The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

Stelarc likes his body to be stimulated by other people. That's normal. But Stelarc can be thousands of miles away at the time. ANNIE GRIFFIN establishes contact We can 'fiiltPftirTi Stelarc is saying. giiess i tion." I am picking dead skin he talks.

He keeps describing the potential wondrousness of being able to activate each other long distance. "Imagine being wired to the Net. In the naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm HTi 'v mHUHHslllllllllllllBlB it rjHHH iHBpBflhfoi SHHHflBBfHEfllH people can decide for selves." Houston, doyouread me? Stelarc wants to taUcabout Stimbod, has developed a system whereby he attaches elec- trbdestohisbcdy.iyhlcHare.i;1; attached to a computer. one operating the computet can operate Stelarc can make Stelarc's muscles mdye. Recently Stelarc connected Stimbod to the Internet.

So i from the other side of the world, by appointment, you can stimulate Stelarc's talis-'', cles and make him jerk. Now Stelarc is even more i excited by the idea of creating a mutual Stimbod i where two people, connected' via the Internet, can stimulate and experience each other's Stelarc Isn't the only person doing shocking things to his body on the Web! LSD guru TIMOTHY LEARV is in the last stages of cancer and preparing for the world's first cyberspace suicide. Leary, whose mantra in the 60s was 'Turn on, tune in, drop out1 plans to kill hhnsarf In front of 0 vidaocamera, so his fans can watch on the Met Executed kllior JOSEPH PAUL JERNIGAN was let loose on the Internet in 1994, after donating his body to medicine; The body of the 39-year-old Texan was frozen in gelatin and sliced Into 1 ,870 sections, which were each photographed to creates) 3-D image. Surgeons can now practise on it. IMAGINE.

Stelarc exists. I'd always thought he was a hypothetical artist who did hypothetical performances no real human being would dare attempt. Stelarc was the cyborg who gave himself a robotic third arm; the maniac who suspended himself over New York City, naked, by hooks, through his flesh. There were stories that he'd swallowed a camera to film his intestines, then made a retracting sculpture which sat in his stomach until the surgeon removed it He couldn't be real. But a few months ago he was on television! He is real, lie's Australian, and he's coming to an arts centre near you.

Stelarc's having his dinner in Melbourne as I'm finishing breakfast in Deptford. He'd faxed the day before to say he'd prefer a good old telephone conversation to an Internet exchange. I'm pleased. I want to talk to this guy. As we begin speaking I activate my answering machine's two-way record button, which makes an echoey bleep every 15 seconds.

This gives our conversation the sound quality of astronauts communicating through space. Houston, areyvu there? Stelarc sounds tired. He's been performing a lot lately. I want to make contact. I ask him why he does it, and he immediately rewards me with The Laugh.

Stelarc's laugh is huge, even through space. "No one's ever asked me that Really? "Well, no I mean I guess I've never thought about that." Gosh. If I was hanging naked by flesh hooks over thousands of people I'd want to know why. This must be a sexual political tiling, I tell him. Your work is full of male sexual imagery.

What about that third arm? That's pretty phallic. "Well, Annie, that's interesting, but I I guess it's never really been my intention to explore gender issues." I sense that he's been baited like this before. "I mean, it was a robotic arm," he says. Yeah, but when you go on about exploring the obsolescence of the body, don't you think you're really talking about the obsolescence of your body, of the male body? Don't you think, even if it's subconscious, that your anxieties are about masculinity? I suddenly realise hbv hostile Isound. "Well," bodies.

"If I'm caressing my chest," he's telling me, "I feel my hand across my chest. But what if, at the same time; I know that you're caressing your breast" I ask him if he's seen Katherine Bigelow's film Strange Days. He hasn't I tell him it's about men wanting to experience what it's like to be a woman. "Oh. That's not what I meant" Bleep.

I listen harder, not sure if this is becoming an art-interview version of telephone sex. Stelarc is trying to make me understand the pleasures of Stimbod. "I mean, if we were both electronically linked now, what you did on the right side of your body might be manifested on my left side. What I did on my right side might be manifested on your left side, We wotild be creating a situation where we're acti-' vating a half of each other's body, thereby having some sort of physical contact through internal propriocep- PHOTOGRAPH; SAUNTER Stelarc 'It's a beautiful notion, that of your body being a host for remote agents' off my toe as I listen. What if Stelarc was operating my hand? What if he missed? I wonder.

