Utopia & Clemenceau
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.
