Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  [t]oday, something as basic as sex itself is inextricably entwined with a flood of alien images and cues implanted from media programming and advertising. But one thing remains fairly certain: pain is a uniquely personal experience; it remains loaded with tangible shock value.157

  Significantly, the modern primitive figures prominently in the rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan, who asserted throughout the sixties that the electronic interconnectedness of the “global village” restored “the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.”158 “Our teenage generation is already becoming part of a jungle clan,” said McLuhan.159 In his gnomic pronouncements about “the retribalizing process wrought by the electric media,” he returned obsessively to techno-tribal metaphors, cryptically observing that “TV tattoos its message directly on our skins.”160 More lucidly, he declared that “the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness, into what Joseph Conrad termed ‘the Africa within.’”161

  Certainly, the assumption that computer culture has a heart of darkness underlies the now-obligatory appearance of modern primitives in cyberpunk narratives. The Lo Tek lumpen-tribe of Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” are “mad children” who roll the atavistic schoolboys of Lord of the Flies and The Road Warrior’s postapocalyptic aborigines into one. They roost in the rafters of a derelict mall, in a precarious aerie lashed together from amorphous junk, and their fashion “[runs] to scars and tattoos”: a bare-chested Lo Tek girl displays breasts adorned with “indigo spirals.”162 The Zombie Analytics, one of the feral packs who prowl Richard Kadrey’s novel Metrophage, leach the pigment out of their skin and tattoo their bodies with “subcutaneous pixels offering up flickering flesh-images of dead video and rock stars.”163 And in Walter Jon Williams’s short story, “Video Star,” a street style called Urban Surgery is in vogue:

  The nose had been broadened and flattened to cover most of the cheeks, turning the nostrils into a pair of lateral slits, the base of the nose wider than the mouth. . . . The effect was to flatten the face, turn it into a canvas for the tattoo artist who had covered every inch of exposed flesh. Complex mathematical statements ran over the forehead. Below the black plastic eye implants were urban skyscapes, silhouettes of buildings providing a false horizon across the flattened nose. The chin appeared to be a circuit diagram.164

  Thus, the same modern primitivism that speaks to antimodern, antitechnological elements in cyberculture lends itself equally to a wired tribalism that reconciles Mondo 2000’s techno-yippie vision of the “kids at the controls” of the “cybernet” with the Road Warrior fantasies that Scott Bukatman believes mask “a deeper utopianism: the ‘perverse hope that someday conditions will indeed warrant a similar return to the body’ as technology collapses into ruins.”165

  These and other philosophical crosscurrents swirl around the style of tattooing known as “biomechanical”—an adjective borrowed from the Swiss surrealist painter H. R. Giger, whose imagery inspired the genre. Giger is a meticulous limner of cybernetic nightmares best known for his Hollywood monster-making (the Alien movies) and sumptuous books (Giger’s Alien, H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon, and H. R. Giger’s Biomechanics). His embrace of airbrush, a medium sullied by its associations with commercial illustration, and his fulsome subject matter-a wall of buttocks sodomized by penises and mortared with feces, a quadriplegic infant covered with boils, “erotomechanic” renderings of human orifices penetrated by heavy metal phalli-have ensured him entrèe to the art world by the servants’ entrance only.

  But good taste, as Edith Sitwell once observed, is the worst vice ever invented. Giger’s sublegitimate status in the art world is counterbalanced by his pervasive influence in cyberculture: At least one PC game, Cyber-dreams’s Darkseed, is based on Giger’s artwork, and cyberpunk bands such as Cyberaktif and Front Line Assembly routinely cite him as an inspiration. The highest tribute is paid by modern primitives who emblazon themselves with Giger’s slavering, mace-tailed Alien-a cyberpunk rite of passage duly noted by Gibson in his novel Virtual Light, which includes an exchange in a near-future tattoo parlor:

  “Lowell. . . he’s got a Giger.”

  “‘Giger’?”

