Euphoria &amp; Dystopia: Becoming Machine / Staying Human

Sara Diamond

“Becoming Machine/Staying Human” reflects a preoccupation of the Banff New Media Institute from its very beginnings: the relationship of the body (including the mind) to the technological interfaces that mediate and redefine it. Closely related concerns placed human experience within the larger context of life itself, including significant shifts in cultural and social relationships to, and representations of, nature. This inquiry often focused on the intersection of the biological and the digital, whether through metaphor or technology. Science and art relied on variant philosophical traditions in their interventions around these issues— the BNMI would bring these fields into productive discourse and chart their intersections, within the dramatic tableaux of the Rocky Mountains.

Published by Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press Copyright © 2011 Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions would be corrected in subsequent editions. Publication Design and Production: Philip Beesley Architect Inc. Art Director: Hayley Isaacs Copy Editor: Claire Crighton eBook Development: WildElement.ca Riverside Architectural Press, www.riversidearchitecturalpress.com Banff Centre Press, www.banffcentre.ca/press Printing and binding by Regal Printing Limited This book is set in Zurich Lt BT and Garamond Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Euphoria & Dystopia : the Banff New Media Institute dialogues / edited by Sarah Cook and Sara Diamond. Accompanied by HorizonZero DVD. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-920159-71-2 ISDN 1-894773-24-1 1. Art and technology. 2. Banff New Media Institute. I. Cook, Sarah, 1974- II. Diamond, Sara, 1954- N72.T4E97 2011 700.1’05 C2011-905947-9 Black CMYK Pantone THE BANFF NEW MEDIA INSTITUTE DIALOGUES EUPHORIA & DYSTOPIA EDITED BY SARAH COOK & SARA DIAMOND Banff Centre Press . Riverside Architectural Press Contents 3 BECOMING MACHINE / STAYING HUMAN SARA DIAMOND 308 Introduction ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE STONE 327 A Hell of an Interesting Time LAURIE ANDERSON 340 Interactive Screen, 1996 TOMAS RAY 347 Digital Burgess, 1997 LARRY YAEGER 351 Digital Burgess, 1997 RICHARD LOVELESS 351 Out of the Box, 1998 RICK SACKS 354 Out of the Box, 1998 JOSHUA PORTWAY 356 Out of the Box, 1998 LOUIS-PHILIPPE DEMERS & BILL VORN 359 Flesh Eating Technologies, 1997 MACHIKO KUSAHARA 362 Growing Things, 2000 DIANA DOMINGUES 365 Out of the Box, 1998 MARY FLANAGAN 367 Carbon versus Silicon, 2003 CAROL GIGLIOTTI 369 Flesh Eating Technologies, 1997 GREGOR WOLBRING 379 Growing Things, 2000 LAURA HERSHEY 382 Smart, Sexy, Healthy, 2001 PETER POOLE 387 Growing Things, 2000 MIKE MACDONALD 388 Out of the Box, 1998 PATRICK CLANCY 389 Growing Things, 2000 ROY ASCOTT 396 Growing Things, 2000 STEVE KURTZ 400 Growing Things, 2000 TED KRUEGER 403 Emotional Architectures, 2001 BRIAN FISHER 406 Emotional Architectures, 2001 HEIDI GRUNDMANN 412 Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 JOHN CHOWNING 417 Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 PAMELA Z 419 Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 LOUISE PROFEIT-LEBLANC 420 Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 3 Becoming Machine / Staying Human SARA DIAMOND 309 “Becoming Machine/Staying Human” reflects a preoccupation of the Banff New Media Institute from its very beginnings: the relationship of the body (including the mind) to the technological interfaces that mediate and redefine it. Closely related concerns placed human experience within the larger context of life itself, including significant shifts in cultural and social relationships to, and representa- tions of, nature. This inquiry often focused on the intersection of the biological and the digital, whether through metaphor or technology. Science and art relied on variant philosophical traditions in their interventions around these issues— the BNMI would bring these fields into productive discourse and chart their inter- sections, within the dramatic tableaux of the Rocky Mountains. In the period of the ’80s and ’90s, some critical theory (postmodernism) unset- tled previous Cartesian concepts of a unified subjectivity, while other theory strove to explore ways of reuniting nature and culture. Grand theories in philos- ophy and science were challenged, and new ideas (string theory and the wildly interdisciplinary field of nanotechnology) moved in to take their place. During this same period, accelerated technological development increasingly allowed machines to overtake simple functions of intelligence formerly performed by humans. Immersive, tactile, biometric, mobile, and tracking technologies sup- ply a few examples of dramatic incursions into the human sensorium which is the sum of an organism’s perceptual capacities). Some theorists, such as Donna Haraway, described this phase of machine/human integration as posthuman.1 In these decades, increasing concerns about the earth, natural life, and sustain- ability began to permeate the emergent fields of science and technology studies, as well as cultural studies. The changing nature of technologies created new experiences and possibilities in the space/time relationships and imaginaries of human bodies and minds. Mark B. N. Hansen, a time-based media theorist, extended Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of 1 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004). E THUE P HMOAT R IEAR&I A DY L KSNTO OWP IN A :ATSHD E ATA B A N F F N E W M E D I A I N S T I T U T E D I A LO G U ES topological or “quantum time” 2 into the sphere of new media’s virtual quality, where one can perceive “the complex texture or ‘thickness’ of the present (retention, nowness, protention).” 3 Drawing on Deleuze’s argument that digital media will find its aesthetic, Hansen notes the ability of artists’ works to “compel us to confront the rich temporal depth, or affective bodily spacing that underlies our complex experience of time.” 4 Apropos to this chapter, he continues, “Insofar as they catalyze an awakening of their viewers to this bodily foundation, the works they create might indeed be understood as efforts to specify what remains distinctly ‘human’ in this age of digital convergence.” 5 The Banff Centre’s very early Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus and The Bioapparatus residency (1991) discussed synaesthesia. The Art and Virtual Environments Project and the Art and Virtual Environments Symposium—and their ultimate publication, Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (1994)—continued discussions about time, space, consciousness, and the body. The Summer Summit at the Summit (1997) was co-produced by the BNMI and Real World, and drew together leading digital artists, designers, games designers, theo- rists, computer scientists, scientists, and economists. It identified the importance of taking computer interfaces and experiences “out of the box” and making inves- tigations of the human body—not technology—the more critical focus for future BNMI sessions. This inspired the first summit funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Telus: Telus Presents: Out of the Box: The Future of Interface (1998). This theme continued throughout the years that followed, as the BNMI expanded its focus on digital media, engineering, and computer science to embrace dialogues with biologists, chemists, and medical researchers. Evidenced by the excerpts that follow, the BNMI balanced a concern with the human/technology divide and humanity’s cultural understanding of nature with a decade of investigation of empirical scientific discovery; in so doing, the institute blended a belief in a material and sometimes-invisible real world with that world’s own mediated representations through its many instruments and discourses.6 2 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (London: Continuum, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. C. Boundas (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 3 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 249–50. 4 Ibid., 103. 5 Ibid., 99. 6 In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Naomi Barad, a physicist and a constructivist philosopher of science, argues that while science is constructed through discourse, publication, and debate, it still makes meaning of the material world. Barad states this perspective as follows: “The objects of knowledge are the agents in the production of knowledge” (88). SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Media theorists such as Timothy Druckery and N. Katherine Hayles argued for an awareness of the physicality of new media, as its cognitive dimensions overrode its 311 communication functions.7 Druckery stated, “Networked communities, the emer- gence of bio computing and genetic mapping, represent fields in which information has become essentialism.” 8 He suggested that digital technology required new-media cultural works to be deciphered as performances—bringing the body of the viewer, the apparatus, the artists, and their work into a reflexive, embodied relationship that proposes the “image-as-event,” resulting in the extension of “the contingent stability of the moment.” 9 These thoughts found alignment with another shift: “the performa- tive turn” in the humanities and social sciences, during which the use or expression of language and its effects began to be privileged over its production.10 Language became embodied and materialized; curator Jens Hoffman and artist Joan Jonas proposed that not only art forms but “academic fields such as philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology have revisited performance as a means of examining core issues of social science, shifting their eyes from structuralist methods to processes.” 11 This thinking foregrounds an interest in the performance of the body in relation to technology. Performance—with its focus on the body’s presence and actions and on the unconscious expression of speech and its linguistic analyses—overlay the notions of analyzing and enhancing performance in relation to productivity that drove experi- mentation in computer science and engineering. Technology could be seen as an actor within a network that includes human actors.12 Cognitive science was increas- ingly brought to the analysis of the intersection of human experience with intel- ligent systems and digital media. By extension, discussions regarding the libratory potentials of the posthuman also included dystopian concerns about the expansion of an apparatus of control and surveillance within technoculture, whether meant 7 Timothy Druckery, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996); N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); N. Katherine Hayles, review of Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric, by D. Grecoof (2004), http://www.altx.com/ebr/hayles.htm. 8 Timothy Druckery, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996), 23. 9 Ibid., 25. 10 See Judith Butler, “Bodies and Power Revisited,” Radical Philosophy 114 (2002); Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002). 11 Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas, “Perform,” Art Works (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 12. 