For four decades, Stelarc has done some pretty extreme things for his art.

His work has involved, among other things, being suspended in the air by hooks attached to his skin, sewing his lips and eyelids shut with a surgical needle and placing a sculpture inside his stomach cavity, with a video camera recording the proceedings.

To what does he attribute his tendency towards the odd in his work?

“I was a bad painter in Art school,” Stelarc joked.

“Generally, the performances are about discovering the physical and psychological limitations of the body,” he said. “They are about augmenting the body and extending its limitations with technology.”

The Australian artist, who is principal research fellow at Nottingham Trent University in England, will present a talk and demonstration at 6:30 p.m. today in Mershon Auditorium. The free event will examine the relationship between technology and the body.

“It will involve demonstrating the third hand, which is a robotic hand attached to my body that mimics my movements,” Stelarc said. “We also have a muscle stimulation system in which we’ll be wiring up four student volunteers and tracking them.”

The event will also feature video and other visual material of Stelarc’s past and present art projects. He is considered to be a seminal artist in the art field, having used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States.

Stelarc has experimented with the extent to which the body can be controlled by a machine, and has done performances where his muscles are hooked up to electrodes and other people have complete control over his motion. Many of his pieces explore the Internet as well.

“What he’s going to do is demonstrate his third arm and he’s going to control it using his muscles,” said Amy Youngs, an Art lecturer at Ohio State.

Youngs, who has experienced Stelarc’s electrode machine on her muscles, said the talk will be very interesting and unique.

Stelarc has been teaching classes as an artist-in-residence at OSU and has had an exhibit of his work in the Hopkins Hall Gallery. He was also a judge in the Undergraduate Juried Art Exhibit that gave scholarships to OSU art students earlier this spring.

His honors include a three-year fellowship in 1995 from the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australian Council; the position of Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997; and artist-in-residence for Hamburg City in 1998.

Stelarc’s talk is part of the Media Arts and Culture Colloquium. The Colloquium is sponsored jointly by the Wexner Center for the Arts, the College of the Arts and the Department of Art. It was arranged by Ken Rinaldo, an OSU professor who runs the Art and Technology Program of the Department of Art.

To find out more on the artist Stelarc, visit his Web site at www.stelarc.va.com.au.