October 12, 2004
Introduction: Escape Velocity
"Escape velocity" is the speed at which a body—a spacecraft, for instance—overcomes the gravitational pull of another body, such as the Earth.
More and more, cyberculture seems as if it is on the verge of attaining escape velocity in the philosophical as well as the technological sense.
It abounds in sublime visions of a "posthuman" apotheosis that will deliver us from the human condition, into prosthetic godhood. The body is obsolete, declares the cybernetic performance artist Stelarc; he envisions a "pan-planetary physiology" for the spacefaring cyborg, its brawn augmented with robotic hardware, its brainpower boosted with computer chips. Going further, the roboticist Hans Moravec dreams of "downloading" our minds into computer memory and disposing of our dead meat altogether.
Transferred to a deep space probe, a disembodied consciousness could explore the cosmos, drifting lazily into infinity.
Spun from sci-fi mysticism, New Age millenarianism, and human potential pep talk, the rhetoric of escape velocity promises an escape from history, gravity, even mortality. It is a hymn to progress and a transport of rapture—an end-of-the-century deus ex machina that crosses cyberpunk science fiction with the pentecostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and true believers are lifted into the parting clouds.
But placing our faith in a cyber-Rapture is a risky endgame at a time when the problems all around us clamor for immediate solutions. Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound and the Earth dwindling to a pinpoint in our rear-view mirror leave social responsibility behind, on the launch pad; they ignore the depredation of Nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses. As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Disney's Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that—for the foreseeable future, at least—we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as "bionic angels," to quote the ‘90s cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus; it pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:16 PMTurn On, Boot Up, Jack In: Cyberdelia
Rooted in Northern California and rallied around the Berkeley-based quarterly Mondo 2000, the cyberdelic wing of fringe computer culture encompasses a cluster of subcultures, among them Deadhead computer hackers, "ravers" (habituées of all-night electronic dance parties known as "raves"), technopagans, and New Age technophiles. In cyberdelia, the values, attitudes, and street styles of the Haight-Ashbury/Berkeley counterculture intersect with the technological innovations and esoteric traditions of Silicon Valley.
Chapter One uncovers the roots of contemporary computer culture in '60s counterculture; dissects the libertarian-libertine politics of Mondo 2000, the New Age mutant hacker 'zine with one foot in the Aquarian Age and the other in a Brave New World; deconstructs the voodoo cosmology of William Gibson's cyberpunk novels; and infiltrates the technopagan subculture, whose members use computers in occult rituals.
To inaugurate "Cybermage," a topic on the technopagan BBS BaphoNet, Tony Lane posted an introduction worth quoting at length: "For too long magick has looked backward. So often I hear about 'traditional' Native American this and authentic Egyptian/Celtic/Hunan that. Sorry folks—there are very few 'authentic' magickal items/rituals/practices out there...Something might SEEM stronger if it is wrapped in the mystique of...bear clan tribal blood, blah blah blah. I have no doubt that this WAS a very powerful spell (and might still be one) for a member of the bear clan. If you are a CPA from Burbank I doubt that there is much there for you...I feel there is a better way...[T]he central idea of CYBERMAGE [is]: MAGICK that uses the current world is more powerful because it is more personal to the magician. In many of the magical ancient cultures magick and science were often the same thing. Imagine if they could see what our science today can do! They would worship us as GODS...If in our work we could meld science and magick we could [work] wonders. We could cure and create and build things man has never seen nor dreamed of. But first we have to turn away from the...traditional ways and branch out into new areas, [exploring]...the parallels between a magickal spell and a computer program and the possibility of having an electrical familiar." (A "familiar," according to The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology, is "a low-ranking demon in the shape of a small domestic animal to advise and perform small malicious errands.")
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:15 PMMetal Machine Music: Cyberpunk Meets the Black Leather Synth-Rockers
The cyber-rockers and cyberpunk writers in Chapter Two scuffle over the legitimacy of their mutual claims to the torn mantle of adolescent rebellion. In so doing, they highlight the essentially cyberpunk nature of rock music, a form of low-tech insurrection made possible by the human-machine interface. Rock has been cyborgianed—-or, to use the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad's punning coinage, "Neuromantic"—from the very beginning. "Cyborgs, romantic cyborgs, Neuromantic cyborgs, have in fact been using technological augments for transcendental purposes ever since Dylan picked up that electric guitar," writes Spinrad. "When it comes to the characteristic music of our times, we have all been accepting Neuromanticism as a given for a quarter of a century."
Chapter Two notes the appropriation of the term "cyberpunk" by neurocore and art-clang bands such as Sonic Youth, Elliott Sharp, (SOUND CLIP: 8-bit /352K 16-bit/705K) and Front Line Assembly; chronicles the influence of punk and industrial rock on cyberpunk novelists such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and Pat Cadigan; and teases out the cybercultural themes of mechano-eroticism, body loathing, social control, and the fear of predatory machines woven through the Nine Inch Nails video, "Happiness in Slavery."
Set in what a press release describes as "a world in which people willingly submit to ritualized sadomasochistic relationships with devouring machines," "Happiness in Slavery" stars body artist Bob Flanagan. The roller coaster ride into the abyss begins when Flanagan climbs into the stylized chair in a grim, decaying chamber that could be an abandoned basement, an S&M dungeon, a torture cell, or a gothic laboratory. Without warning, the mechanized device comes alive: metal restraints snap over the armrests, pinning Flanagan's hands in place, and sharp wires shoot out of them, burrowing into his flesh. He grimaces in agony/ecstasy as a three-clawed pincer rips a gooey, worm-like organ out of his chest while a drill arm bores a messy hole nearby. His entrails are processed by thrusting, lubricated machines and, for the coup de grace, the chair transforms itself into a heavy metal sarcophagus, sealing itself shut with Flanagan inside. A sphincter irises open on its underside, and a wad of offal—Flanagan's remains, presumably—plops onto a mass of writhing worms.
