Australia: Artist to connect implanted human ear on arm to Wi-Fi

An Australian artist has decided to connect an implanted human ear on his arm to wireless internet, in a bid to allow people to track his movements.

The artist, Stelarc, who is also an academic at the Curtin University in Western Australia, has in the past inserted a sculpture inside his stomach and used a third hand for writing.

Stelarc now plans to have a microphone with GPS and wireless Internet capability implanted into the human ear that is part "surgically constructed and partly cell-grown" and has been in the making for some 20 years.

"Increasingly now, people are becoming Internet portals of experience... imagine if I could hear with the ears of someone in New York, imagine if I at the same time, could see with the eyes of someone in London," said Stelarc, reported Yahoo News.

"There won't be an on-off switch. 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.

"In previous performances I've used a third hand, an extended arm, a six-legged robot. Having an extra ear was sort of a natural progression."

Stelarc's ear on the arm idea was executed by a team of medical experts from across the world, who started by inserting a scaffold underneath his skin.

Over the course of the next six months, tissue and blood vessels formed near the implanted ear.

"People's reactions range from bemusement to bewilderment to curiosity, but you don't really expect people to understand the art component of all of this," said Stelarc, reported ABC News.

"I guess I've always got something up my sleeve, but often my sleeve is rolled down."