12 See John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1999) for a discussion of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory by a wide range of theoreticians. These theorists concentrate on the social constraints, systems, actors, and networks that unfold in the performance of social processes including technologies. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Left Mark Pesce, Eric Zimmerman, Simon Pope and Andy Best participate in a discussion group, Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity, 1997. Courtesy of the BNMI. Right Mervin Jarman, Merja Puustinen, Bruce Damer and Jane Prophet give an avatar salute during dinner, Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity, 1997. Courtesy of the BNMI. to increase productivity or monitor behaviours. After September 11, 2001, critics argued that “surveillance society,” 13 with its anxiety about terrorism, had legitimized the use of bio-polit- ical technological interventions that began well before the 21st century, such as iris scanning and Internet and video-surveillance. At the same time, reality television and webcam culture, as well as mobile-phone conversations in public spaces, became entrenched in the Western world, acclimatizing subjects to being surveilled and, in return, looking back. Dialogues about intelligence in virtual and physical spaces were closely allied to these concerns about privacy and security. Summits explored the performative in relation to technology, always with a referent in the physical world of the body; these events included Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity (1998); Telus Presents: Out of the Box: The Future of Interface (1998); Human Voice/Computer Vox: Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity (2001); Emotional Architectures/Cognitive Armatures/Cognitive Science in Interactive Design (2001); Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones (2002); Inside/Outside: Responsive Environments and Ubiquitous Presence (2004) and its companion Outside/ Inside: Boundary Crossings, a Wearable Design Workshop (2004); Bodies in Play: Shaping and Mapping Mobile Applications (2005); and Bodies in Motion: Memory, Personalization, Mobility and Design (2005). 13 See David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003), 4. Also valuable is David Lyon, ed., Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2004), 4. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? was an early, unrecorded summit that tried 313 to understand the ways in which identities cross the line between the “fleshy” and the virtual within the space of online graphic worlds. This event looked at the cultural limitations of the aesthetics of virtual worlds and anticipated the large-scale explosion of these spaces in gaming and social worlds, such as Second Life. Supporters of online virtual worlds, including Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer, and Roy Ascott espoused an ideology that suggested these would be transcendent other realities, where bodies and all their attendant cultural baggage might even- tually be abandoned or marginalized in favour of a fully embodied avatar experi- ence. These concepts were hotly debated at the BNMI summits over the years. The BNMI attempted to look at the ways that human culture—including its most performative expressions—has been defined by the ability to construct tools over many millennia. Hence, the BNMI considered ways in which the body itself had served as metaphor for technology, and as its active ground. After all, it could sing, speak, move, or fight. The summit Human Voice/Computer Vox corresponded with a gallery show entitled Computer Voices/Speaking Machines, and an Aboriginal spoken-word and performance-art series. It suggested that the voice was the oldest technology in human history, just as computer music was the first form of creative computational art. As participants in the summit explained, musical algorithms were the easiest cultural forms to create in the ’60s and ’70s, given the computation constraints of the era. In attendance was John Chowning, who is considered one of the grandfathers of computer music. As a drummer and computer scientist, he discovered the Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis algorithm in 1967. The patent to Yamaha resulted in the synthesizer and the first Yamaha products, which rolled out in 1983. At the same time, Chowning was a significant composer, creating Stria (1977) using his FM algorithm. Chowning states,“By modulating the frequency of one oscillator (the carrier) by means of another oscillator (the modulator), one can generate a spectrum that has consid- erably more components that would be provided by either of the two alone.” He later composed Stria using the Golden Mean in music, finding that “in setting inharmonic ratios between carriers and modulators, that unlike in nature, there was a perceptible order when one moved through the frequency space with a con- stant spectrum draw an analogy between this inharmonic spectrum—including a frequency space where the pseudo-octave is at powers of the Golden Mean—and T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA the harmonic series and tonality.” 14 Later compositions placed FM over voice synthesis. Chowning shared this rich history of invention and creation with the summit participants. The Human Voice/Computer Vox summit is a good example of the BNMI’s breadth and international outreach. It brought together leaders in Aboriginal storytell- ing such as Louise Profeit-LeBlanc15 and Ojibwa composer David DeLeary; new-media artist/curator Archer Pechawis; voice trainer and extended-vocals specialist Richard Armstrong; computer-music composers such as Wende Bartley and Ricardo Dal Farra;16 sound designer Nick Ryan;17 composer David Eagle;18 technology creators (John Chowning,19 Perry Cook,20 Philippe Depalle,21 and Bruce Pennycook22); media artists (Elizabeth Vander Zaag,23 Sharon Oviatt,24 and Sidney Fels25); radio journalists (Gordon Krieger26 and Hildegard Westerkamp27); performers (Pamela Z28 and Pascale Landry29); and visual artists and digital-media artists who work in audio (Naoka Tosa,30 Ken Gregory, Heidi Grundmann, Emmanuelle Loubet,31 Alain Thibault,32 Martins Ratniks, Raitis Smits,33 and 14 See Curtis Roads, “John Chowning on Composition,” in Composers and the Computer, ed. William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1985). Mathematically, the Golden Mean is called the “golden ratio” or “golden section.” According to Wikipedia, “Two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The golden ratio is an irrational mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887.” Wikipedia contributors, “Golden ratio,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Golden_ratio&oldid=440470943. 15 First Nations Heritage Advisor, Yukon Government and Aboriginal Music 16 Professor and Coordinator, National Ministry of Education (Argentina) 17 Sound Designer, BBC Imagineering 18 Composer and Director, Electroacoustic Music Studios, University of Calgary 19 Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus, Stanford University 20 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University 21 Chair of Music Technology, Schulich School of Music, McGill University 22 Vice-President of Research, Faculty of Music, McGill University 23 Media Artist and Director, Front Media Ltd.s 24 Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Human Computer Communications, Oregon Institute of Science and Technology 25 Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia 26 Writer and Programmer, Brave New Waves/CBC Audio 27 Composer, Educator, and Radio Artist 28 Composer and Performer, Z Programs 29 General Director and Performer, Les Productions Recto-Verso 30 Media Artist and Researcher, ATR Media Integration and Commutations Laboratories 31 Executive Producer, K-Sound 32 Artistic Director, Association pour la création et la recherche électroacoustiques du Québec 33 RIXC/E-Lab & Digital Video and Streamed Radio SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Jocelyn Robert34). Not surprisingly, this context brought into question the roles that humans had historically played, provoking artworks, critical thinking, and 315 technological experiments in which the human and the mechanic were in con- tinual transformation. In David Rokeby’s 2001 gathering of a digital chorus, n-cha(n)t (co-produced by the BNMI and the Walter Phillips Gallery, and featured in its Computer Voices/Speaking Machines exhibition), chanting computer voices emanated from speakers and repeated the whispered words of gallery visitors, conspiring and spinning out of the audience’s immediate control. These gaps in coherency again point to the differences between humans and machines. N. Katherine Hayles discusses the point at which the line slips from legibility to illegibility in her book Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002), disclosing the structured nature of technology. Machine communication becomes the process of processing— but with other machines, not with the spectator. This reminds audience mem- bers that “the computer is also a writer, moreover a writer whose operations we cannot fully grasp in all their semiotic complexity.” 35 Rokeby also insists on the role of human consciousness in completing artworks or reflecting back on technology, allowing the viewer to sense the gap between the machine logic and intelligence and human.36 Performance and performativity underscored the modus operandi of the Banff New Media Institute. Participants were welcomed into a dramatic physical space where the rules were not always clearly delineated. They were given a limited time- frame in which to present their research, technologies, artworks, and theories in a succinct and focused yet deep manner. Marketing pitches were looked on askance. Throughout the events, participants were literally given the opportunity to perform through games led by the moderator, intensive social encounters (includ- ing themed musical and performance evenings), parties in Canmore, immersive artistic experiences, established prototypes, and outdoors experiences—regardless of the season. The event depended on my performance as the lead moderator, and the performance of my team of facilitators, who wove together the discrete threads 34 Founder, Art Centre Avatar, and Professor, l’École des arts visuels de l’Université Laval 35 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 50–51. 36 For a detailed discussion of Rokeby’s philosophy and practice in relation to machine intelligence see, Sara Diamond, “Interpolations: The Art and Invention of David Rokeby,” in David Rokeby: A Retrospective Catalogue, ed. Su Ditta (Oakville: Art Gallery of Oakville, 2004), 49–85; “Holistic Bodies: The Immersed and Nuanced work of David Rokeby,” in aRt & D: Research and Development in Art, eds. J. Brouwer et al. (Rotterdam: V2_NAi Publishers, 2005), 66–73. