Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  platoons of shrinks and unemployed former Pentagon psy-war spooks to think up best-selling scenarios for their songhacks and VoxBox mercenaries to turn into lyrics and music. . . . Muzik, Inc., had turned hit-making into a science. . . . the psychological profiles of the total mass audience had been broken down into fine demographic slices.85

  Muzik, Inc., bombards the benumbed viewers of its unmistakably MTVish twenty-four-hour rock video channel, MUZIK, with faceless product such as the “dead-ass plastic max metal thing with a ton of swagger and rubber underwear and a spec sheet for a soul” that Glorianna OToole wrinkles her nose at, early on.86 Glorianna is described, in the thumbnail sketches of the novel’s main characters at the front of the book, as

  the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll. She remembers Woodstock and Altamont and Springsteen. Technology put her out to pasture . . . until [she was] hired to create [a] computer-generated rock star.87

  Billy Beldock, president of Musik, Inc., inveigles her into adding the ineffable intangible missing from Project Superstar’s attempt to create a million-selling AP (Artificial Personality)-a video rock star conjured from “raw bits and bytes or stock footage” and brought to singing, dancing life by an “image organ player.” He cajoles, “Aw, come on, Glorianna, you know that APs have to be the future of the industry. . . . It’s too cost-effective not to be inevitable.”88 Beldock needs Glorianna to discover why none of Musik, Inc.’s APs have “shipped gold or cracked the charts with a megahit,” a mystery she unravels posthaste:

  “That soulless crap is to the real thing as white bread is to pumpernickel,” she declared from the bottom of her heart. “It’s-”

  “I know, I know,” Billy sighed, joining her on the chorus.

  “It’s just not Rock and Roll.”89

  Which is to say that Musik, Inc., could not by definition counterfeit “the great voice of that spirit which had now all but vanished from the world” because real rock V roll was “music that kicked their kind of ass”–in other words, rock and rebellion (whether teen angst or sixties-style radicalism) cannot be disentangled.90

  Challenging Sterling’s assertion that the movement is in every way consonant with the eighties (“an era of. . . old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication”), cyberpunks such as Cadigan, Shirley, and the New Wave alumnus Norman Spinrad (who deserves the title of “honorary cyberpunk,” at least) betray an unexpectedly reactionary anti-postmodernism when it comes to the changes wrought by cyberculture on popular music.91

  They inveigh against the supersession of the authentic by the synthetic, of the visceral by the cerebral: the supplanting of human performance by computer-controlled MIDI instruments; of “real” sounds by digital samples or synthesized substitutes; of traditional musical skills by computer literacy; of live performance, experienced communally, by rock video or pay-per-view TV, experienced privately; even of outsized, unwieldy technology by small, sleek devices (Rickenharp mourns the passing of the imposing “stacks” of amplifiers that made the twentieth-century guitar god such an imposing sight). The transcendentalist raptures familiar from cyberpunk evocations of the insertion of the human into the technosphere via cyberspace or, conversely, of the invasion of the body by what Sterling calls “visceral” technologies are nowhere in evidence here.

  But while such creeping technophobia is obviously contrary to the cyber term of the cyberpunk dualism, it is entirely in keeping with its punk aspect. Punk’s cynical embrace of modern consumer culture-a Warholian mockery of hippiedom’s failure to build a New Jerusalem among the dark, satanic mills of industrial modernity-concealed a yearning for a lost authenticity of its own (that of fifties rockabilly and sixties garage rock) that was no less romantic simply because it reeked of hot rod exhaust and jounced to the twang of electric guitars. According to Mary Harron, a one-time contributor to the New York underground magazine Punk, the phenomenon “was about saying yes to the modern world. Punk, like Warhol, embraced everything that cultured people, and hippies, detested: plastic, junk food, B-movies, advertising, making money.”92 Simultaneously, and contrarily, punk-informed in part by the return of Teddy Boy culture and the mainstream rock ’n’ roll revival of the early seventies (Grease, That’ll Be the Day, American Graffiti)-looked back to the raucous, frenzied mavericks of fifties rockabilly and the garage rockers of the mid-sixties. In its own way, punk was no less nostalgic for the fast-receding Real than hippie: Punks like Tony James, the Generation X bassist who sported an Elvis T-shirt, or the Ramones, wearing leather jackets in homage to The Wild One, recalled their audiences to a fabled time when rock was lean and hungry, uncorrupted by the mainstream influences that had made it fat and fatuous by the late seventies.