What if he was aiming fdr my chest and accidentally-! poked my finger in my eye? Bleep. What happens if the system cirasKes? i Stelarc is saying: "It's very strange when you're watching voiir bodvmove but vou initiated thatmove- ment you're not contracting your own musclesto do it. We have no conscious experience of involuntary muscle He obviously doesn't suffer the spasms of the chroni-; cally ticklish. "It's an incredi-1 ble experience, Annia If you see me jn London please introduce yourself and I'll plug you in and you can feel this for yourself:" Okay. Bleep.

Iaskhimifhisworkisabout exploring a mindbody divide. he screams from Australia, and then The Laugh, "I mean, I get so tired and irritated when people talk about the Internet as a kind of a strategy for escape from their bodies. They say that the Internet is 'mind to mind' communication. Well! If 'mind' means this reductive realm of text with a few images thrown in then that notion of mind for me is a very reductive concept. Mind for me is smell, sight all these things generate this notion of a mind in the world.

It's not amind that should be talked of separately from the body. We're superimposing old metaphysical yearnings on to new technologies. We have this transcendental urge to es-. cape the body, and we've superimposed this on technology. It ail looks so seductive." Stelarc speaks in carefully constructed sentences, and I'm catching up with his ideas as An extraordinary performance Viviana Durante in Anastasia predictably delightful, but in Act Tliree, where her flayed body is either screaming with anger or locked into catatonic misery she appears both helplessly tiny and emotionally immense.

It was worth reviving the ballet just to see her push to such extremes; Otherwise, despite some excellent cameo performances, this necessarily half-baked revival doesn't honour MacMillan. Maybe the Royal should have bitten the bullet and given Anastasia over to anodier choreographer tore-invent JM i r. clips from first class service include efficient processing 'of your VJk REVIEWS: JUDITH MACKRELLon Anastasia at the Royal Ballet Plus MICHAEL BILLINGTON on Patrick Marber's reworking of Dennis Potter licence middle of the night, you be sleeping, drowsy, but then I'd activate you. You'd be star tled. I want to tell him that men were doing this long before the Internet.

"To me this is a beautiful area," he says, "the notion of your body being a host for remote agents." Alter our conversation, I research Stelarc on the Inter net I learn that his emphasis on extending the physical dimensions of computer communication is a hot topic at the moment amongst cybercul- ture critics like Mark Dery (author of the recently pub lished Escape Velocity) and Sirius, former editor of Mondo 2000. As a performance artist, Stelarc brings a perspective to these debates which is literally beyond words. At the ICA next week, Stelarc will perform that is to say will be manipulated by the person controlling the touch screen interface of Stimbod. Audiences will see a man who is most definitely not in control of himself. "What's intriguing is not so much being a biological body or being a machine, but rather, operating in a realm between those two states.

So you're not merely a body, but you're not yet a machine." This is one vision of the future, according to Ste-. larc, and not an agenda for technology. "Artists," says Stelarc, "are about creating contestable futures, not impos ing Utopias. Weeks after we speak, I am still thinking about Stelarc, still haunted by his descriptions of remote physical contact. Something he said towards the end of our conversation stays in my memory.

"We think that what it means to be human is what it means to be an individual. What if what it means to be human is what it means to communi- cate. Intelligence can be constructed in you or in me, or we can construct intelligence as that which happens between Houston, wenaveconfact. Stelarc will be appearing at Jhe IUA in tondon tram May S-1-1, and at the Zone Gallery. Newcastle, on 31.

PATRICK Marber, was scheduled to deliver a new play to the National tliis he has delivered a first- rate production ofDenius Potter's 1979TV hit, Blue Remembered Hilis: Uie one in which seven adult actors play', children in thecorruptedEdeh of a wartime Forest of Dean. As Potter's most cohesive script, it transfers naturally to the stage." Its secret is that it uses Pot-. ter's particular memories of the summer of 19-13 to explore children's constant gift for playfulness and cruelty. The war shapes their fantasies, games and sorrows: Willie lives in a dive bomber's dream world, bullying Peter is a Mittyesque parachutist and the despised Donald executes lonely rituals invoking the memory of his dad, who has been captured by the Japs. Yet there is also something strangely tuneless and horribly recognisable about the kids' shifting alliances, about the boys' competitive tension in the presence of the flirty, mothering Angela and Audrey and about the childrens' collective guilt over Donald's eventual death.

Potter's vision, in contrast to the apocalyptic pessimism of The Lord of the Hies, seems to stem from lived experience. In general, television plays Potter's included sound verbally thin when robbed of the camera's speakmg eye. But Marber and his designer, Rich ard Hudson, solve the problem magically by creating a totally artificial world: a child's pastoral dream of an imagined England, all rolling hills and Enid Blyton-ish toy animals, which offsets the casual cruelties on display. Marber also wittily brings thetwoworlds-- real and stagey into collision by having Audrey, in a moment of celebration, bootoneof the sheep into the distance and by having Peter aim a menacing swipeatthechurch.spire. Paddy Cunneeri's score, also very Pottcrishly, deploys pop-songs of the period and the ac tors reinforce the point that the ch dd is father and mother ot the man.