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA of panels, ideas, and practices and pushed participants to exchange, debate, and reach new understandings.37 The BNMI sustained a dialogue about the crossover of biological and digital science, which addressed topics including the emergence of new materials and practices that called for “design” or artistic intervention. At these events, critical and ethi- cal concerns encountered curiosity and case studies of artists’ practical engagement with emerging materials. Death, Desire, the Dream and the Machine (1996) and the significant conference Flesh Eating Technologies (1997) were early forays into biotech and art. The Digital Burgess (1997) and Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence (2002) considered artificial life (AL) from the perspective of science and as a creative material. The Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art sum- mit (2000) continued AL concerns and moved beyond these into larger issues, such as designing life and emerging bio-art practices. Smart, Sexy, Healthy (2001) picked up a thread that ran through dialogues in many of the summits, about the potential of technologies in the field of inclusive design and the threat of designing for exclusion of the disabled. The summit considered a range of practices and sciences—including nanotechnology, biotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence (AI)—that could enable the full participation of disabled individuals and communities. Carbon versus Silicon: Thinking Small/Thinking Fast (2003) delved into nanotechnology and its relationship to digital tools, and engaged participants in designing a world that fully mobilized nanotechnology for social and cultural purposes. AI, also explored in Chapter 1 (“The Material Known as Data”) and at the summit Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence, either used the human brain as a model or attempted to replace functions of simple intelligence in order to augment brain capacity. AI was closely related to AL, a discourse about technology that took up the very nature of life itself. Researchers and artists created algorithms that used biomimicry (now a popular move- ment in design) to create lifelike computational activities.38 These “crea- tures” often drew from evolutionary metaphors, which programmers built 37 Each day, I—as lead moderator—gave a presentation that synthesized the key debates and findings in order to catch up those who arrived late and push the process to the next phase of discussion. On the final day, I then facilitated a brainstorm that encouraged ongoing networking and dialogue amongst the group, at times resulting in future events, co-productions, or research connections that included the BNMI. Performance—physical and intellectual—thus underwrote the very philosophy of the BNMI. 38 Biomimicry studies nature’s solutions to problems (for example, adhesives or natural structures) and then applies these strategies to human challenges. More information is available at http://www.biomimicry.net. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK into their systems and designers built into their aesthetics, in a somewhat hermeneutic circle. The field eventually led to concepts of emergence, 317 as these lifelike computational entities began to develop unpredictable behaviours. At the event Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence (2002), the panel “Organic Lives, Other Than Our Own” heard presentations by Nell Tenhaaf39 about “Thinking Through AL as an Artist”; this was echoed by Christian Jacob,40 a highly imaginative computer scientist, who discussed “AL, Plants and Autonomous Systems,” referring to artworks and scientific investigations that explored the emergent algorithms. Demetri Terzopoulos,41 a computer-vision and computer-graphics scientist, discussed applications that combined AL and AI in real-time computer-aided design and medical imaging. A panel entitled “Are You Human?” 42 explored “Modelling Humans—Thinking with and for You: Agent Technologies and Neural Networks,” looking at how ideas about the human brain have been inferred in the construction of intelligent systems. The summit explored one of the continuing interests of the BNMI—emerging materials with embedded intelligence, such as electronic materials, embed- ded soft sensors, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and shape metals. Smart materials created the promise and threat of “ubiquity”—a world in which even simple objects could be responsive to devices. AI researchers Catherine (Kate) LaBore43 and Katherine Isbister 44 joined engineer Tom Donaldson, who discussed agent systems and smart fabrics with the artist-and-architect team of Marina Zurkow, creator of the animated character Braingirl , and Scott Paterson. The challenge of machine breakdown in such a world prompted a discussion about the consistent history of failure of digital technologies—lead- ing to systems failure and innumerable instances in which humans were left to guess at operating instructions or intended meanings. Artificial-life research exerted considerable force. Biota.org presented the event 39 Associate Professor, Visual Arts, York University 40 Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Calgary 41 Professor, Computer Science, University of Toronto 42 The title of the panel was inspired by Goldfrapp’s song “Human” on their 2000 Felt Mountain album, with lyrics such as “Are you human, or a dud? Are you human or do you make it up?” See http://www.1songlyrics.com/g/goldfrapp/human.html for the full lyrics. 43 Creative Director, CARTE, USC Agents In Dramatic Learning Environments 44 Interface Agents, Using Principles From Social Psychology And Role Appropriate Behaviour T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Left Artificial-life scientist and artist Thomas Ray and scientist Desmond Collins discuss the Cambrian explosion against the “databank” of Burgess. The Digital Burgess, 1997. Courtesy Bruce Damer, biota.org. Centre A palaeontologist excavates the Burgess Shale during a summit hike. The Digital Burgess, 1997. Courtesy of Bruce Damer, biota.org. Right Artificial-life computer scientists Christian Jacob and Przemyslaw Pruskinkkieewicz at the Burgess Shale. The Digital Burgess, 1997. Courtesy of Bruce Damer, biota.org. The Digital Burgess (1997).45 The Burgess Shale is a fossil record of the pre- Cambrian era located near to Banff; led by Bruce Damer, with sponsors from Silicon Graphics Inc., British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, 3D Labs and Intel, the event entertained leading AL designers, biologists, geologists, palaeontologists, museolo- gists, and artists. The Digital Burgess offered “a conference on the origins and future of life on Earth.” 46 Its participants included world-class researchers such as Stefan Benston;47 museum curator Desmond Collins;48 theoretical biologist Richard Gordon; Steve Grand, inventor of Creatures and director of Cyberlife Inc., a sponsor of the event and the company that built the game and some of Grand’s other ALife prod- ucts; Paul Marrow and Christopher Winter of BT Labs; Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz;49 the biologist Thomas Ray; artists such as Teri Rueb and Karl Sims; ALife pioneer Bill Riedel;50 and computer scientists Demetri Terzopoulos and Larry Yaeger. The event celebrated and picked apart metaphors that drew from the science and mythologies of the Burgess Shale and were peculiar to each profession. Participants hiked up the Burgess Trail to the fossil deposits and met with paleontologists and then sat in a darkened auditorium looking at digital-life forms. 45 Extensive documentation of the summit is available at http://www.biota.org/conf97/. 46 See event description at w.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/1997/digital_burgess/. 47 Head of Department, Swedish Museum of Natural History 48 Royal Ontario Museum, and Professor, University of Toronto 49 L-system Researcher, and Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary 50 Researcher, Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Editor Emeritus, paelo-electronica, http://palaeo-electronica.org/staff/bill.htm. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Flesh Eating Technologies (1997) was a sequel to Death, Desire, the Dream and the Machine (1996) that I co-created with Sylvère Lotringer of Semiotext(e); I also co-mod- 319 erated. This symposium argued the following premise: “As we round the bend towards the millennium, there is a widespread sense that it’s too late—for just about anything. On the threshold of despair, a strange ecstasy has appeared where, ‘flesh devours tech- nology and technology devours flesh’ as expressed in popular culture and ‘humour and anxiety’ manifest in ‘crazy science’... alien invasions, cannibalism, vampirism, survival- ism, self-extermination, nature and nanotechnologies, viral economies, war games, technologies of violence, delirium and compulsion.” 51 Flesh Eating Technologies included artists, such as tactical-media artist Heath Bunting; robotics artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn; engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko; memory theorist and artist Pedro Meyer; filmmaker Alison Murray; games designer Joshua Portway; new- media artists Jane Prophet and Catherine Richards; visual artist Carolee Schneeman; performance artist Eden Velez; and photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. Several cultural theorists, such as Bob Dobbs,52 Celia Pearce,53 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,54 Jennifer González,55 and Allucquere Rosanne Stone56 also performed or spoke, providing a wide array of approaches to “the future and limits of science.” 57 Journalists including Mark Dery (New York University) and Robert Enright (CBC, Border Crossings) provided analyses of popular culture and science for the event. Science researchers included Charles Ostman and Alexander Tsiaras; the latter created the controversial CD-ROM and book Body Voyage, based on the The Visible Human Project.58 The description of Growing Things reflected, “Many artists are fascinated with the imminent possibilities of designing life forms, but are we damaging or growing things? How can we open the lines of communication between Human/Nature and Technology?” 59 The summit noted the difficulties that artists encountered in trying to work with biological materials and issues, comparing this to their easy access to 51 See the event description on the BNMI Archives website, http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/ programs/archives/1997/flesh_eating/. 52 Church of the SubGenius 53 Researcher, UC, Irvine 54 University Professor, Columbia University 55 Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz 56 Director ACTLab, University of Texas at Austin 57 The summit was framed as an exploration of new frontiers of science within the context of dramatic millennial change. 58 In The Visible Human Project, a male cadaver and a female cadaver were cut into thin slices, which were then photographed and digitized. 59 See the event description at the BNMI Archives website, http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/ programs/archives/2000/growing_things/. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Left: Artists Katie Egan and Marta de Menezes. Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art, 2000. Courtesy of Michael Alstad, http://www.year01.com/. Right: Eduardo Kac with his controversial transgenic GFP Bunny, 2000. Courtesy of Michael Alstad, http://www.year01.com/. digital tools. The summit included participants with varied perspectives on genetic engineering. For example, artist Eduardo Kac had recently produced his controver- sial green rabbit, GFP Bunny,60 in order to underscore the everyday power of genetic engineering and genomic research. At the same time, his project raised concerns about artists’ experiments that occurred outside the boundaries of laboratory-ethics guidelines. Activists who held deep concerns about sustainability, human rights, and genetic engineering in plants and mammals went head-to-head over the tactics needed to call attention to genetic engineering. This event anticipated wider 21st-century debates in science, government policy, and cultural circles about the overall dangers and value of genomics, genetic engineering, and artists’ use of biological materials and research. Carbon versus Silicon was created in consultation with leading nanotechnology researcher Jim Gimzewski of UCLA, who opened up his database and encouraged world-class nanotechnology researchers to attend. Scientists who attended include communications director Catherine Alexander;61 director of stakeholder relations Andrew Gilliland of the newly founded National Institute of Nanotechnology, National Research Council, located at the University of Alberta; Oxford University’s John Ryan;62 Computer Sciences Corporation/National Aeronautics 60 See http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html for project details and responses. 61 National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (USA) 62 Director and Professor of Physics, Bionanotechnology IRC, Oxford University SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK and Space Administration (CSC/NASA)’s Deepak Srivastava;63 Charles Ostman;64 and Andrew Kostiuk.65 There was a strong showing of medical researchers 321 and physicists, including pharmacologist David Wishart,66 biochemist Gregor Wolbring,67 oncologist Linda Pilarski,68 cognitive scientist Brian Fisher,69 and medical researcher Maroon Tabbal.70 Carbon versus Silicon explored nanotechnol- ogy in relation to its connection to digital tools, substrates, and expressions. It continued the BNMI’s thematic preoccupations with the body and new technolo- gies while adding the hybrid mix of chemistry, biology, and physics that make up nanotechnology. The summit was meant to consider the relationship between the carbon (life and material) and silicon (digital) sciences, in order to find a com- mon ground for nanotechnology researchers, space-time physicists, science-fiction writers, ethicists, technology makers, artists, designers, and cultural theorists. Speculative-fiction writers such as Noelle Nalo Hopkinson and Jim Munroe71 joined artists Mary Flanagan,72 Victoria Vesna,73 Diana Domingues,74 and Chris Cran; virtual-reality artist Maurice Benayoun;75 artist-biologist Ruth West;76 artist-mathematician Sha Xin Wei;77 architects Tania Fraga da Silva78 and Kathryn Saunders;79 intelligent textile and wearables artist Joanna Berzowska;80 and AL designer Jane Prophet and her team. 63 Senior Scientist and Technical Lead, Computational Nanotechnology, CSC/NAS NASA, Ames Research Center 64 Senior Fellow, Institute for Global Futures, Vice-President, NanoElectronics and Photonics Forum, and Chair, NanoSIG 65 Staff Researcher, TRLabs 66 Associate Professor, University of Alberta 67 Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Medical Biochemistry, University of Calgary 68 Professor, Oncology and Cross Cancer Institute, University of Alberta 69 Associate Director, Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, University of British Columbia 70 Principal, SynCAD Metro Technology & Design Firm (California) 71 Proprietor, No Media Kings (Toronto) 72 Professor, Film and Media Studies, Hunter College 73 Chair and Professor, Department of Design/Media Arts, UCLA 74 Professor, University of Caxias do Sul 75 Co-Founder and Art Director, Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire, Universités Paris 1 and Paris 8 76 In silico v1.0, Department of Design/Media Arts, UCLA 77 Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology 78 Architect, Artist, Professor and Coordinator, Graduation Program, Visual Arts Department, University of Brasília, and Associated Researcher, Polytechnic School of Engineering 79 Principal and Creative Director, Public Domain Experience Design 80 Assistant Professor, Design Art and Digital Image/Sound, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Sara Diamond christened Machiko Kusahara’s hitherto nameless AIBO robot dog “Robita”—a mechanical term of endearment—during Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art, 2000. Courtesy of Machiko Kusahara. The program notes explain the opportunity: Nanotechnology researchers intervene at the level of carbon, shifting fundamental building blocks of matter at the atomic and molecular levels. Computer science and digital media intervene into the virtual, working with non-physical matter. If the digital revolution brought a new era, then the nanotechnology revolution heralds even more change. For one thing, it returns us to our bodies, to technologies that are literally below and on the skin.81 The goal of the symposium was less to demystify and explicate nanotechnol- ogy than to imagine new kinds of applications, as nanotechnology research and development were “opening up vast new horizons in material sciences, medicine, biotechnology, genomics, and manufacturing, as well as computing, information and communications technology.” 82 The symposium posed specific challenges for artists and designers: “How can artists and designers from the physical and digital domain participate in the carbon revolution? How can we imagine new applica- tions for these new materials, in wearables, architecture?” 83 As artists, architects, and designers manipulate physical processes, the symposium asked: “How can we influence what is actually made and not simply argue against [dominant trends]?” 81 Sara Diamond, program notes (2003). 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK While exploring the possibility of new discoveries and collaborations, Carbon versus Silicon also sought an understanding of the ethical ground of nanotechnology through 323 dialogue between scientists and cultural theorists. The introduction to the event agenda provided a call to action, stating, “This is an ocean where biological life breeds with new forms of artificiality. Artifice, the expression of form, the domain of culture, is immedi- ately summoned.… How can we work with and around the spectre of ‘gray and green’ goo—of micro-robotics and self-replicating systems? When does discovery risk being hampered by the immediacy of present values?” 84 Leading this discussion were contempo- rary ethnographers and cultural theorists such as Ron Burnett 85 and Michele E. White.86 With the exception of a roundtable held at the Museum of the Moving Image by Carl Goodman, most other art-world forums had tended toward either anxiety or disinter- est regarding these emerging technologies. Carbon versus Silicon took a distinct strategy. On a pragmatic level, visualization and medical imaging were seen as valuable tools for research and communication; the summit asked “What alliances can we make between the visible and the invisible processes of science? Visualization is the clearest portal where computer science, art and design are able to provide interpretation (of the abstract processes of science). How can we illustrate in ways that provoke understand- ing?” 87 Government administrators (such as Ken Langhorn)88 and leaders of nanotech- nology commercialization centres were in attendance. Two case studies were of immediate relevance to the summit. James Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna were undertaking a major collaboration, NANO: An Exhibition of Scale and Senses, that would be exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2004, and they shared their ideas and methods. Artist Jane Prophet89 was also present, with curator Peter Ride and her geneticist partners on the Cell Project: Neil Theise,90 Robert Saunders,91 and Mark d’Inverno;92 together, they provided an overview of the project that served as a model for art-science collaboration.93 84 See Introduction to summit agenda at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2003/ carbon_vs_silicon/. 85 Designer and President, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design 86 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Art Department, Jewett Arts Center, Wellesley College 87 See Introduction to summit agenda at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2003/ carbon_vs_silicon/. 88 Director, Technology Communication, Alberta Innovation and Science 89 Joint Director, Centre for Arts, Research, Technology and Education, University of Westminster 90 Attending Physician, Division of Digestive Diseases, Beth Israel Medical Center 91 Artificial-Intelligence Consultant (UK) 92 Professor, Cavendish School of Computing, University of Westminster 93 This project served as a case study of the kinds of collaborations that were possible between artists, medical researchers, computer scientists, and mathematicians. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA The mixed milieu required constant translation between the vocabularies of the vari- ous sciences at the table, and then between these and other kinds of researchers. On the final day of the summit, a brainstorming session was organized by Mark Resch94 and I. Applications for nanotechnology materials and capabilities emerged, such as a future nanotechnology dream home, tools to facilitate disabled individuals’ full capacity in physical environments, self-cleaning, re-patterning garments, and related ecology-friendly, sustainable materials. “DREAM,” an issue of HorizonZero resulted, serving as a forum for the dream home and for dialogues about nanotechnology. Several years later, at Inside/Outside, similar issues were again pursued, in part with a returning group of presenters who could report on their work in accessing nano- technology materials and ideas. A panel, “Changing the Nature of Nature? Theories and Case Studies: The Body, The Environment, Nano-technology” focused on the use of embedded nanomaterials in artworks. Following a long trajectory of dialogues at BNMI, speakers again defined notions of “life,” asking, “Are responsive environ- ments alive?” and further considering whether these environments were “ecologically friendly.” As moderators of the panel “Changing the Nature of Nature? Theories and Case Studies: The Body, The Environment, Nanotechnology—Are Responsive Environments Alive? Are They Ecologically Friendly?” Tom Donaldson and I facili- tated dialogues between Victoria Vesna (who addressed the ways that her responsive garments had provoked new kinds of behaviours and communications amongst wearers) and Marc Böhlen95 (who explored emergent behaviours that he addressed through systems analysis and through his playful and complex artworks); Böhlen’s paper was entitled “The Consequences of Automated Measurement and Control in Domains Ranging from Bad Breath to Plant Growth, Animal Husbandry, Whistled Voices and Customer Services.” Next to engage was Nina Czegledy,96 who analyzed the ways in which perceptions of the human body were changing with the advent of genomics and nanotechnology. Gisèle Trudel97 followed this, exhibiting her research into micro- and nano-imaging technologies, which she used as materials to inspire “structural intuitions linking art, nature and science.” 