  It was this investment in authenticity that accounted for punk’s deep-dyed suspicion of “rock tech”–at least, of any technology more advanced than the electric guitar-even as it said yes to the modern world. It explains Lewis Shiner’s reflexive resistance to “a lot of guys in black leather who use synthesizers . . . and digital sampling,” as well as the instinctive aversion to the cyborging of rock in the fiction of Shirley, Cadigan, Spinrad, and others. As Sterling confirms, cyberpunk, “[l]ike punk music . . . is in some sense a return to roots.”93 Allowing that groups such as Cabaret Voltaire “used synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines to produce rudimentary avant-punk music,” Goodwin notes that

  despite the occasional use of machines, the emphasis in punk was always on real performance. . . . Indeed, an overreliance on advanced technology was taken as a sign of “progressive rock”–the very music that punk was supposed to displace.94

  The irony of punk’s rejection of high technology in favor of that blunt instrument of modern primitivism, the electric guitar, is self-evident, as Norman Spinrad points out in his essay “The Neuromantic Cyberpunks.” Conceding that rock has “always been the music of libidinal anarchy and the romantic and transcendental impulses,” he contends that it has “also always been by definition technological music, for without the electric guitar and the synthesizer, it ain’t rock and roll either.”95 Ergo, “the expression of the romantic impulse through high-tech instrumentalities is the heart of rock and roll.”96 In a sense, then, rock has been cyberpunk–or, to use Spinrad’s punning coinage, “Neuromantic”–from the very beginning. Spinrad reads Rickenharp’s triumph in Eclipse as a “cyborged triumph”; made possible by “the electronic augmentation of [Rickenharp’s] fleshly musical powers,” it “demonstrates . . . that cyborgs, romantic cyborgs, Neuromantic cyborgs, have in fact been using technological augments for transcendental purposes ever since Dylan picked up that electric guitar. When it comes to the characteristic music of our times, we have all been accepting Neuromanti-cism as a given for a quarter of a century.”97

  To Sex Pistols-era punks (and the cyberpunks who are their standard-bearers), the electric guitar symbolized the raw, the real; synthesizers, by contrast, were synonymous with the flaccid, the bathetic. Now, however, with cyberpunk’s “virus-like” infestation of mass culture, there has been a semiotic slippage: Gibson’s claim, in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, that he “gave [computer nerds] permission to wear black leather” applies equally to electronic musicians, specifically those who play synthesizers, once the most painfully unhip of pop instruments.98 Heedless of Shiner’s misgivings, the black leather synth-rockers have claimed cyberpunk as their own. The mainstream finds its own uses for things, too, it seems.

  3 / WAGING A TINKERER’S WAR

  Mechanical Spectacle1

  Matt Heckert’s Walk and Peck Machine, customized with horse remains. Photo: Bobby Neel Adams

  Manufacturing Dissent

  Mark Pauline, Chico MacMurtrie, and Brett Goldstone are waging a tinkerer’s war.

  Pauline builds engines of destruction. He is the founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories, a loosely knit organization which, since 1979, has been perfecting a heavy metal theater of cruelty-scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remot
e-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in a murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes. MacMurtrie fabricates puppetlike robot musicians, warriors, and acrobats that perform in ecotopian dramas. And Goldstone builds junkyard whimsies driven by steam or powered by water: a horseless carriage with a fat-bellied, wood-gobbling boiler for an engine; a Water Bird brought to life by water pumped down its vacuum-cleaner-tube gullet, causing its tin wings to flap excitedly.

  Costly, complicated, and sometimes even hazardous, the performances mounted by these Californian artists are infrequent and usually take place on the West Coast or, on occasion, in Europe. All three take advantage, through “Dumpster diving” and what Pauline euphemistically calls “aggressive scrounging,” of the machine parts and electronic components generated by the computer and aerospace industries.

