Click here for the first part of this interview.

Dazed Digital: The suspension series must have been extremely painful – how did you challenge that?
Stelarc: I've never really been interested in practices like S&M but what's interesting of course is the realisation that a painful body is not a reflecting body. In other words, in a painful body there is a collapse of mind/body into one throbbing entity so you don't have that convenient subjective separation between your mind and your body. When you're physically challenged or physically stressed, you are just a body. The suspended body is anxious, uncertain, empty and obsolete.

DD: How many scars do you have?
S: I did 26 suspension events, 18 hooks each time, inserted in slightly different places, so you can figure that out. But I do have one additional scar that goes from my knee to my ankle. It's the worst scar on my body, and that was the result of me slipping and falling over a concrete pedestal in an art museum in Vancouver. So, art can be dangerous but not in the way that you always imagine!

DD: How did your twenty years spent in Japan influence your work and ideas?
S: I loved my stay in Japan, but as an artist I've never functioned by appropriating stylistic, conceptual or other cultural features and incorporating them in my work. I went to Japan because I wanted to experience an Asian lifestyle after studying western philosophy and western art, and I wanted to experience a culture that had state-of-the-art technologies in IT and robotics. My best friends there were Butoh dancers. I found it a very seductive form of dance. The dancers are typically shaven clean, often painted white, so personality and gender is almost erased. I saw the Butoh body as a sort of post-catastrophic body, a zombie body that originated after World War Two. I think Butoh was the one performative practice in Japan that really interested me in a contemporary sense.

DD: How do you consider the disciplinary cross-overs between art and science?
S: I think sometimes you're better off not asking certain questions. This idea that art is research irritates me out of my skin. We also need to make a distinction between using technological media and doing scientific research. I think artists and scientists fundamentally work in different ways. Art is not about methodical, reductive research. Art tends to generate more questions whereas scientists want to find more answers.

DD: What are your plans for the near future?
S: It's not that I have a blueprint for lots of future projects. Of course at the moment I am trying to complete the ear on my arm which will be a while yet. One project generates another, you don't quite know what's going to happen next. But that's what makes things interesting. I think what's intriguing for artists is what happens between intention and actuality. Between the idea and the outcome. I don't think the idea in itself is all that important nor is the final outcome but what happens in between that makes it truly interesting. It's about the accident, the improvisation, the unexpected.