  “This painter. Like nineteenth-century or something. Real classical. Bio-mech.”166

  It is the ease with which Giger’s images adhere to the overlapping, sometimes clashing meanings of technoculture that accounts for the artist’s popularity among cyberpunks. His coprophilia materializes what Arthur Kroker calls “excremental culture,” the locked loop of production-consumption-excretion-recycling that characterizes an information economy, while his Freudian fear of penetration is congruent with the crisis of masculinity and the AIDS pandemic. Despite the optimistic glosses of critics like Fritz Billeter, who sees in Giger’s work the promise of “a potential human existence in which nature and technology form a unity, unknown until now,” it is more convincingly theorized as a sump where the repressed phobias of cyberculture bubble up.167 Certainly, Giger’s biomechanical cosmology, where spaceship hatches resemble vaginal openings and phallic aliens bristle with exhaust pipes and electrical conduit, dramatizes the obsolescence of mechanist and vitalist worldviews in an age of soft machines and hard bodies. But it speaks, more immediately, to the increasingly irrelevant body’s anxiety over the invading technologies that threaten, like Alien’s “Chestbursters” and “Facehuggers,” to tear it apart from within and without.

  Of course, no reading is definitive, and modern primitives have invested Giger’s imagery with personal meanings. Biomechanical tattoos come in several varieties: images lifted directly from Giger’s coffee-table art books, most commonly the Alien monster; intricate, geometric abstractions fashioned from intertwined cords or the dizzy tracery of wiring diagrams; and “rippers,” “peelaways,” or “bust-outs”—trompe l’oeil renderings of the skin slashed open or Swiss-cheesed to expose cyborg circuitry or mechanical innards (cogwheels, crankshafts, and the like). Not infrequently, tribal and biomechanical styles are combined: transistors, microchips, and other technological odds and ends are integrated into Tinkertoy jumbles of bones or used to fill in bold, simple figures borrowed from the tattoo traditions of Borneo or Polynesia.

  Jonathan Shaw surmises that the biomechanical genre “probably started becoming a part of the basic iconography around the time of Alien (1979), when Giger’s work started coming into play pretty heavily.” Pat Sinatra, the proprietor of the Woodstock-based “ritual tattooing and piercing” emporium Pat’s Tats, dates the inception of the style to the release of The Road Warrior in 1981. “[The well-known tattooist] Shotsie Gorman did a takeoff on the movie, a back piece of a space-age motorcyclist who had melded with his motorcycle,” she recalls. The tattooist Marcus Pacheco, who owns San Francisco’s Primal Urge studios, attributes much of the style’s popularity to Guy Aitchison, a Chicago artist whose neon-bright images of chrome-plated machines, their surfaces dancing with photorealistic reflections, have earned him celebrity status in tattoo culture.

  Aitchison, for his part, cites Giger and Kulz as the catalysts for his use of the biomechanical vernacular. “Giger’s work grabbed me, and then I saw a full-body photo of Greg Kulz, which really affected me,” he says. “He was the first person [to get a biomechanical tattoo], to my knowledge. I started working in that style almost as soon as I saw the photo of Greg, just playing off the idea behind it-the repeated patterns, the hoses, that sort of thing.”

  Eddie Deutsche, who works at San Francisco’s Tattoo City, credits Kulz with pioneering the genre in the early to mid-eighties. “Greg started doing biomechanical stuff in a cartoony style, using solid black-and-white graphics,” says Deutsche. “His forte was putting biomechanical imagery inside rippers. The next step after the ripped skin was the Borneo-style tribal shapes that I did, filled in not with solid black but with biomechanical imagery. You get the overall shape of a tribal tattoo
, the curves and spikes and all that, and then when you get close up, it’s got all the little biomechanical textures-the transistors-and-wires thing or the bony motifs from Giger’s Necronomicon books.”

  Kulz, who tattoos at Erno’s in San Francisco, is every inch the modern primitive, with his close-cropped hair and traffic-stopping techno-tribal tattoos: His backbone is overlaid with stylized black shapes somewhere between vertebrae and machine parts; an X-ray rendering of a pistol lies flat on his belly, its muzzle disappearing into his jeans; distilling tubes and pipettes jostle for arm space alongside a cogwheel and a circuit board.

  “As a kid, I really loved The Six Million Dollar Man,” he says, recalling the early seventies TV series about a severely injured astronaut who leaves the operating table a “Bionic Man”—a cyborg able to see through walls with his X-ray eye, run at eye-blurring speed on his prosthetic legs, and lift trucks with his artificial arm. “There was one episode where he tore his arm open and there were circuit boards in there; that really lit a fire under me,” remembers Kulz. “Then I got Giger’s Necronomicon I, which had pictures of a woman in a body suit that Giger had painted on her. That was so inspiring!