  They use obsolete or discarded technology to enact what the cultural critic Andrew Ross calls “a communications revolution from below.” Their aesthetic of refunctioning, retrofitting, and reanimating military-industrial junk is equal parts funk art and Frankenstein, shot through with cyberpunk’s politics of low-tech insurgency. Their quixotic machines mock the benefits of technological progress, the virtues of consumerism, and the benevolence of corporate America sold by the anthropomorphic robots of theme parks, trade shows, and Disneyfied malls.

  Mechanical spectacle is a sort of Road Warrior bricolage, to borrow Claude Levi-Strauss’s term (from the French noun bricoleur, meaning “tin-kerer” or “handyman”) for the makeshift strategies, improvised with the odds and ends at hand, that the so-called “primitive” mind uses to make sense of the world around it. Though less cosmic and more overtly political than the myths and rituals of tribal “tinkerers,” mechanical spectacle parallels primitive bricolage in its ad hocism and in the sense of sympathetic magic that suffuses it-the lingering assumption that even ritualized resistance to technocratic power produces tangible effects, if only in the minds of audience members.

  Moreover, in staging techno-spectacles that feature few human players, if any, mechanical performance artists dramatize the disappearance of the human element from an increasingly technological environment. Then, too, Pauline and MacMurtrie’s use of remote-controlled robots, “slaved” to the physical movements of human operators, reminds us of our ever more interdependent relationship with the machine world-a relationship in which the distinction between controller and controlled is not always clear.

  The mechanical performance art of these avant-garde roboticists seems to pop out of any pigeonhole into which it is forced-proof, perhaps, of its newness. Even so, it is not without precedent. In the sixties, when the union of art and science in programs such as E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) seemed to promise wondrous monsters, a number of artists experimented with kinetic sculpture or interactive multimedia, much of it computer-controlled. Nam June Paik, the grandfather of video art, created Robot K-456, a six-foot-tall junk heap that had toy airplane propellers for eyes and a radio speaker mouth that blared John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address; as a showstopper, the robot excreted beans and twirled one of its mismatched Styrofoam breasts. Controlled (but only just) by a model aircraft radio transmitter, K-456 once tottered out of a gallery, flapping its arms and menacing passersby (“One of your sculptures is walking down Fifty-seventh Street,” reported an agitated gallery-goer).

  A more recent parallel exists in the work of the British roboticist Jim Whiting, whose pop-eyed automata and ghostly, dancing shirts made the 1984 video to Herbie Hancock’s instrumental “Rockit” an instant classic. Brought to life by computer-controlled pneumatic systems, Whiting’s robots move with the pixilated jerkiness of characters in an old Rotoscope cartoon. Some have realistically rendered faces and are clad in formal attire. Other, less fortunate relatives are legless amputees or, sadder still, lone, writhing limbs. Seen in an art gallery installation, these humanoid mechanisms stir mingled emotions-pity, whimsy, childlike fascination, and in the case of the disembodied legs that dangle from overhead supports, fear. Kicking in midair, they cross the floating dance of a marionette with the frantic jig of a hanged man.

  Robotics hobbyists are kindred spirits as well. Organized by the sculptor David Santos, the Motorola engineer Alex lies, and the designer jeweler Craig Sainsott, the Austin-based Robot Group began as a loose confederation of artists, engineers, and basement putterers and has evolved into an eighteen-member nonprofit organization. “I believe strongly in cultural robotics, robots that are works of art as well as technological marvels,” says Santos, in the group’s video press kit. “The sculpture of the future will be interactive, intelligent; it’ll walk, it’ll talk, it’ll fly.” Sainsott and his wife Charlene have made Santos’s prediction a reality, after a fashion: Powered by pneumatics and controlled by computer, their Shrinking Robot Heads-mechano-musicians fashioned from old springs, wok lids, bicycle wheels, and shock absorbers-are a heavy metal group in the literal sense.

