Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  The mechanized spectacles of Goldstone, MacMurtrie, and Pauline put an off-center spin on the stories told by Audio-Animatronic sales-bots in Disney attractions, airport bars, and megamalls. It is no coincidence that Pauline concocted the term Disneyfication to describe the vacuousness his motorized roadkill is intended to guard against: his mechanical puppet shows, like those of his colleagues, reject the received notion that we should relax into our assigned role as passive consumers of high-tech commodities whose intricate workings are a mystery to us and whose design and function are entirely out of our hands. Reminding us that those who cannot control machines are, more and more, controlled by those who can, Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone argue for the liberatory power of techno-literacy. They refuse what the cultural critic Donna Haraway calls “a demonology of technology”–the self-defeating strategy of indicting the tool along with the toolmaker-and recycle or appropriate outright the products of industrial and military culture.

  In a society guided, until very recently, by an unswerving belief in planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption, inexhaustible resources and infinite frontiers, the refunctioning and reanimating of cast-off or antiquated technology assumes the status of a political act. This notion, implicit in William Gibson’s cyberpunk maxim, “THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS,” reverberates in Rick Sayre’s comments on the low-tech aesthetic.

  “Almost everything Chico and I build uses pieces of other things-old graphics machines, TVs, stereos and so forth,” says Sayre. “Our prototype computer-control system . . . [is] a co-optation of consumer technology. The microprocessor isn’t a PC-type thing, it’s the same sort of embedded control you’d find in the family car or microwave oven. This is yet another [example] of overconsumption. I mean, nobody needs a computer in his microwave oven, yet people want it-they want an LED on their power drill, they want their iron to be able to talk to them-and it’s an incredible waste.”

  Cannibalizing domesticated technology for parts, Sayre, MacMurtrie, and their compeers build feral machines-grungy, exuberantly ugly robots that, not yet housebroken, leak oil everywhere. Embodying the aesthetic of “impractical contraptions, irrational technologies” set forth by Pauline in his essay “Technology and the Irrational,” they call to mind the “useless machines” of the Italian sculptor Bruno Munari, whose existential clock L’Ora X is rigged with hands that spin ceaselessly around a blank face.52 Pauline, who once staged an event called Useless Mechanical Activity, delights in converting machines “from things [that] once did ‘useful’ destruction into things that can now do useless destruction.”53

  But unlike Munari’s poetic devices, the immaterial commodities produced by the artists in this chapter-a mixture of terror and merriment, smoldering wreckage and revelatory flashes-are unmarketable as objets d’art. Pauline and his brothers-in-arms insist on their autonomy from what they see as an elite, effete art world in thrall to private collectors and corporate investors. Their mechanical spectacles stand in relation to gallery art and corporate diversions as the memory of Coney Island-dubbed a “pyrotechnic insanitarium” in the early 1900s-contrasts with the reality of the Magic Kingdom. Whereas the Disney dream of better living through technology is untroubled by libidinous urges, antiauthoritarian yearnings, and other imps of the perverse–“guaranteed safety for the broad spectrum of humanity whose mental health is predicated on denying that there is any such thing as mental ill health or, indeed, a mental life of any significance beneath the conscious level,” as Richard Schickel puts it-Coney in its heyday flung wide the floodgates of the id.54

  The only way into Disneyland is Main Street, U.S.A., a Wonder Bread version of Grover’s Corners, complete with horse-drawn fire wagons and barbershop quartets; visitors entered Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park through the Barrel of Love, a slick, spinning wooden drum that flung giddy merrymakers off their feet and into indecent contact with total strangers. Couples debarked from the ride that gave the park its name-a genteel roller-coaster in which double-saddled wooden racehorses galloped from start to finish along a rolling track-into a twisting, turning series of dimly lit passages that opened, at last, onto a brightly illuminated stage. There, compressed air from a “blowhole” swept the lady’s skirt upward while a clown armed with an electrified prod jolted her gentleman friend in a particularly sensitive spot. Meanwhile, an audience of former sufferers howled with delight. After another blowhole or two and a few well-aimed whacks from a dwarf with a slapstick, the mortified pair slunk offstage and into the audience, to savor the humiliation of the next unfortunates.