  “Around ‘eighty-three, before anyone I knew had a biomechanical tattoo, I got tattooed by [the tattoo legend] Ed Hardy, who did a section on my arm. It’s not really of anything, just tailpipes and circuit boards and distilling tubes and components picked out of Necronomicon 1. I wanted my arm to look all machine; I didn’t want any hint of meat. Ed had previously done a Giger tattoo on Jonathan Shaw, but at the time I had no idea that anyone had ever gotten one.

  “For years, I really pushed the biomechanical style. A big inspiration was industrial music-Throbbing Gristle, SPK-and the performance artists who shared that aesthetic, such as Mark Pauline, Chico MacMurtrie, and Barry Schwartz. I tried to take the same aesthetic and bring it into tattooing.”

  Kulz’s tattoos are less illustrations than animated cartoons; he exploits his knowledge of human anatomy to create images that conform to the body’s topography, coming to life when a muscle is flexed or a limb is rotated. According to Marcus Pacheco, biomechanical tattoos are becoming increasingly dynamic. “These days, a lot of the biomechanical work incorporates muscle and bone structure to create the illusion of the body being made out of mechanical components as well as organic materials that look metallic or rubberized,” he says. “The biomechanical effect involves making body parts look metallic so that they look like ‘organic equipment,’ neither mechanical nor biological, but both.”

  Biomechanical tattoos speak volumes about the human condition in cyberculture. Putting an off-center spin on the tattoo’s function as a marker of “outsider” status, they signal the alienation of the body they embellish: in cyberculture’s maze of dualisms, the meat is the mind’s Other. Moreover, they inflect one of the essential meanings of a tattoo-“to express what is happening on the inside,” according to Pat Sinatra-with strange, new resonances; someone who represents his inner self as a riot of wires, light-emitting diodes, and BX cable glimpsed through a trompe l’oeil gash in his flesh possesses a self-image unique to the late twentieth century. Like the metal fetishist in Tetsuo, he may be acting out cyborg fantasies; contrarily, he may be saying, “Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me—a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but essentially mechanical.” Alternately, biomechanicals may function as a sort of homeopathic medicine, symbolically inoculating the body against invading technologies. Or they may simply attest to the fact that the mysterious inner workings of information machines have attained totemic status in cybernetic subcultures. In tangled cables whose involutions conjure Celtic “knot-work” or Borneo-style abstractions filigreed with microcircuitry, we see the artifacts of a technological society endowed with magical associations.

  To Shaw, the biomechanical style must be understood within the context of modern primitivism, which harks back to an essential humanism anchored in the physical body. “Primitive cultures evolved along certain lines for very strong reasons,” he says, “and with the advent of technology a lot of these tribal cultural patterns have been swept away. I don’t think mankind is ready, spiritually or mentally, for the transformations it’s undergoing in the technological era; tattooing is a mute plea for a return to human values.” Biomechanicals, he suggests, give vent to deep-seated anxieties over the body’s uncertain future. “The world is becoming mechanically oriented and the human race is mutating,” he observes. “I think biomechanicals appeal to the collective unconscious.”

  Conversely, the very “biomechanoid” mutations (to use Giger’s term) that unsettle Shaw are the stuff of Cliff Cadaver’s postevolutionary whimsies. In his Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue article, “How to Make a Monster: Modifications for the Millennium,” the Hollywood-based piercer pays lip service to “modern occultists” who “reflect their inner spiritual growth . . . through a continually evolving physical body” and excoriates technological modernity (“our standardized society,” “the made-for-TV existence”) even as he abandons himself to cyberpunk fantasies about designer hair transplants that create a “marathon mohawk that extends from pate to tailbone”; dental implants in the form of “custom fangs of steel, gold or porcelain”; and “multiple piercings . . . around the circumference of the head . . . to [create] a metal crown of thorns fit for the most outspoken heretic.”168 Amusingly, Cadaver’s posthuman being shares DNA with Haraway’s “promising and dangerous monsters” as well as the Hell’s Angels: He is a Utopian aberration, a self-made “monster God” who “disregard[s] all pseudo-restrictions of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or morality to focus upon [his or her] individual essence” and whose sign-off, after such high-toned ruminations, is the biker expletive “FTW” (“FUCK THE WORLD”).169

  For the present, Cadaver’s postmodern monster is pure metaphor, stippled on skin or trapped between the covers of cyberpunk novels; in some archaic future, however, such fictions may become palpable. “‘For, you see,’ said the Illustrated Man, ‘These Illustrations predict the future.’”170

  Joseph M. Rosen, M.D.: Of Human Wings and Wireheads

  “We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings are asleep in the flesh of man.”