  Sainsott, Iles, and the computer programmer Bill Craig are working on the Mark IV, a fourteen-foot, silver-skinned blimp that scuds along, steered neither by wind nor human whim but by the two bidirectional motors that drive its propellers and its own robotic brains. In its automatic mode, the blimp uses sophisticated computer programs such as neural networks that pilot the flying machine with the aid of sonar data collected during training flights. “We don’t want to do robots with a point,” says Iles, “because robots with a point are boring. If you forget about having a point, then you get stuff like this.”2

  Robot Wars, the mechanical mêlée that erupted in San Francisco in August 1994, catapulted do-it-yourself robotics into the public eye. The event, which was covered by the national media, pitted homemade, radio-controlled combatants against each other, among them a nasty little contraption with high-pressure spikes and a gas-powered saw, a hundred-pound robot modeled on a World War I tank, and the Master, a buzz saw on wheels. Marc Thorpe, one of the event’s organizers, has high hopes for future Robot Wars: “Once you add the element of combat and survival [to cyberpunk low-tech], you are into football fan territory, which is a huge audience.”3

  Analogs in art history and grassroots robotics notwithstanding, the work of Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone sits most comfortably in the tradition of robot theater. Historically, robotics and dramatics are intertwined: The word robot itself was introduced into popular usage in a theatrical production-the Czech playwright Karel Capek’s 1921 science fiction play, R.U.R = Rossum’s Universal Robots–and the earliest known robots were performing machines, wonderworks born of science and sorcery, calculation and incantation.

  Hero of Alexandria, a Greek engineer who lived in the first century A.D., is believed to have built a mannequin theater in which the god Bacchus sprayed wine from his staff while bacchantes danced. In the late Middle Ages, mechanized mannequins began appearing on clock towers. The Strasbourg clock was renowned for its elaborate “jackwork,” or moving statues. Every day, at noon, the clock’s cast-iron rooster crowed three times in remembrance of the apostle Peter’s denial of Jesus.

  None of these devices compared, however, with the clockwork automata of eighteenth-century roboticists. France’s Jacques de Vaucanson was famed for his gilded copper duck, first exhibited in 1738. Goethe, Voltaire, and other leading lights in Europe’s intelligentsia gaped at this miraculous contraption, which quacked, gobbled grain from its keeper’s hand, flapped its wings, and excreted droppings. The Scribe, built in 1772 by the Swiss clock and watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son Henri-Louis, was no less astonishing. Set in motion, a life-size barefoot boy seated at a desk would dip his quill pen in an inkwell, shake it twice, and write a preprogrammed text, moving to the next line when necessary. The automaton’s eyes followed the moving pen, giving it an astonishingly lifelike air. Among the Scribe’s repertoire of famous phrases was Descartes’ axiom, “I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.”

  Mechanisms that counterfeit life continue to captivate the human ima
gination. Millions have their first close encounter with robots in a Disney theme park, where creepily realistic, computerized characters perform in revues like the Enchanted Tiki Room, a Polynesian fantasia populated by Audio-Animatronic birds, flowers, and tribal masks that talk and sing. (Audio-Animatronic is Disneyspeak for the technology used in electronically animated robots whose sound tracks, issuing from hidden speakers, are synchronized with their movements.)

  Traditionally, performing machines, from the mechanical mannequins of centuries past to today’s corporate image ads disguised as kitsch diversions, have celebrated the status quo. The mechanical spectacles fabricated by the underground technologists profiled in this chapter question the underlying assumptions of mainstream engineering, consumer culture, the art world, and the rest of what Ross has called “the military-industrial-entertainment complex.”

  “We’re just trying to do a theater with machines,” says Pauline, as if to allay any fears. He flashes a toothy, conspiratorial grin. “You have to provide entertainment value.”

  Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty

  Mark Pauline has a firm handshake.

  Which is remarkable, since his right hand has only three fingers, two of which are suspiciously stubby. Odd bumps pebble the heel of his hand; a wad of misshapen flesh bulges between his thumb and first digit. It is the hand of a monster, attached to a man.

  Pauline’s fingers are, in fact, not fingers at all, but transplanted toes. He lost three fingers and a thumb in 1982 while working on a rocket motor for one of his shows. The propellant exploded, hurling Pauline several feet. “I was lying on the ground and blood went in a sheet of red over my eyes,” he recalls. “I . . . looked at my hand, ‘cause [it] felt funny, and all I could see was the bones.”4