I spent part of my childhood growing up on a farm in Saskatchewan, which is idyllic in some ways but far from utopian. Clemenceau Saskatchewan is a real, grounded place, and the only utopias I found there were in the oil paintings by my grandmother and the odd (and failed) mechanical devices that my uncle cobbled together from bits of engines, parts, and abandoned machinery. I learned a genuine joy in creating something out of nothing, and utopian dreams were usually brought down by mechanical malfunction, the two dimensional picture plane, harsh weather, or something else. The false promise of utopia fills the landscape of Saskatchewan: as a place where many European immigrants were promised an idealized future and came to find a bitterly hostile environment.
As a teenager and early in my twenties I found myself caught up in the promises of the Web, Email, FTP, and Usenet. In 1994 the idea I could look at photos on the FTP server of Survival Research Labs in California had an immense impact on me. I was quickly swept up in communities of artists using technology, but maintained a discomfort with the beaming promise of technology: of the spiritual transcendence of virtual reality, of Mondo 2000, Wired Magazine, and of what is termed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as “The Californian Ideology.” Although I didn’t think it at the time, I think the reality of Clemenceau made it impossible to believe. Clemenceau was (in Baudriallard’s terms) my heterotopia.
Instead, I found resonance with what is now termed “D.I.Y.” – and my heroes were Mark Pauline, Simon Penny and other people hacking around with physical devices. I grew to hate VRML, the glossy promises of interactive communication, and of the Californian Ideology. For me the best part of the internet was finding that there was a community of junkyard hackers, like my Uncle Reginald in Clemenceau. Utopian promises of technology are alluring and sexy, but seem oversimplified and shallow, like a type of pornography. There’s only a surface promise and no personality.
Consumer culture, of course, requires a consistent cycle of excitement and hype over the promise of tomorrow – but for me this was harder to be swept up in with fond memories of Clemenceau. Playing in abandoned cars, making go-karts, and watching my grandmother construct images out of oil paint: it was all too real and fun to get caught up in a fictional future.
I’m really happy to catch up with Garnet’s work and to hear about Michelle’s new projects, specifically “Buscando al Sr. Goodbar”. I am interested in how the project brings into the youtube/map equation a very new and vital thread of connection through and between the network and the world.
I have never liked any of the words suggested by language– “cyber”, “virtual”, etc., and I always think that it is a mistake to think of the real and the virtual as a simple binary. These things are intertwined and complex, and there isn’t really any reason we should separate out that which happens “on the screen” from that which happens “off the screen”.
I think it is a real challenge to work with elements between screen/not screen and have them retain or recapture vitality, loveliness and importance, because in culture we are used to transferring between these modes, and we tend to discard the haeccaeity of the thing if it is onscreen. I see this thread in some of Garnet’s work, for example with his use of the real cockroach in “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot”. This is one of the things I think is successful about Michelle’s new projects – there is a cascading array of representation and represented activity and it is examining what that movement is, and where that transformation is happening or not happening.
I also like how there is a play with scale. Scale of course is so important to considerations of the map and how it functions. We don’t always consider the haptic qualities of the map or of the things that are mapped. Google Earth is so tiny and fluid and swift and gigantic, Borges’ interactive map.
That is why I like the introduction of people, especially groups of people, especially groups of people in a bus (!) when tracking down and connecting with youtube videos. The man playing the piano on youtube is so very small and luminous, but when we meet him in real life he is large and in the centre of a crowd, and the whole things scales up back up again.
It relates to the Baudrilliard quote advanced by Garnet: “The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.” I like how sometimes the world can be rendered “a little more unintelligible” through the provision of detail and specificity, through the actual activities of people and qualities of places and things.
I think Baudrillard is a good starting point for this conversation: as I look back at my work over the past fifteen years, I’ve continually worked with the theme of inverting simulations or the virtual. I initially did this by attempting to invert and play with the internet and notions of reality wrapped around it – see ”Interface” (1995-1996) <http://conceptlab.com/interface/> or “The Simulator” (1997) <http://conceptlab.com/simulator/>.
About five years ago I started exploring biomimetics and computer simulations of biological intelligence, and produced “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot” (2004-2006) <http://conceptlab.com/roachbot/> which attempted to rethink a trend in robotics to increasingly use simulated models of insects. In this case, I saw scientific research pursuing a goal of a sanitized, simulated model of something, but afraid to directly engage with the real thing. In this project, I replaced the sanitized, simulated model of insect logic on a microprocessor – which is frequently used to control mobile robotic systems – with the real thing, an actual cockroach. It’s an extension of the logic and a perversion of it at the same time: it can show that simulations are inherently curated, manicured and biased.
In my most recent work, “Out Run” (2009) <http://conceptlab.com/outrun/> I’ve been exploring the theme of simulation in videogames and points at which games cross over into everyday physical reality. In my Out Run project, I am taking a sit-down arcade game cabinet that is modeled after a Ferrari Testarossa and enabling it to actually drive. In other words, I am “un-simulating” a 800 pound driving video game built by Sega in 1986 and converting it into a small car. While driving your miniature Ferrari, the video game screen in front of you will completely obfuscate your view, but software is being built to render the real world in the style of the original 8-bit videogame. It is like a fantasy taken to its extreme and gone humorously wrong. I expect that it will be quite dangerous driving a car with only a 1986 computer simulation of reality as your windshield, but perhaps not too different from people that have blind faith in GPS navigation systems while driving.
Coming back to Baudrillard, I think it is worthwhile to note that about fifteen years after he published “Simulacra and Simulations” (1981) that he brought forward the concept of “radical thought” as a method out of his somewhat fatalistic view of simulacra and how images degrade from reflections to perversions to masking absence to pure simulation. One of my favorite passages of text is from Baudrillard’s description of radical thought in “The Perfect Crime” (1996) and I think it pertains to some of the work that Michelle, Kate and I are involved in:
“Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion – in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real… The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.”
I think of radical thought as being similar to the historical role of the trickster – one that disrupts the everyday by inverting conventional behavior, using humor, and being open and at peace with life’s paradoxes and multiplicities. Being a clown doesn’t accomplish much, but trying to intelligently invert social conventions and assumptions can constructively and artistically rewire our understandings of who we are. Mapping real space using virtual models is a part of “working over the illusion.”
