Finally, an interesting discussion is going on bdy modification after an Australian performance artist grew an ear on his arm, which he eventually intends to connect to the Internet. The body modification project is an attempte to fuse together science, art, and technology.
The artist, whose legal name is Stelarc (born: Stelios Arcadiou), first came up with the idea for Ear on Arm nearly 20 years ago, but it took him a good decade to find a medical team willing to perform the surgery, he told ABC that: “The ear is pretty much now a part of my arm, it’s fixed to my arm and it has its own blood supply,” he said.
As the surgery video above below, a working microphone was successfully implanted along with the ear scaffold, although it had to be subsequently removed due to an infection. Stelarc, who is also a professor with the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University in Western Australia, intends to replace the microphone with a new wireless unit that will transmit audio to the Internet and be trackable by GPS.
"This ear is not for me, I’ve got two good ears to hear with," he said. "This ear is a remote listening device for people in other places. They’ll be able to follow a conversation or hear the sounds of a concert, wherever I am, wherever you are."
"There won’t be an on-off switch," he added. "If I’m not in a Wi-Fi hotspot or I switch off my home modem, then perhaps I’ll be offline, but the idea actually is to try to keep the ear online all the time