Waging a Tinkerer’s War: Mechanical Spectacle
Chapter Three considers the machine art of rogue technologists like Mark Pauline, in which amok robots and humans menaced by heavy machinery dramatize popular anxieties over the growing autonomy of intelligent machines and the seeming obsolescence of humanity.
Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, a loosely knit organization which has perfected a heavy metal theater of cruelty—scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remote-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in a murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes.
A combination of killing field and carnival midway, SRL's theater of operations can be seen as a meditation on the game-like nature of military strategy, an object lesson in the theatrical unreality of war, or a black comedy about arms proliferation. "SRL shows are a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex," says Pauline.
He and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:13 PMRitual Mechanics: Cybernetic Body Art
In Chapter Four, we meet cyber-body artists such as Stelarc, who performs encrusted with implants and bristling with cables, dodging the unpredictable, potentially bone-shattering swipes of industrial robot arms. As well, we encounter D.A. Therrien, who stages hot-wired exorcisms in which nearly nude humans huddle in cages or writhe on electrified crucifixes while percussionists hammer rude tattoos on prostrate bodies, using electrified drum sticks.
Stelarc is the foremost exponent of cybernetic Body Art. In performance, he bears a striking resemblance to one of the Borg, the implacable cyborg villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Slowly contorting his amplified body, 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; his electrode-studded arm is yanked upwards, puppet-like, by a burst of electricity while the robotic Third Hand attached to his other arm scrabbles at the air.
Stelarc dreams of a cyborged, "post-evolutionary" humanity, armored and endowed with pile-driver brawn by a robotic exoskeleton; fitted with an array of antennae to amplify its sight and hearing; and implanted with a brain chip or genetically engineered to expand its cortical capacity to supercomputer proportions. Such creatures might resemble the "Lobsters" in Bruce Sterling's Crystal Express—Borg-like posthumans sealed in "skin-tight life-support systems" whose greatest pleasure was to...open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared...or just sitting and soaking in watts of solar energy through their skins while they listened with wired ears to the warbling of Van Allen belts and the musical tick of pulsars.
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:12 PMRobocopulation: Sex Times Technology Equals the Future
In Chapter 5, on-line swingers who engage in text sex and hackers who fantasize about anatomically accurate robo-bimbos cast a revealing light on the gender politics of computer culture, and on our national obsession with the mechanizing of sex and the sexualizing of machines. We contemplate sex machines and machine sex, from James Brown to Marshall McLuhan's Mechanical Bride, from Future Sex magazine to the techno-porn of the Italian Futurists, from J.G. Ballard's Crash to the cyberpunk novels of K.W. Jeter, from MUD Sex and Net.Sleazing (on-line "text sex") to teledildonics (sex in virtual reality) to hilarious, horrific visions of Orgasmatrons to come (forgive pun).
Eric Hunting, a contributor to the "Dildonics" topic on the electronic bulletin board the WELL, imagines a cybersex technology inspired by an unnamed '70s SF novel: an "artificially intelligent bed...capable of making love to its occupant, a consequence of [its] being composed of a synthetic flesh-like material which could form any shape, contour, or texture." He goes on to describe, in some detail, the engineering of such an "amoebot," a sort of protean waterbed made of "an amorphous material of dynamically variable density and muscle-like motor function capable of extruding fully animate shapes under direct computer control." Hunting extrapolates from phase change fluid, a recently invented "polymer suspension which changes instantly from solid to liquid in the presence of an electrical current."
Coupling with an amoebot would be rather like having sex with the T-1000, the liquescent, polymorphous android who, in Terminator 2, is able to assume any imaginable form in the twinkling of an eye. The Amoebot, writes Hunting, "operates in a very straightforward manner. The computer constructs rigid and semirigid forms by controlling current flow through the forms by controlling current flow through the matrix of polymer 'nerves' and directs fluid pressure through these forms to inflate and extrude them and to provide motor function. It can dynamically create pressurized chambers, tubes, and fluid joints and vary their density and solidity as needed to construct whatever form is desired. The outer skin senses the contact and relative position of the user or of objects and the internal pressure sensors determine force applied while also providing feedback on variable internal pressures used by synthesized motor systems."
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:11 PMCyborging the Body Politic: Obsolete Bodies and Posthuman Beings
Chapter Six is a cabinet of curiosities whose exhibits typify what David Cronenberg calls "uncontrollable flesh": the French plastic surgery artist Orlan, a self-made "morph" whose body is her medium; a male-to-female transsexual who fancies herself the "techno-woman of the '90s"; bodybuilders who Nautilize themselves into machine age icons; plastic surgeons who dream of human wings; postmodern primitives whose techno-tribal tattoos incorporate microcircuitry and machine parts; and the Extropian Transhumanists, a California-based posthuman potential cult. These and others in cyberculture spin millennial fables about the transitional state and uncertain fate of the body, late in the 20th century.
In his Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue article, "How to Make a Monster: Modifications for the Millennium," the Hollywood-based piercer Cliff Cadaver takes postevolutionary whimsies to new extremes, envisioning 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." Cadaver's posthuman being 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 Hell's Angels expletive, "FTW" (Fuck The World).
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:10 PM
