Stelarc, a performance artist who has staged "a series of events intended to exhibit the 'obsolescence of the body'" (Taylor, Mark C.. Hiding. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 135), is well known for his development of a mechanical third hand that is controlled by signals sent out by the muscles of the person donning it. As does this creation, all Stelarc's performances demonstrate the "obsolescence" of the body--in needing the body in order to show the lack of use of the body, the performances emphasize the body's presence and necessity. The body's natural signaling commands the machine. Our bodies are necessary to our technologies and our technologies are becoming necessary to our bodies. Stelarc attaches himself to machines in order to extend his body, in order to increase its relevance. Taylor says, "While appearing to amplify the body these supplemental hides might eventually render it obsolete." (Taylor, Mark C.. Hiding. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 137) The body will therefore become a past that refuses to disappear, a surface that hangs on, a rhythm that has set the pace for the continuation of the oscillation between what is inside and what is out, what is electronic and what is not, and what is that hard knot that refuses to be anything but in between.

Stelarc also created "Ping Body, an internet actuated and uploaded performance" that was a part of the Digital Aesthetics Conference in Sydney, Australia in 1996 (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/pingbody/ [Accessed 9 December 1999].). In "Ping Body," Stelarc's body was in essence hooked up to the net and "shocked" in response to pings, more intensely the higher the traffic. Pings are signals that are sent out to certain IP addresses to basically check the vital stats, very similar to the sensory processes the body naturally conducts, periodically checking on the vital stats of its parts. Stelarc therefore made the net a part of him, or maybe more precisely, himself a part of the net, a place the general public is in anyway, but not so explicitly.