You can deduce their whole adult futures from Gerard Horan's swaggeiingly weak Peter, Steve Coogan's dreamily fantasising Willie, Goraldine Somerville's bossily attractive Angela and Debra Gillett's affection-craving Audrey. After the stuttering start to Karaoke, it is good to be reminded ot Potter at his best MB Anastasia: at the Royal Opera House (0171-304 4000). Blue Remembered Hills: London SE1 (0171-9282252). still smiling, showed abov.e the hole he was in. Snow is in a bit of a hole himself as everyone enjoys him and no one believes him.

It must he a blow, when you have just flooded the Commons with so many Labour MPs that they are hanging like bats from the rafters, to.have Labour's spokesman smile: "1 don't really believe in all this guff. I know it's guff, you know it's guff and Peter knows it's Dimbleby led the BBC's local election coverage, Jonathan Dimbleby ITV's. When their parents chose those names they must have thought what jolly good churiis our boys ill be. Jonathan pressed his product enthusiastically: "The clearest, the most accurate, the most vivid and the most comprehensive political picture you can get." And the shortest, the BBC's being two hours longer. ITV have no Snow but that is easily remedied.

Peter has a virtually identical cousin Jon; who reads the news on Channel 4. And TV does like to keep things in thefamily, doesn't it? Nancy Banks-Smith IT WAS what Professor Anthony King called "Peter Snow's splendid poll of holes." Snow, whose froth- ingprophecies add greatly to the gaiety of election nights, had a new computer game. Prime Minister In A Hole. Five prime.ministers lined up Macmillan toucliingly antique in pin-striped trousers, Wilson in his Gannex mac all standing in holes of their own digging. The depth of the hole was the difference between their popu: larity in the polls and the opposition's.

Macmillan's and Mar garet Thatcher's holes were 14 per cent deep. Callaghan's was 15 per cent Wilson 20 per cent All, Snow said chillingly. met some frightful fate shortly alter tailing do wn their holes. "And now John Major!" he cried. Watch him! Thirty-one per cent! He realty in a terrible hole! The biggest hole in recorded history!" Only John Major's head, Balletic WHEN HIS flawed-and controversial Anastasia was dropped from the repertory 18 years ago Kenneth MacMillan intended to rewrite a better version.

But he never lived to do it. which means that the Royal's current revival, though slightly edited, retains most of its problems intact. Like its heroine, Anna Andersen (the woman who fought to prove she was the last Tsar's daughter), Anastasia has been left dangling in history-Many of the ballet's troubles were created by the fact that it was composed backwards, hi 1967 MacMillan choreographed Act Three as a short work showing Andersen in a mental asylum reliving the traumatic destruction of the Romanovs. Then, four years later, he preceded it with two new acts that portrayed Andersen's Anastasia's childhood. Yet in doing so he allowed all the drama to remain shdved into the last harrowing act, and he didn't seem to realise that his young Anastasia was a non-heroine.

Though we see her as a child playing with her siblmgs and a young woman at a ball, nothing until the Bolsheviks; slaughter of her family ever xa II i jrrjrt happens to her. She's a lively girl with a mildly dysfunctional family and a terrible destiny but its not enough to motivate a whole ballet. Essentially all that occurs during the first two acts is that the characters dance. Bob Crowley's new designs turn Act One into a floating Golden Age as tile family picnic on their gorgeous yacht: and Mac-Millan's often lovely choreography gives us charming snapshots of heroically leaping officers partnering Anastasia's exquisite sisters. The only snake in the grass is Rasputin, with his mad monk's gaze and stringy hair.

Act Two, MacMillan alternates dancing with vignettes of revolutionary activity, buthis music (Tchaikovksy's Thud Symphony) provides no dramatic throat and as the Bolsheviks merrily seize their guns it's as if they're off to the fair. Nothing prepares us for the pitiless intensity of Act Three where Andersen in a grey shift, is assailed by memories and the stage is filled by jagged images of violence, flight and loss. All that connects Anastasia and this drab and desperate middle-aged woman is Viviana Duranto's extraordinary performance. hi Acts Olie and Two she is FREE used to be a psychiatrist but he got better. He has the fresh confidenge you find in old ladies, young children and toothpaste.

His specs are serviceable. The arms of his sweater tend to droop over his hands except when he waves them about excitedly. Which he often does. Once he patted a per- fume. His.confessions of ignorance are instant and cheerful.