  The universally recognized symbol of Disneyland is of course the beaming, button-eyed face of Mickey Mouse; Steeplechase’s emblem was a demented jester whose ear-to-ear grin insinuated that propriety ended at the park’s gates. “Sudden disorientation, exposure of flesh, unaccustomed and rather intimate contact with strangers of the opposite sex, public shame, and strenuous physical activity resulted in a tremendous sense of release,” writes the historian Judith A. Adams.55

  Then, too, a nascent class consciousness percolated through Coney, in midway games where largely lower-class revelers could, for the price of a few pennies, demolish mock china and crystal in a re-creation of a high-bourgeois Victorian sitting room. “The games at Coney,” writes Jane Kuenz, “depended in part on the thrill of doing something you otherwise couldn’t but may have wanted to: express openly an alienated and hostile relationship to commodities and the frustrations associated with a life in which you maybe had fewer of them.”56 Disneyland, by contrast, is a sexless, microbe-free monument to a normative future where the sole interface between the technocratic elite and the technologically illiterate masses is the point of purchase.

  “Coney’s amusement,” according to Adams, “shattered all expectations of normality and paradoxically turned engines of work into joy machines, spectacle, and chaos.”57 The same could be said of the robot dramas produced by Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone, which cast a new light on the cautionary tales, so unsettling to machine-age capitalists, of automated factories run amok or steel-collar workers turned murderous. In mechanical spectacle, images of runaway machines and robots humanized by their glitches speak to a growing discontent with the notion that technology is best left to our military-industrial benefactors-a discontent that bears fruit in the popular desire to follow Pauline’s lead in “re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry and science away from their typical manifestations in practicality or product.”58 The rituals of resistance staged by machine artists celebrate technocracy’s malfunction-ings even as they dramatize cyberpunk fantasies of mutinous machines and techno-revolution.

  Smart Bar. Photo: SKID

  Timothy Leary at “Shiva’s Erotic Banquet” rave, 1992. © 1992 Don Lewis

  R. U. Sirius. © 1993 Bart Nagel

  Mondo 2000. © 1993 Bart Nagel

  Disassembly line: video for “Happiness in Slavery,” by Nine Inch Nails. Directed by Trent Reznor and Jonathan Reiss, featuring Bob Flanagan. © 1992 Nothing/TVT/Interscope Records. Courtesy of Nothing/TVT/Interscope Records.

  David Myers with Feedback Machine. Photo:Judith Norma

  Elliott Sharp. Photo: Hendrik Lietman

  MarkTrayle with Power Glove. Photo: Jim Block

  Front Line Assembly. © 1995 The All Blacks B.V. Used by permission of Roadrunner / Third Mind Records.

  Matt Heckert and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories. Photo: Bobby Neel Adams

  Pauline amid mechanical mayhem, with the Inchworm at left, the Inspector in the foreground, and the Walking Machine at right. © 1995 SRL

  The Running Machine in The Deliberate Evolution of a War Zone: A Parable of Spontaneous Structural Degeneration (1992). © SRL/Gladsjo.

  The Big Arm in Illusions of Shameless Abundance: Degenerating into an Uninterrupted Sequence of Hostile Encounters (1989). Bobby Neel Adams / Sixth Street Studios

  The Walking Machine. © 1995 SRL

  The Big Arm and the Inchw
orm in An Original Machine Performance Tailored Especially for the City of Copenhagen (1988). © 1995 Cati Laporte

  SRL’s Medusa breathes fire (with the aid of aV-1 jet engine) in A Carnival of Misplaced Devotion: Calculated to Arouse Resentment for the Principles of Order (1990). © 1995 Kimric Smythe

  Guinea pig–controlled walking machine in a 1985 installation at New York’s AREA nightclub. © SRL/Jonathan Reiss

  Rabot. © 1995 Mark Sangerman

  Chico MacMurtrie with Taiko Drummer. Photo:Douglas Adesko

  String Body. Photo: Douglas Adesko

  MacMurtrie teleoperating the Tumbling Man by means of a radio-transmitting suit. Photo:Tom Erikson

