching out anyone who dares to ask what really happened up there. These things were seen. They surveilled and stalked every Apollo mission. They look so much like us, they could sit beside you on the bus and you’d be none the wiser. You think that doesn’t worry the bigwigs? Newsflash. There will never be another Moon mission. Why? Because the entities told us to get off the Moon and stay off.’

I look around, fearful of agents. Backing away from bumbling, naive Cornell, I run through the crowd, searching for my reverse-vision portal before my colleagues leave me here to rot.

He yells after me, probably in all innocence: ‘Is Hilary Clinton an alien?’

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