98 94 CEO, Onomy Labs Inc. (California) 95 Artist, Engineer, and Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo 96 Artist, Critical Media, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (Toronto) 97 Media Artist and Professor, École des Arts Visuels et Médiatiques, Université du Québec à Montréal 98 Gisèle Trudel, “Representing Invisibles Through Structural Intuitions Linking Art, Nature and Science; Current Research with Micro and Nano Imaging Technologies” (lecture, Inside/Outside: Responsive Environments and Ubiquitous Presence, Banff New Media Institute, (2004) SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK In defining the relationship of science, nature, and cultural practices, the BNMI attempted to balance a genuine interest in emerging technology with ethical concerns 325 about control, empowerment, and engagement. Chapter 5 (“Social & Individual Identity in New Media”) takes up both the libratory and the potentially invasive and autonomous nature of new-media technologies. This theme echoed throughout the decade, warranting both celebration and concern. The BNMI had begun an analysis of the contradictory nature of techno-culture well before 2001. The summit Death, Desire, the Dream and the Machine explored the pre-millennium popular culture and the artistic fascination with apocalyptic phenomena and technologies.99 Bringing these concepts together, the summit Emotional Architectures was meant to consider the ways that different cultural understandings of life, affect, and intel- ligence provided scaffolding for virtual spaces and smart physical environments. This event occurred shortly after September 11, 2001, and became in part a dialogue about surveillance, violence, technology, architecture, and emotion due to the events that preceded it.100 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones was a post-9/11 event that allowed consideration of the potential of and significant shifts in mobile telephony and wearable technologies that relied on sensor systems, as well as the changing understandings of privacy that these technologies engendered. Despite the speculative and often challenging nature of the summits described in this chapter, the BNMI was able to gain the confidence of federal funding agen- cies—both as an independent research institute and as a cultural centre—as well as that of foundations, artist-run centres, and companies large and small. The Digital Burgess (1997) was sponsored by British Telecom Labs, Sun Microsystems, 3D Labs, Intel, and SGI. The event thus made use of private as well as public sponsorship, a funding pattern that was to continue throughout the history of the BNMI; for example, Human Voice/Computer Vox (2001) received funding from the Millennium Fund Canada Partnership Program and many other supporters, including the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 99 The Visual Arts program at The Banff Centre held residencies that coincided with Death, Desire, the Dream and the Machine (1996) and Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones (2002). The first was Apocalypso (1996), one of a series of residencies that explored millennialism, which looked at the carnivalesque within the cultural imaginary before the turn of this century—a combination of intensified pleasures and imminent dangers. The second, Up Front and Personal (2002), was a residency concerned with the rise of reality television, confessional structures of culture, and the changing nature of artists’ autobiographical works. 100 Reports that describe and analyze Emotional Architectures/ Cognitive Armatures/ Cognitive Science in Interactive Design (2001) and Smart, Sexy, Healthy (2001) can be found on the BNMI website. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA stain.org, Avatar, the Canada Council, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. As the BNMI matured, it regularly attracted funds from the Alberta Science Research Authority and the SSHRC. It also had stable long-term funding from Telefilm Canada and Bell Globemedia. Such a funding mix ensured that government poli- cymakers and leaders from new-media companies participated along with artists, designers, and researchers from across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Consequently, the dynamic and critical discourses of these summits filtered beyond the art and science communities. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK 327 A Hell of an Interesting Time ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE STONE The close of the 20th century was a hell of an interesting time. During the ’90s, we witnessed the increasing mutual porosity of two modes by which the world had traditionally been interpreted: the machinic and the biological. In the 21st century, we are more inclined to recognize that split as based in some oddly powerful social delirium, and yet inhabitants of “developed” nations continually saw it recreated, reinforced, and reimagined in the media, popular culture, philosophy, the arts, and—most intriguingly—the hard sciences, where, perhaps more than anywhere else, the practitioners do know better than to make this separation. There appears to be a lot of emotional and epistemic capital involved in preserv- ing such categorizations. As with sex, gender, and race, such efforts to reinforce binary modes of address and perception tap into vast reservoirs of fear, greed, lust, and power. The dominant mode of consciousness of our “developed” soci- ety fastens on and uses [these polarities], in its koyaanisqatsi’d101 way, to define and explain itself to itself. I think it helps for us—people who have soaked in the Banff way of engaging these discourses and who have pursued the questions raised and thrashed these out there—to reflect on how the modes of 101 In the Hopi language, the word “Koyaanisqatsi” means “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.” The concept inspired a film by director Geoffrey Reggio. See http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/ for details of the film and the concept. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA engagement we practiced and perhaps developed may provide waypoints for 328 those discussions to continue in other places and times. As someone who witnessed almost the entire decade of events at Banff from a profes- sional and personal perspective (which, in retrospect, I think of as watching a grand 10-year March of Time newsreel), I probably count as some kinda elder in this scene. So—as Donna Haraway taught her flock—when you’re in the expository mood, the first thing to do is announce your stakes. While Haraway had the delightful habit of sneaking her stakes into the first few paragraphs without overtly calling attention to them, my full-body-contact poststructuralist-theorist persona insists on marking and setting off the moment at which the maker makes herself visible within her artifice. So. My stakes arise amid the particularly situated swings of the pendulum of power and the epistemes and aesthetics that power creates, and begin from the already- problematic perspective of a US citizen born in the 20th century, the century that could arguably be called the epoch of the machines. The 20th century opened on a panoply of unbridled greed—looting and pillaging of human and natural resources by a wealthy and entrenched elite—coupled with a brutal disregard for the needs of the poor. This was more or less the way things had been since time immemorial, but they always look a mite different when they are busily impinging on your own self, don’t they? In the late 19th century, the great Paris Exposition of 1878102 introduced the steam engine and the dynamo to the general public, and factory owners sent their employees to the fair to gape in awe and fascination at machines that would shortly destroy their livelihoods and the entire world as they understood it, annihilating the primacy of artisanship and producing a class of workers who acted like machines and were as interchangeable as parts on an assembly line. Men of iron, machines of flesh: in the words of the philosopher Al Capp, “Life was awful confoozin’.” 103 However, the catastrophic collapse of the US stock market in 1929 brought a tempo- rary reversal of fortune: the changing of the guard to a more liberal and genuinely populist-minded government. What followed was a period during which public 102 Both the Paris World’s Fair (l’Exposition Universelle) of 1878 and the Centennial International Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 introduced the steam engine. See http://www.expo2000. de/expo2000/geschichte/detail.php?wa_id=5&lang=1. 103 See the L’il Abner cartoons by Al Capp, available online at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149709/. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES works and institutions flourished, and during which wealth was temporarily redis- tributed over a much greater portion of the society; this introduced a time in which 329 public funds provided an impetus for a real burgeoning of art in its role as cultural critic and mirror of civilization. Unions helped restore a modicum of human indi- viduality and self-determination against the anonymizing force of industrialization. Also, by the beginning of the 20th century, artists and writers of all kinds had loudly signalled human culture’s vexed relationship with its own productions—in particular, those productions meant primarily as instrumentalities.104 The various roles human- kind conceived for itself—as exemplified by, say, theatre on the one hand and cotton gin on the other—had been annunciated in the textual mode earlier by such examples as Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s l’Homme machine and August Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future.105 Of course, in Freudian terms, the more instrumental these technologi- cal creations became—which is to say, the more firmly they grounded themselves in the regime of strict causality, quantification, replicability, binarism, and the whole panoply of what we have become accustomed to call the rational or post-Enlighten- ment—the more their evil twins asserted themselves in the regime of the oneiric. Interesting from the standpoint of how we view our creations from the oneiric perspective were the countless “penny dreadful” novelettes in which modern technolo- gies—undifferentiated and still barely out of the womb—were represented as destruc- tive and terrifying.106 To 20th century sensibilities, the signal representation of 104 Here I invoke an entirely arbitrary but perhaps useful distinction between things created solely for enjoyment, awe, or rapture and things created with a view toward instrumentality or “practical use,” such as the tools and fruits of industrialization, labour-saving equipment, laws authorizing the creation of corporations, and the corporations themselves. 105 La Mettrie was an 18th-century French philosopher and physician and an Enlightenment materialist. His 1745 publication l’Histoire natural de l’ame argued that physiological changes in one’s blood and brain affected emotions and mental processes, a concept so radical that he was forced to flee to Germany. His 1748 book was entitled L’homme machine. He was also known for his indulgence in fleshly pleasures (he died from food poisoning after overeating pheasant pâté with wild truffles). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was an experimental 19th-century French romantic novelist. His novel L’Eve future pioneered the term “android”—in this instance, a machine-woman meant to replace the dispassionate fiancée of the protagonist and overcome the flaws of “real women.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Offray_de_La_Mettrie, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Auguste_Villiers_de_l’Isle-Adam, and http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/villiers.html. 106 Representations of technology as possessing something like a Benjaminian aura extend back to the earliest recorded narratives. In the Norse sagas, for instance, the thing that differentiates a true weapon from a mere tool is that a true weapon has a name. The weapon’s name is actually the name of the demon that was compelled to assume its shape or was in other ways incorporated into it; thus to be a “true” technological artefact was to already stand in a problematic relationship to the intelligence that instrumentalizes the selfsame artefact, and to imply in its nature the tension between mere material and the oneiric regime, which simultaneously inhabits and, Rilke-like, hovers just behind it. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA this view was perhaps H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.1 Wells’s graceful engines of 330 destruction nicely captured the engine of the era’s own cultural narrative, in which the regimes of organicity and artifice had to be rendered as distinct as possible before they could be granted admittance to the cultural spaces of narratization and textuality.2 As the 20th century drew to a close, the brief interregnum during which the public sphere appeared to seamlessly incorporate art as boon companion and loyal critic also came to an end. In the political arena, capital, xenophobia, ignorance, and superstition united in a terrible and irresistible synergy. The power elite again found time to realize that one of the purposes of art was cultural criticism, and to decide that, as such, art was dangerous to society. Within a short time—during the 1990s in America—nearly all public funding for art was eliminated, along with public funding for most civic discourses not in step with the dominant discourses, however and wherever they were situated. These issues constituted background and context for events taking place at The Banff Centre. The great interdisciplinary thematic residencies, as well as the BNMI sum- mits of the late 20th and early 21st century were themselves both witness and subject to the great cultural upheavals of the time. This author was present at times when the future of creativity at Banff was as limitless as the skies over Tunnel Mountain,3 at times when rounds of massive defunding left the centre stunned and reeling, and later, through the inevitable corporatization, and which perforce changed Banff’s character deeply—how deeply is for you to decide. The differences between pre- and post-corporatized Banff exemplified what was happening worldwide, as transnational corporate capital and its ruling elite consolidated their grip on world economies to the most minute possible detail; they also brought to light the ways the institution, its component divisions, and their staff found ways to innovatively, flexibly, and some- times 1 The War of the Worlds (1898) is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. It describes the experiences of an unnamed narrator who travels through the suburbs of London as the earth is invaded by Martians. It is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an alien race. 2 It’s more than casually interesting that Steven Spielberg’s visualization of Wells’s description shows strands of DNA; in the 21st century, DNA represents a hotly contested rat’s nest of discourses in which human intentionality—embodied in technologies of genetic surveillance and modification (for example the Tripod aliens harvest blood and tissue from a human to fertilize their genetically modified red weeds, a source of nutrients and protection)—clashes with what is frequently referred to as the blind forces of nature. Ultimately, of course, they are the same thing from a cultural perspective, and we appear to be left with semiotics (which is to say, the science of difference) as the tool of last resort with which to attempt to understand why the cultural urge to differentiate this heterogeneous field into opposites persists across space and time. 3 For the sake of those who have not yet been blessed with the opportunity to visit The Banff Centre, it is worth noting that Tunnel Mountain is so named because it contains no tunnel and is not a mountain. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES quirkily respond to the exigencies of an impinging world in upheaval, offering power- ful lessons for other institutions grappling with their own difficult evolutions. 331 For the most part, life in the first decade of summits was firmly centred on the joys and pains of creativity and inquiry—but, occasionally, the world beyond the mountains had its ways of calling us to attention. Attacks were waged on the kinds of inquiry and innovation that were not directly accountable to a bottom line, and these were not limited to the sphere of the so-called representational arts. Edgy art and the artists who make it have seemingly always been suspect and thought of as in some ways dangerous to entrenched power, no matter what form this art may take. While most artists were largely unaffected in their comings and goings, it bears noting that some Banff artists were not beyond being touched by [political and economic upheavals, and certainly the culture wars], and some were even honoured by being singled out for specific harassments.4 Heath Bunting, a Banff artist and longtime summit participant, was jailed in London on his way to Banff—ostensibly for carrying a pocketknife at Heathrow, but more likely due to his reputation as a vocal proponent of free radio. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a well- known Banff participant whose installations and performances criticize racism and are highly regarded, was strip-searched at the Calgary airport on his way to a sum- mit, apparently for the crime of looking Hispanic. Furthermore, as this is being written, Steve Kurtz, a member of the world-renowned Critical Art Ensemble and a Banff summit participant, is fighting for his professional and social life against the awesome might of a United States justice system seemingly gone berserk.5 Many observers consider Kurtz’s persecution a deliberate attempt to suppress dis- sent, representative of a broader situation many artists face at the dawn of 4 Art is not the only field in which political harassment may be considered an honour. For example, when the brilliant scholar Angela Davis was hired by the History of Consciousness Board at the UC Santa Cruz, the department was obliged to fax her letter of acceptance to her in jail. 5 I hope this book may outlast the Kurtz controversy, so for the reader of the future here’s a brief summary: The Critical Art Ensemble, a performance group specializing in critical and cultural theory, was preparing a gallery installation involving cultures of common, harmless bacteria grown in laboratory-standard agar dishes, and Kurtz was keeping these at his home. In May 2004, Kurtz awoke to find that his wife, Hope Kurtz, had died of heart failure during the night. Kurtz immediately dialed 911. When the paramedics arrived, they stumbled across the materials for the gallery installation and immediately declared a full-scale biological hazard alert, cordoned off the block and seized Hope Kurtz’s body. Subsequently, the US government charged Kurtz with various terrorist activities in connection with possessing the provably harmless biological materials. It might be reasonable to expect that once the agency realized its mistake, the charges would be dropped; instead, the agency has aggressively pursued a massive and ruinous prosecution against Kurtz and an associate, who provided him with the bacteria. Why this should continue is unclear. Plausible reasons include governmental inertia (the thing is in motion and no government functionary may be willing to take the initiative to stop it), vindictiveness, or, chillingly, a desire on the part of the current administration to make an example of Kurtz in order to put a damper on dissent in any artistic form. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA our current century.6 332 I think it’s helpful to view the summits held over the last decade with this rich tapestry as background. All of them addressed—in one way or another, either tangentially or head-on—a generous constellation of disciplines and themes. If we boil them down to a few kernel schemata, an act that unavoidably conceals the deep complexity that connects them at the level of what Gregory Bateson called “the Pattern,” those kernel issues might be articulated as: • A generous permeability among flesh and machine, biology and technology, leading to the collapse of the received categories of experience and instrumentality. This is sometimes expressed in terms of carbon-versus-silicon schemata, and implies some mutually agreed- upon working definition of life; • Work and play considered against the background of the conflicting demands of capital, society, and spirit, thus requiring close analysis of how and why these terms come to acquire value; • Coercion and virality as two opposed methods of effecting change, respectively describing vertically and laterally organized epistemes; coercion being as old as the first humans on earth and virality being a characteristic of postmodernity, the organic origins of that term being noted as extending the metaphor of organicity into the hoary discursive field of the instrumental; • The nature, definition, and especially scope of intelligence. (This is perhaps the most vexed of all those mentioned.) In general, these kernel issues appeared again and again in various masks and disguises, and when we examine the dialogues as they unfolded over the course of each sum- mit, we find the same ones coyly peeking out. This pattern of themes may have been what the Geist in its infinite sarcasm was whispering to us, or merely what Ebenezer Scrooge called a fragment of undigested potato, but it was the BNMI core organizers—in particular, Sara Diamond and Susan Kennard, and, earlier, Lorne Falk in the Visual Arts residency programs—who ingeniously chose a delightful, volatile mix of participants and thus set the stage for novel productions and lively, focused debate. Out of the sum- mits came not only useful work but also pivotal 6 On April 21, 2008, the indictment for mail fraud and wire fraud was ruled “insufficient on its face” by the presiding judge, Richard Arcara. This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. The FBI did not appeal, and Kurtz’s ordeal ended. See the film Strange Culture by Lynn Hershman Leeson for an overview. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES decisions on which much later work was based. I’ll mention just a few. For Flesh Eating Technologies (1997), Brenda Laurel mounted a staggeringly complex demon- 333 stration of a true multiple-inhabitant immersive virtual world, addressing, along the way, such issues as how nonhuman sensoria might experience the world and how such experience might be mediated to give humans something of the experience of seeing and hearing through nonhuman ears and eyes. Mounting such a simulation over the three-day period of the summit required 15 programmers constantly work- ing to keep the extremely fragile software from crashing (which it did anyway), and cost Paul Allen, of Interval Research fame, nearly US $1,000,000. The project was meant to answer a specific question Allen and Laurel had posed: namely, “At this time, is a true multiple user immersive virtual world with nontrivial content practi- cal?” The definitive answer: “No.” Colour us surprised. The collection of copper wires and transmission protocols we call the Internet came under scrutiny in unexpected ways. A delegation of First Nation elders told those participating in a BNMI session entitled “Who Owns the Internet?” at Synch or Stream: A Banff Summit—A think-tank on networked audio and visual media (1999) that efforts at inclusion and attempts to bridge the so-called digital divide were misguided; according to these elders, the ruling bodies and even the very structure of the Internet presupposed a racist episteme, and the only viable solu- tion was for a consortium of First Nations people to build their own Internet. For most participants, this was what you might call a swift dunk in meltwater; wake-up calls seldom come so clearly phrased. Later, First Nations artist Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew elaborated the issue in more narrative form while also stirring up some debates of his own. Today, the issue of whether all-inclusion is really a viable policy or whether the result is merely a species of deadly homogenization remains open. Michael Naimark took it on by recording the questions young children in the Amazon basin felt were most important, such as “what is the fastest bird?”; by juxtaposition, the rest of us were made more aware that what to us are great and universal questions may not survive a trip to the next town. During this period, Banff was host to The Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace (4CyberConf) (1994), a continuation of Michael Benedikt’s original gathering designed to question all things virtual.7 A better fit could not have been imagined; thanks to Sara Diamond and Douglas MacLeod, the conference looked very much like a Banff summit. And the gentle atmosphere and civil discourse that 7 See http://www.cyberconf.org/ for a CyberConf archive. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Banff fostered were perfect counterpoints to the preceding year’s 2CyberConf at the 334 UC Santa Cruz; at one point, 2CyberConf participants were so incensed that they found themselves shouting at one another.8 It was in the run-up to 2CyberConf at Santa Cruz that I observed Stephen Hawking talking into a microphone with his voice synthesizer; this led to some hearty theorizing about how and where the boundaries of his body and his agency could actually be understood. Some time has passed since then, but I’ve found no reason to revise those thoughts, even after one of Hawking’s grad students told me in no uncertain terms that he knew exactly where Hawking’s physical boundaries were—Hawking had nearly run him over. Continuing on the path begun by Jim Funaro at the Contact conferences,9 Bruce Damer explored the concept of the “avatar”; this term was first used by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer to refer to the cartoon characters who represented humans in Habitat, the first serious multiplayer online graphical virtual world.10 Avatars are prime real estate for debates about the locus of agency—i.e., how and even whether an image or icon can stand in for and act in the name of an absent agen- cy.11 The more we use avatars to mediate online experience, the more the boundaries between flesh and art become blurred and slippery; in neurology, this improbable fact is brought home by such border phenomena as the phantom limb and its intriguing relationship to prosthetics. At the time Damer began his work, little was known about how, in the long run, humans would actually relate to and with avatars.12 Start-up companies too numerous to mention attempted to build business models around 8 The shouting was over a highly contentious point regarding whether the Internet would naturally remain a peaceful commons or whether various forces would contend for supremacy and control therein. The perspective of time shows that the latter view was correct, but, after all, the conference was in Santa Cruz, and a large and vocal constituency considered it nothing short of heretical to raise the idea that a common discursive space might require policing. From the personal view of this author, who was the director and instigator of 2CyberConf, the shouting was an indicator that the conference was doing its job; if it were not for the fact that she was down there in the trenches shouting back, she would have been licking her lips and purring in satisfaction. 9 At the Contact conferences, “participants design an integrated world, alien life form and culture, and simulate contact with a future human society.” See founder Jim Funaro’s explication of the roots of the event at http://www.contactconference.com/c02.html. 10 The correct term is “graphic”; “graphical” came into use to refer to virtual worlds, though it’s not clear why. However, if you’ll allow me “graphical,” I’ll see you and allow you “intrinsical,” and raise you “phallogocentric” and “heteronormativity.” 11 You bet it can. Ask any religious person (except those from religions that forbid graven images). 12 The BNMI held an event entitled Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity (1997), which explored the rise and fall of the virtual-world movement and interest in avatars. This interest would reawaken with computer gaming and the technical ability to create large-scale virtual worlds in the 21st century. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES the idea that, instead of travelling, people would meet in avatar form around virtual conference tables. None of these companies made it out of the starting gate—most 335 probably because their business models ignored the fact that businesspeople like to travel more than they like looking at cartoons of other businesspeople. Of course, we have by no means put paid to the idea of virtual conferencing; the killer app remains tantalizingly over the horizon, though no one has the faintest notion of what it is.13 Where avatars have really taken hold, obviously, is in gaming, in which the idea is not to represent a human but, rather, an abstraction or fantasy of a human—and with that, lo and behold, we’ve somehow managed to come back around to theorizing the oneiric. What we did discover, however, is that virtual objects, including avatars, can and do have real physical value, and are regularly bought and sold for serious bucks in such markets as eBay. Cognoscenti of the avatar realm will recall Morningstar and Farmer’s surprise when the very first social group to emerge in the very first graphic-based vir- tual world was a band of thieves14—the idea that people would become so engrossed in the simulation that abstractions therein would come to possess real value that transcended the simulation was brand new and deeply intriguing.15 On other fronts, we observed that technological prosthetics can and do change the way we think of ourselves as living bodies, to the extent of enabling new modes of behaviour and perception that are proper to species other than our own; this was made evident not only through Brenda Laurel’s magnificent experiment Placeholder, but also through some seemingly simple phenomena that evince profound effects. The most interesting of these is the way cell-phone texting produces flocking and schooling behaviour in humans, as observed in teen populations in Helsinki. Humans are pack animals—in 13 This comment was made before the rise of Second Life and Skype (both of which launched in 2003, although Skype didn’t introduce videoconferencing until 2006), two consumer-oriented software environments that partially meet this description. 14 The thieves appeared in Habitat, initially created in 1985 by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar. Lucasfilm’s Habitat was an early and technologically influential online role-playing game developed by Lucasfilm Games and made available as a beta test in 1986 by Quantum Link, an online service for the Commodore 64 computer and the corporate progenitor to America Online. See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Farmer and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Morningstar. 15 And, at the time, impossible. Fujitsu, Habitat’s corporate owner, was concerned that value that transcended the simulation would be interpreted legally as gambling; as such, it forbade selling a virtual object for real money. This simple fiduciary fact is one of the things that has changed most profoundly in the years after Habitat. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA social terms, hierarchy-driven. Birds and fish are flocking and schooling critters, respec- 336 tively, generally acephalous and nonhierarchical. But when humans use friend lists to simultaneously text each other in large groups, strange and wonderful things happen: new patterns of sociality emerge that have never been observed in human populations before. The meaning of these observed behaviours has yet to be properly worked out. And lastly, we discovered that far too many sober professional artists were secretly Quake freaks. But that, children, is another story. So I hope this brief romp through time will whet your appetite a bit for the tales that follow, as the amazing people who met through the good offices of the BNMI discuss their work. We’ve had 10 extremely good years of groundbreaking work at Banff— fruitful and plentiful in every way. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be there look forward to the next decade of adventures with eager anticipation. Selah. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES 337 T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 3 TRANSCRIPTS LAURIE ANDERSON Interactive Screen, 1996 THOMAS RAY The Digital Burgess, 1997 LARRY YAEGER The Digital Burgess, 1997 RICHARD LOVELESS Out of the Box, 1998 RICK SACKS Out of the Box, 1998 JOSHUA PORTWAY Out of the Box, 1998 LOUIS-PHILIPPE DEMERS & BILL VORN Flesh Eating Technologies, 1997 MACHIKO KUSAHARA Growing Things, 2000 DIANA DOMINGUES Out of the Box, 1998 MARY FLANAGAN Carbon versus Silicon, 2003 CAROL GIGLIOTTI Flesh Eating Technologies, 1997 GREGOR WOLBRING Growing Things, 2000 LAURA HERSHEY Smart, Sexy, Healthy, 2001 PETER POOLE Growing Things, 2000 MIKE MACDONALD Out of the Box, 1998 PATRICK CLANCY Growing Things, 2000 ROY ASCOTT Growing Things, 2000 STEVE KURTZ Growing Things, 2000 THEODORE KRUEGER Emotional Architectures, 2001 BRIAN FISHER Emotional Architectures, 2001 HEIDI GRUNDMANN Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 JOHN CHOWNING Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 PAMELA Z Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 LOUISE PROFEIT-LEBLANC Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 The first excerpt, from a talk by Laurie Anderson, begins a discussion about the choices that 340 artists can make in the ways they imagine and represent nature and the ways they position themselves both as critics and early adopters of scientific discovery. She considers the tensions between concepts of nature, culture, and technology as well as their shifting categories, a change accelerated by the digital revolution. LAURIE ANDERSON Interactive Screen, 1996 Laurie Anderson / Transcribed: CD1 Track 23–end of Track 39, CD1 Track 98–99 (8:00). CD3, Track 6–22, CD3 Track 24–48, CD2 Track 5–42 (end at 2:23, continue at 4:25, end at 5:00 in Track 42) [actual order of talk is CD2, CD3, CD1] / Talk: “Always Interactive” / Panel: Keynote / Event: Interactive Screen / Date: Monday, July 22, 1996, 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Laurie Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, musician, and inventor. Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single “O Superman”—a song that appeared in her stage show United States and on the spoken-word album Big Science—reached num- ber two on the UK pop charts. She starred in and directed the popular 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel; this was followed by Bright Red, co- produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels. In 1977, Anderson invented a tape-bow violin that uses a magnetic tape head in the bridge and recorded magnetic tape on the bow. In the late ’90s, she developed a talking stick: a six-foot-long, baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds. Laurie Anderson: I’m going to talk about three different places—and they are the control room, the theatre, and the mental hospital—and describe how I think these three places are beginning to merge into what I think of as a late-20th-century techno culture. This is a culture in which the borders between work and fun are, I believe, starting to get a little bit blurred. I started thinking about this trend a couple of months ago, and it began when I got this mysterious phone call from the National Media Organization (NMO) inviting me to come to a very secret event that was being planned by an aerospace company. They said they were going to launch the first civilian flight to the moon, and they wanted me to come along as an observer—a content provider to write about the experience. Now just a word about this term “content provider.” I mean, why does this sound like something from China’s Cultural Revolution? “Content providers—we’ll put them over there.” You know, after a year of hearing this term at virtually every tech conference, I’ve gotten use to it. And you know the fact that there are no more L AURIE ANDERSON artists and that’s our new name? I’ve gradually adjusted, and now I actually like it. It sounds practical and positive—and credible. 341 Anyway, back to this phone call—they invited me to come on this trip to the moon as an observer, and I just couldn’t believe it. It was like a weird dream and I kept saying, “You mean, actually go to the moon? You mean, actually go to the moon?” And they said they couldn’t exactly tell me where or when it was because security was very tight. They said they would call me back and, “We’d appreciate if you don’t mention this to anyone,” and I said, “Of course, I understand, you can count on me.” And I hung up the phone and I waited for about five minutes and then I called a few friends and I said, “You won’t believe this, but I just got this call and now I will need to go to the moon.” You know there was this odd silence on the other end of the line. And I couldn’t help it, I went on with all this other information that they—the NMO—had told me. I told them everything about how the first civilian flights are going to be going up in four years, and how they are going to orbit the moon in a reusable craft, and that they had all these plans to build these resorts and retirement colonies on the moon for old people who are losing their mobility, and how great it was going to be for handicapped people who could suddenly do somersaults and free fall, and what the new zero-gravity sports would be like, and the new zero-gravity dance companies. When I stopped talking, I just heard that silence again on the other end, and I don’t think anybody really believed me. It’s like after the Cold War race to the moon was over, everyone just forgot that it was even up there, and forgot that we’d ever try to get there again. And anyway, two weeks later they called again and they said “Lift-off is in approximately one month, and could you just be more or less on the alert? And I can’t tell you anything more.” Click. And I thought, gee, maybe I should be doing some sort of training for this. I started having all kinds of nightmares of all these people and things getting yanked out into space in this weird lunar rip tide. I had to go out and keep rescuing them. And these other nightmares where I was looking back at the earth and thinking about how billions of years ago the moon had just been sheared away from the earth and how it left this gaping hole filled with water and became the Pacific Ocean, and how the moon keeps pulling on the earth and trying to get back. The next call was a couple of days later, and they said the flight was proceeding on schedule and that it was going to be a very important simulation. And I said, “What do you mean ‘simulation?’ You mean we’re not going to go to the moon?” And they said that this was not going to be an active launch, and they hoped that there hadn’t T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA been any misunderstanding. The deal was we were going to sit on the ground in a 342 capsule for four days pretending that we were going to the moon. This was going to be a really important scientific project. Because they wanted to know whether this flight could be considered a vacation: would it be relaxing, would people want to go more than once? And they kept repeating that I was the perfect person to try to analyze this situation. Now, I really don’t know why they picked me for this. I myself don’t have any vacation skills whatsoever. Partly this is genetic—my Swedish ancestors were really a pretty gloomy bunch, you know. They get fun totally backward. So, if they go to a funeral where they’re supposed to be sad, they find this incredibly easy. It comes very naturally, so this makes them very happy. But when they’re invited to a party, where they are supposed to have fun, they find this incredibly difficult and defeating, and they get even more depressed and sad. When I finally arrived at the simulated lift-off, I was determined to have fun, or at least to analyze whether other people were having any. [Anderson was asked to monitor the shuttle, not participate as an astronaut.] The day of the blast-off, they were playing the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey on a ghetto blaster and the eight people chosen for the flight lined up and entered the craft, which was made of sheet rock and plywood and blinking lights. Then, for four days, we monitored their every move with microphones and a lot of cameras. Every few minutes, what was known as “mission control” would give them bits of information about where they supposedly were in space. And the flight crew kept giving them little jobs to do that had to be prefaced with the exact military time, you know: “0400 hours—humidity nominal, pressure nominal, thrust .478.” And they had to memorize all these com- mands and rules and repeat specs on things like liquid nitrogen. Every two hours, they were given questionnaires, things like: “Do you feel this is a good vacation so far?” “Do you find this flight relaxing?” “How do you feel about your fellow pas- sengers?” or “Has your opinion of them changed since the last questionnaire?” It was all so incredibly claustrophobic; if you can imagine being trapped in a parked station wagon for four days with your family, answering questions every two hours about how much you like them, it would give you some idea of the excitement level inside the capsule. Another 20 minutes would go by and someone would say “Do you want another Pop-Tart?” “No, thanks.” We wrote all of this down. And every hour, the capsule looked more and more like the day room in a mental ward. And finally, after four days, the passengers came out of the capsule, and they L AURIE ANDERSON were playing the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme song again. I thought they would all be in a really bad mood after following all these rules for four straight days, but instead they were 343 saying things like: “This experience in space has really changed my life.” And “I just see things differently now, just being up there in the middle of all those stars it was awesome.” And I thought: This is amazing. I’m seeing the incredible power of the human imagination. And this is why humans will survive. We’ll survive because we’re basically completely insane. But we’ll get back to mental hospitals in a minute. In the meantime, I just want to say a word about theatre. And lately, in trying to imagine the future of theatre, I’ve been looking back to the origins of techno-theatre. There’s a great description of Radio City Music Hall in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, by the writer and architect Rem Koolhaas.16 He tells the story of architect S. L. Rothafel, also known as “Roxy,” who is hired to build the ultimate theatre of the future in the centre of the centre of the world, the Rockefeller Center. Now this is 1931, so the backer sent Roxy to Europe to see some modernist architecture for inspiration, but Roxy was just bored by all of this constructivism, and by the end of the trip he hadn’t got- ten a single idea. He’s on his way back west, and he’s in the middle of the Atlantic, and he is thinking about all of this and staring at the sunset and suddenly he has this vision, a sunset. The theatre of the New World should be shaped like a giant sunset. You know, huge yellow and red centre circles in a circular stage that light up a place “where the fun never sets.” So he built this colossal theatrical machine with elevators and a revolving stage and electrical fly lines, a fountain, a huge sound system, mics that automatically retracted into the proscenium—but the trouble with Radio City was that none of the shows worked. And vaudeville was all about facial expression and slapstick and timing and rapport—winking at the audience—all of which was totally erased due to this immense sunset that kept happening on the stage. What did work, though, were the dance teams. They were known as the Roxyettes, later shortened to the Rockettes, and they worked really perfectly. Radio City became a kind of theatre that was about precision, this huge, synchronized machine made of women working in formation—a big animated sex machine, a theatre starring speed and technology. Well, 65 years later, multimedia theatres are everywhere and have mutated into these odd hybrids of entertainment and commerce and information and art—big technology is still, of course, at the centre of things. What it can do, how fast it can be and how it can dazzle people. Of course the main thing about technology is that 16 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Oxford University Press, 1978). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA

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