  Trigram’s 20-foot-tall “Metal Mother.” © 1995 Kurt Prasse

  “Overconsumption Man” and pneumatically powered robotic trees in The Trees Are Walking. Photo: Sixth Street Studio

  Brett Goldstone with Steam Car Mark III. Photo: Sixth Street Studio

  Water-Powered Vehicle. © 1995 Mark Fleming

  “Big Bicycle Bird,” “Water Wheel Bird” and, in foreground, “Beach Chair Bird,” in Birdland. Photo: Rusty Reniers

  “Water Wheel Bird.” © 1995 Brett Goldstone

  “Beach Chair Bird.” © 1995 Brett Goldstone

  4 / RITUAL

  MECHANICS

  Cybernetic Body Art

  Comfort / Control. © 1992 Don Lewis

  Stelarc: I Sing the Body Obsolete

  Knowledge is power! Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours-your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain-can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete.

  –Bruce Sterling1

  Yawning with your mouth sewn shut isn’t easy, as Stelarc discovered during his 1979 Event for Support Structure. The Australian performance artist spent three days in Tokyo’s Tamura Gallery, sandwiched between planks suspended from a tepeelike arrangement of poles, his mouth and eyelids stitched tight with surgical thread. At night, he slept on the gallery floor.

  “Interestingly enough,” he recounts, “it wasn’t so much the painful-ness of the stitching . . . or the compression of the body between two pieces of wood but rather the difficulty in yawning . . . that presented a problem.” His deep-toned, diabolical laugh bounces off the walls. “This is something I hadn’t considered.”2

  Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou) is the foremost exponent of cybernetic body art. Decades before virtual reality went pop, he experimented with jerry-built simulation technology at the Caulfield Institute of Technology and, later, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). From 1968 through 1970, he constructed a series of enclosures called Sensory Compartments in which the user was “assaulted by lights, motion, sound” and fabricated helmets fitted with goggles that split the wearer’s binocular vision, immersing him or her in a fun-house-mirror world of superimposed images. The artist, a confirmed McLuhanite, describes these devices as the product of a “realization . . . that it was the body’s physiological hardware that determined its intelligence, its awareness, and that if you alter this [hardware], you’re going to present an alternate perception.” This is a reiteration, in so many words, of McLuhan’s assertion that

  [t]he extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act-the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.3

  Proceeding from that proposition, Stelarc has evolved an aesthetic of prosthetics in which “the artist [is] an evolutionary guide, extrapolating new trajectories . . . a genetic sculptor, restructuring and hypersensitizing the human body; an architect of internal body spaces; a primal surgeon, implanting dreams, transplanting desires; an evolutionary alchemist, triggering mutations, transforming the human landscape.”4

  His nearly naked body plastered with electrodes and trailing wires, the artist in performance bears a striking resemblance to a Borg, one of the implacable cyborg villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With his Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, Third Hand, Automatic Arm, and Video Shadow, he bodies forth the human-machine hybrid all of us are metaphorically becoming. Less a man than the organic nerve center of a cybernetic system, he literalizes our vision of ourselves as terminal beings, inextricably entangled in the global telecommunications web. In that sense, he is a postmodern incarnation of the archetypal image of Man the microcosm-a naked man, spread-eagled inside a pentagram, which according to J. E. Cirlot is emblematic not only of the analogical relationship between the individual and the cosmos but of “the human tendency towards ascendence and evolution.”5

  “All the signposts direct us to him,” declares John Shirley, in an essay that theorizes Stelarc as the embodiment of cyberpunk’s posthuman yearnings, “a chimera grafted together of horror and grace, the synthesis of erstwhile humanity and tomorrow’s humanity struggling to be born.”6 Positioning the artist alongside Survival Research Laboratories as a cultural mutagen “doing the work of science fiction outside the genre,” Shirley draws parallels between Stelarc’s preoccupation with techno-evolution and the themes of cyborged or genetically engineered body modification treated in SF novels such as Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Samuel R. Delany’s Nova.7

  Stelarc has performed with hulking, industrial robot arms, dodging their potentially bone-shattering swipes. On occasion, his events take place in the midst of sculptural installations of glass tubes crawling with plasma discharges or flashing and flickering in response to signals sent by his body. A cagelike structure perched on the artist’s shoulders emits argon-laser pulses. Synchronized to throb in time to his heartbeat, the beams are made, through eyeblinks, facial twitches, and head movements, to scribble curlicues in the air. “Video shadows”–images captured by video cameras positioned above and around him and projected on large screens-are frozen, superimposed, or juxtaposed in split-screen configurations.

