Distrust That Particular Flavor

One of Greg Girard’s pictures is worth some ridiculously high number of my words. If you want to have an unforgettable experience, find this book and see why I was rendered basically speechless.

“Terminal City” was some rail magnate’s early suggestion for naming Vancouver. It’s a very lazy title for this introduction. I wish I’d thought of something better.

Introduction: “The Body”

THERE WAS A HEYDAY of virtual reality conferences during the late Eighties and early Nineties, and thus I found myself in Barcelona, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Linz, blinking through jet-lag at various manifestations of new technology, art, and attempts at interfacing the two. Very little of this stuff managed to work its way into long-term memory, most of it evaporating from the buffer almost immediately. Highly memorable, though, were the destructo-displays of Survival Research Laboratories, the machine-assisted street theater of Barcelona’s La Fura dels Baus, and the performances of Stelarc.

When eventually I was able to meet Stelarc himself, in Melbourne, I found that he radiated a most remarkable calm and amiability, as though the extraordinary adventures he’d put “the body” through had somehow freed him of the ordinary levels of anxiety most of us experience.

As he sat in a Melbourne restaurant, recalling the sensation of having discovered that a robotic “sculpture,” inserted down his throat and mechanically unfurled, was stubbornly refusing to refurl for removal, and that surgical intervention might shortly be the only option, he struck me as one of the calmest people I’d ever met. He resembled a younger J. G. Ballard, it seemed to me, another utterly conventional-looking man whose deeply unconventional ideas have taken him to singular destinations. Ballard’s destinations, however, have been fictional, and Stelarc’s are often physical, and sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality (as with the elegant little sculpture converting “the body” to gallery space).

I had first encountered this art in the pages of the American magazine ReSearch: photographs of an event in which unbarbed steel hooks were inserted through various parts of “the body.” Counterbalanced with rocks, on ropes, these then levitated the prone body, which remained suspended for some period of time above the heads of onlookers. This immediately put Stelarc on my map. Who was this person, and what was he up to? Whatever it was, I sensed that it had little to do with rest of the magazine’s contents (someone who’d opted to bifurcate his penis, extremes of recreational corsetry, etc.).

Later, at the Art Futura festival in Barcelona, I saw video footage of more robotically oriented Stelarc performances. I imagine now that I was watching Stelarc in performance with his robotic third arm, but what I recall experiencing was a vision of some absolute chimera, at the heart of a labyrinth of breathtaking complexity. I sensed that the important thing wasn’t the entity Stelarc evoked, but the labyrinth that the creature’s manifestation suggested.

Extraordinary images, not least because they seemed the literal physical realization of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

Stelarc’s art has never seemed “futuristic” to me. If I felt it were, I doubt I’d have responded to it. Rather, I experience it in a context that includes circuses, freak shows, medical museums, the passions of solitary inventors. I associate it with Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter, eccentric nineteenth-century velocipedes, and Victorian schemes for electroplating the dead. Though not retrograde in any way: timeless, as though each performance constitutes a moment equivalent to those collected in Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine in the Industrial Revolution: moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction.

I am delighted at the publication of this volume, and look forward to a day when the world’s museums house effectively immortal suburbs of that great work, “the body.”

Stelarc walks the Posthumanist talk.

The Net Is a Waste of Time

I COINED THE WORD “cyberspace” in 1981 in one of my first science-fiction stories and subsequently used it to describe something that people insist on seeing as a sort of literary forerunner of the Internet. This being so, some think it remarkable that I do not use e-mail. In all truth, I have avoided it because I am lazy and enjoy staring blankly into space (which is also the space where novels come from) and because unanswered mail, e- or otherwise, is a source of discomfort.

But I have recently become an avid browser of the World Wide Web. Some people find this odd. My wife finds it positively perverse. I, however, scent big changes afoot, possibilities that were never quite as manifest in earlier incarnations of the Net.

I was born in 1948. I can’t recall a world before television, but I know I must have experienced one. I do, dimly, recall the arrival of a piece of brown wooden furniture with sturdy Bakelite knobs and a screen no larger than the screen on this PowerBook.

Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch.

Today I think about the test pattern as I surf the Web. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium. Not that I can even remotely imagine what that medium might actually be.

In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing.

Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing. It never reminds me of conversation, although it can feel a lot like staring into space. “Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mind has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan’s personal catalog of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isn’t moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.

I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure — this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate — or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains… everything we have lost?

The finest and most secret pleasure afforded new users of the Web rests in submitting to the search engine of AltaVista the names of people we may not have spoken aloud in years. Will she be here? Has he survived unto this age? (She isn’t there. Someone with his name has recently posted to a news group concerned with gossip about soap stars.) What is this casting of the nets of identity? Do we engage here in something of a tragic