Approaching a gardener, self-consciously pruning a palm, he said, "Here's Mark, who's up a ladder trying to look busy. Chuck us down a coconut and come down and have a chat." He applied his pointed ear to a polyanthus to hear a vine weevil munching. You can tell he's a doctor. "My favourite way of sorting out that hideous beastie the vine weevil," he said, "is just taking each one in turn then squeezing it LIKE THAT and its head shoots Off. Lovely!" The woman afflicted with weevils took his advice.

'I think," she said, applying a stout boot firmly to the prob- lem, "we'd better squash these buggers." You see what 1 mean about old ladies. pear. But in the meantime a new Radio 4 series is worry-, ingawayon the subject. Ballad Of The Sad Cafes, a four-part series on expatriate cafes, began in a Polish establishment in Hammersmith where pre-war and modern emigres swap differing visions of the homeland. Presenter, Eva Hoffman, author of that exceedingly fine memoir about emigration and exile, Lost In Translation, turned in a perceptive piece of social observation that evoked a whole world or two but never lost its lightness of touch.

She was particularly sensitive to the irony that the Poland that the old emigres hanker after had long since disappeared, and was only preserved in venues like this London one. At the heart of the programmes was food whether the.Polish hot-dog which, declared Hoffman, needed to float like three-day-old corpses, or cabbage which, in Poland, isn't the soggy scorned vegetable we know in Britain but a versatile delicacy. Food, she suggested, was a primary, pre-verbal and highly transportable language. In tills programme, one could almost smell it When a party is on a hiding to nothing, it is always entertaining to see who is detailed off to get the hiding. This time it was William Hague, the baby of the cabinet who was thrown to the BBC.

He looked like a junior doctor, gamely coping with 500-odd casualties, while the consultants got their beauty sleep. It is an odd thing but after 2am statistics make no sort of sense at all. Electoral regions with honeyed namesstart to swim before your closing eyes. Amber Valley Mole Valley Three Rivers. Surely Amber Valley is where Ratty, Mole and Badger live, brushing cake crumbs off their innocent whiskers, wondering whether to vote for Toad.

Or not bother. In Walworth Road they were breaking open the champagne. In Wokingham everyone had gone home except the BBC, the former Conservative leader and the caretaker waiting to turn out the lights, After the Psychoanalysing Diana debacle, Channel 4 has founda new and harmless niche for pyschiatrists. Tom Barber, the presenter of the new gardening series Garden Party (Channel 4) a month, and every time' the word comes up in a search, up pops the ad as well. And to think we recently jokedthat they'd soonbcsellingthoair.

But Caught In The Web didn't only talk to the big boys it gave the sceptics their say as well. One of them pooh-poohed the concept of virtual banking (which those of us on overdrafts thought we'd invented years ago), and pointed out that though everyone goes on about the Internet being the big new marketplace, in fact the total amount of online sales this year only adds up to one-tenth of American annual sales of hairdriers. That comically deflated some of the hype. Rhod Sharp delivered a crisp and livply report, but omitted one of the chief issues: what will happen to those.without credit cards, computers, and telephones? (It wouJd have been useful to learn how many fall into this category.) We're breeding a new social group the cyberp'oor. Peter Lilley should be told.

Pessimists predict that witli'tlie creeping digitisation of culture, discrete national identities will disap Television 0, iternet 'PREVIEW' TAPE u7Tvrr a rcmnrXT wi ik. i ri i Martin Jams introduces 60 minutts of This Sceptred Lite, 'Stir Sensibility', 'An Evening With Joyce Grenfdl', 'The Piano', Goldfingcr1, 'Blackadder', and many other top quality recordings. Keuders include Anna Mas.se, Paul Eddlngton, Richard Grunt and Juliet Stevenson. i 1'. It's exciting FRliU 1 nothing dates so fast as yesterday's futurist fantasies, and now the television seems an inert and lumbering kind of beast.

The future is digital, online, and in the Web. Last week's programme, called Cyberdbsh, showed how the medium that was imagined as a place for individual self-expression, free of the homogenising constraints of the State and Mammon, is now becoming corporate nirvana. The big new event on the Web isn't connected with transnational camaraderie it's that, thanks to securely en-" crypted credit cards, you can safely buy.a T-shirt But the programme's most chilling revelation was the advertising sold by a firm that helps you scan two million Web sources for information. The advertiser, say a manufacturer of golf-clubs, buys a word like "golf for (jit; best on talking this month. And it's wdy available from TulkinK Tapes Direct, the mail order preview of Our "prohipt, DIRECT TALKING order and to your To "amlfor deliveries direct door.

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