  A welter of thrrrups, squeals, creaks, and cricks, most of them originating in Stelarc’s body, whooshes around the performance space. The artist’s heartbeat, amplified by means of an ECG (electrocardiograph) monitor, marks time with a muffled, metronomic thump. The opening and closing of heart valves, the slap and slosh of blood are captured by Doppler ultrasonic sound transducers, enabling Stelarc to “play” his body. For example, one transducer is fastened to his wrist. “By constricting the radial artery of the wrist,” he informs, “the sound varies from the normal repetitive ‘whooshing’ to a ‘clicking’ as the blood is dammed, with a flooding rush of sound as the wrist is relaxed.”8 A kinetic-angle transducer converts the bending of his right knee into avalanches of sound; a microphone, placed over the larynx, picks up swallowing and other throat noises; and a plethysmogram amplifies finger pulse. From time to time, an electronic keening splits the air, wobbling on a single pitch, then zigzagging suddenly upward into a ragged whoop. It is produced by analog synthesizers triggered by “control voltages”–electrical signals modulated by the artist’s heartbeat, muscles, and brain waves (translated into EEG, or electroencephalogram, readouts).

  Attached to an acrylic sleeve on the artist’s right arm, the Third Hand chirrs frantically, its stainless steel fingers clutching at nothingness. Custom-made by a Japanese manufacturer, the Hand is a dexterous robotic manipulator that can be actuated by EMG (electromyogram) signals from the muscles in Stelarc’s abdomen and thighs. It can pinch, grasp, release, and rotate its wrist 290 degrees in either direction, and has a tactile feedback system that provides a rudimentary sense of touch by stimulating electrodes affixed to the artist’s arm. Stelarc’s left arm, meanwhile, is robotized–jerkily animated by intermittent jolts of electricity from a pair of muscle stimulators. “Voltage is applied to the flexor and biceps muscles,” notes Stelarc, “bending the wrist, curling the fingers and jerking the arm up and down involuntarily.”9

  In recent performances, Stelarc has reached into cyberspace with his Virtual Arm. Developed at RMIT’s Advanced Compute
r Graphics Center, the Arm is a computer-generated “universal manipulator”–a digital cartoon of a humanoid limb-controlled by gestures from a CyberGlove. The Arm can rotate its wrist and fingers continuously; stretch from here to eternity; sprout extra hands or clone an octopuslike tangle of arms; draw lines with its fingertips or shoot spheres out of them.

  In Actuate/Rotate: Event for Virtual Body (1993), Stelarc took the next step up the techno-evolutionary ladder. Donning a Polhemus magnetic tracking system whose sensors were attached to his head, torso, and extremities, he interacted with a digital doppelgänger that mirrored his every move. The double appeared, alternately, as a wireframe skeleton or a fleshed-out mannequin on a video display monitor. Simultaneously, video cameras fed live images of Stelarc’s physical body into the system, and the computer-generated point of view-the virtual camera-was choreographed by his gestures, generating montages of fleshly and ghostly bodies.

  Stelarc’s performances are pure cyberpunk. Slowly contorting his body in a series of cyborg mudras, he unleashes an inhuman bedlam that sounds like a brawl between a shortwave radio and a Geiger counter. The twin beams of his “laser eyes” stab into the dark; tendrils of electricity writhe, like living things, inside the sculptural installation’s glass tubes; and “video shadows” flit across monitors, now freezing, now stuttering stroboscopically. His arm is yanked upwards, puppetlike, by a burst of electricity while his Third Hand scrabbles at the air. In Stelarc’s cybernetic synergism, the distinction between controller and controlled is blurred; he is simultaneously extended by, and an extension of, his high-tech system.