October 11, 2004
Escape Velocity
Escape Velocity explores the digital subcultures that both celebrate and critique our wired world: cyberpunks, technopagans, cyber-hippies, and rogue technologists, to name a few.
The computer revolution has given rise to a digital underground -- an Information Age counterculture whose members are utilizing cutting-edge technology in ways never intended by its manufacturers. They have taken as their slogan William Gibson's cyberpunk maxim, "The street finds its own uses for things." Some, such as the renegade roboticists Survival Research Laboratories, enact their techno-politics literally, reanimating castoff military-industrial machinery in the service of cyberpunk performance art. Others, such as the postmodern primitives who sport "biomechanical" tattoos of microcircuitry, stage a symbolic rebellion, appropriating the myths and metaphors of cyberculture.
But whether literal or figurative, their activities shift the focus of our cultural conversation about technology from the pundits, politicians, and CEOs who typically dominate it to disparate voices on the cultural fringes, wiring hot-button issues into the power politics and social issues of the moment. Poised, at the end of the century, between technological rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, fringe computer culture poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology be used as an engine of repression or a tool of empowerment in the coming millennium?
Escape Velocity is an electrifying tour of the high-tech underground. Exploring the shadowy byways of cyberculture, we meet would-be cyborgs who believe the body is obsolete and dream of downloading their minds into computers; on-line swingers who engage in "text sex" and eagerly await "cybersex" in virtual reality; cyber-body artists such as Stelarc, who performs amid heavy machinery, dodging the unpredictable, potentially bone-shattering swipes of industrial robot arms; and performance art Road Warriors such as D.A. Therrien, whose ensemble enacts a "ritual mechanics" in which powerless humans are hung from high-voltage crosses or turned into "body drums" and played with electrified sticks.
In a market flooded with "cyber-" titles, many of them a breathless mix of New Age futurism and gadget-happy cyberhype, Escape Velocity stands alone as the first truly critical inquiry into cyberculture. Timely, trenchant, and provocative, Escape Velocity is essential reading for the "incurably informed" -- the cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan's term for those of us addicted to the bracing jolt of future shock.
Posted by Mark Dery at 10:15 PM