  —F. T. Marinetti171

  Joseph M. Rosen may have a hand in that future. A reconstructive plastic surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and a professor at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, Rosen is glowingly described in the video documentary Cyberpunk as a “cyberpunk hero” whose work with the disabled and far-flung speculations have captured the imaginations of those on cyberculture’s fringes.172

  Although he would wince at such a label, Rosen makes no secret of his research interests: bionics, human-machine interfaces, artificial nerve grafts, the simulation of operations in virtual environments, and the transplantation of limbs through immunosuppression. He is an acquaintance of Mark Pauline’s (he performed surgical “revisions” on the artist’s reconstructed hand); keeps abreast of advances in robotics (Anita Flynn from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab has spoken as a guest lecturer in one of his classes); and tracks developments in virtual reality (as a research associate at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, from 1987 to 1989, he worked on surgical simulation with Scott Fisher). He teaches a course called “Artificial People-From Clay to Computers” and the titles of the presentations he delivers at technical seminars sound like one-sentence summaries of cyberpunk novels: “Nerve Chip-The Bionic Switchboard,” “The Development of a Man-Machine Interface for Control of a Bioprosthesis.”

  An avid Gibson reader, Rosen is familiar with the surgically modified modern primitives who play walk-on parts in Gibson’s narratives: Dog, the Lo Tek gang member whose scarred features are “a mask of total bestiality,” his speech garbled by a “thick length of grayish tongue” and canine “tooth-bud transplants” courtesy of a Dober
man pinscher; the Panther Modern gang member in Neuromancer whose face is “a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.”173

  “There was nothing in Neuromancer that with enough funding and enough people I couldn’t do in one of my laboratories,” insists Rosen, adding the all-important caveat, “if people weren’t very critical and they just gave me the money and said, ‘Do it, don’t worry about whether it’s far-fetched or not.’ We’re growing skin on collagen right now, so these things are in Scientific American articles and we’re going to overrun Neuromancer soon.”

  He sees himself as a strange attractor, a transition point between embedded and evolving modes of thought. “I’m trying to get people to shift their paradigms,” he affirms. “That’s the role I see myself playing.” He foresees a shift in emphasis, in reconstructive surgery and bionics, from the restoration of normal function or appearance to posthuman enhancement. “Presently, when we reconstruct somebody, we’re repairing some injury,” says Rosen. “In plastic surgery, the surgical field I’m in, we . . . repair defects of nature or acquired defects. In cosmetic or aesthetic surgery, we change the way [a normal patient] looks. To go the next step and implant . . . devices in normal people so that they can improve their skills is something we [wouldn’t] do right now, but I wouldn’t rule out something like that for the future.”174

  He talks, with unnerving matter-of-factness, about the possibility of reconstructing human legs into limbs capable of kangaroo leaps by “taking a certain muscle and forming it into a band, almost like a rubber band”; augmenting human arms with robotic parts whose sensors and superhuman speed would obviate workplace accidents; and, borrowing an idea from the plastic surgeon Burt Brent, fitting mortals for angel wings-or, more accurately, flying squirrel membranes.175

  In “Thoracobrachial Pterygoplasty Powered by Muscle Transposition Flaps,” a somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay on the surgical construction of human wings, Brent takes his fellow plastic surgeons on a flight of fancy in the hope of provoking them to “extend [their] creativity.”176 His imagination sparked by Leonardo da Vinci’s speculations on human-powered flight, Brent brings “contemporary tissue transfer and plastic surgery principles” to bear on the problem.177 Flaps of skin shifted from the chest, expanded with saline-injected implants, and stiffened with transplanted ribs could be used to create a patagium (the thin membrane stretched between the fore and hind limbs of bats and flying squirrels). The powerful pectoral muscles of birds could be emulated by transposing the latissimus muscles and anchoring them to a “keel-like” extension of the sternum fashioned from bone grafts, similar to the jutting breastbone of a bird.