These two videos are actually two separate scenes from the same work, "Dolly," which is itself only third act of a three-part 'opera' by Steve Reich. The three movements of this opera, Hindenburg, Bikini, and Dolly, all explore the nature of technology in an ambivalent light. The first excerpt, which opens the act, is about cloning, and the second posted/final excerpt is titled 'Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality.' For the libretto/text, which you can read here, Reich collected interviews with some of the most prominent people working in the fields of robotics, cyborg sociology, technology theory, and genetics, including Richard Dawkins, James Watson, Sherry Tucker, and Ray Kurzweil. Then, using a technique that he uses in severalpieces, Reich splices, repeats, and otherwise messes with the interviews (but with minimal hard/destructive editing), and notates the natural pitch and rhythm of the voices so that the acoustic instruments can double/reinforce them.
One of the things that I think draws me to this work (honestly, Reich is sometimes hit-or-miss with me) is the fear and apprehension that frames this work. He frames this act with a religious/spiritual mysticism that appears to be inevitably doomed for failure. In the first part, Reich intersperses lines from Genesis, 'sung' by Kismet, a semi-intelligent robot designed by Cynthia Breazeal:
"And placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it."
So I'm taking an online course on coursera.org on 'Fantasy and Science Fiction,' and had to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. While I was reading, I started imagining Alice as if she were a cyborg. Then I started thinking, that though she is clearly not intended to be a cyborg in the 'traditional' 'BIONIC' sense, she really does satisfy some of the same fears and desires as her techno-enhanced buddies.
OK, hear me out, please!
Indeed, Alice is sort of a 'stranger in a strange land,' if you will. She struggles to make sense of her absurd encounters with the denizens of Wonderland and the looking glass country, while her own body literally unravels. In her first adventure, Alice changes size and shape more rapidly than she can keep track of. (My favorite part is when her neck grows like a giraffe's and she's accused of being a serpent [original sin, anyone?]). As Alice attempts to control her own body, she loses control of the world around her.
Steampunk Alice, though, is another story.
(Picture taken from Rebelakemi, on devientart)
The pivotal cyborg moment, though, comes with the realization that these changes are literally a product of her own design and creation, as she is the creator of her own fantasy. The cyborg as envisioned by Donna Haraway is equally a product of her own potential, who is limited not by her own abilities, but by the limitations and pressures put on by a society that cannot accept the individuality (read:deviance) of the cyborg's powers.
Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'Artifice. I'm not exactly sure what the title means, since I speak pretty much no French. I know from Debussy that Feu d'Artifice means 'fireworks,' and from high school french that Eaux means 'waters,' so is this a play on words that pretty much would mean 'water fireworks?' Anyways, it's a pretty evocative work. Very surreal. I especially like the soundtrack- Autumn from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which depicts a drunken peasant, his 'restful slumber' and a hunting sport, in which the animal seems to be chased until it collapses from exhaustion and dies.
XX. Your Voice Think of the sound of your own voice. What is its fundamental pitch? What is its range? What is its quality? What does it express no matter what you might be verbalizing or singing? What was the original sound of your voice before you learned to sound the way you sound now?
- From Sonic Meditations by Pauline Oliveros
And here are some great words from a letter about her role as a feminist composer-
Actually I am not that interested in composers and musicians. I'm more interested in listening than in being listened to. Eve's droppings. It's a time of reversals. As composer I am the audience, as performer I am the critic, as critic I am the maker. I don't want to lay a trip or an egg. I want to take one or eat it. I am the flying daughter who hears what she oughter.
This is one of my favorite Bjork videos. It's silly, but I love it when she takes apart the TV. I also get this pang of discomfort when she does this because it's not something we're supposed to do. When we buy a product like a TV, we buy a complete object. But Bjork is so comfortable tearing it apart, examining the inside for herself, that she breaches a boundary between consumer and manufacturer in a really playful way. In the end, she gets the most joy from her TV through the exploration of it's insides, not its projected images. And I think the ending is hilarious!
Sorry for the long post, they won't all be this ridiculous!
Bjork's music video for her song, "All is Full of Love" was one of the first music videos that I became absolutely obsessed with as a kid. This song, from Bjork's 1997 album Homogenic (so named because Bjork wasn't fluent in English and invented a word that pretty much is supposed to mean 'homogeneous') is about being 'given love' as long as you're receptive to it. One of the things that fascinates me with the minimalist lyrics is the almost ominous passive construction ("you'll be given") which leaves you to ask... by whom?
The music suggests a similar ambiguity. After a brief and stagnant introduction of synthesized middle-register stings, the rhythmic ostinato is introduced. This ostinato is a little bit unsettling, emphasizing the back beat with a mechanized grinding sound, almost a scream. When Bjork starts singing, she seems to be competing with this pulse. Her line emphasizes the first beats, and her long, sinewy lines seem unrestrained by the mechanical grind underneath. While most people who I talk to about this song say that Bjork's melody sounds timeless, or at least adrift, but I've always thought that her melody was maybe unaware of the machinations that frame her voice. I guess I've always been a little bit of a morbid child, but I was absolutely obsessed with the incoherence between Bjork's line and the rhythmic backdrop. This, in addition to my 12 year-old self still not totally comfortable with being 'given' love (cooties, anyone?), made listening to this song a pretty uncomfortable experience for me, and it still sort of is.
Looking at the music video again, I'm starting to think that scared-puppy childhood Sam may have been on to something... but first, a little background. This music video, which was released a year later was a collaboration between Bjork and Chris Cunningham, who is perhaps most well-regarded for his videos with Aphex Twin. In a really fascinating "making of" video, Bjork explains that her original concept was that she wanted to "describe some sort of heaven," with the caveat that "there would be lust" and that the clean white surface of the figures would melt away into the passions of this eroticism. Interestingly, her original concept of the figures were China dolls, not androids. those were Chris's idea, as he studied industrial robotics as a kid. The process involved programming real robotics, and using video editing in order to impose Bjork's lips onto the robots, making this video the result of an awesomely collaborative cyborg experience. In the end, what's 'real' robotics, what's heavily edited CGI, and what's Bjork's essence all become blurred by the very nature of this process.
One of Chris Cunningham's Sketches
But, for those of you who don't know, Chris Cunningham is basicallySatan. I mean, he's absolutely brilliant, but he's made some of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen, and he definitely highlights some of the tensions that I explained earlier in this post. In this video, a white female-bodied android is constructed by a machine. Everything is very white and sterile, resembling a sort of Heaven, but also a Hospital. This song is basically a love story, as two female-bodied androids encounter each other in this sterile womb and fall in love with each other. Behind the love story between the two droids, we get the ominous presence of the machine, the mother creator. The two androids do not seem to notice that they are being constructed at the very same time that they are falling in love. They are being programmed to love each other, and they are unaware of this process.
This of course, supports the ambivalence I felt regarding the lyrics and the music. There is in fact an important disconnect here between the conscious and the unconscious. Bjork sings in the passive voice, because she is not able to be truly aware of who is actually the giver of love, but in the diegesis of the music video, we get to see it. The machine-creator completes its task unnoticed to the androids, but is very obvious to us as viewers, similar to the interaction between the mechanical backbeat and Bjork's freeflowing melody.
But in the end, why was I so morbidly uncomfortable with this idea? I think it was because this video questions the nature of freewill in a very powerful way, but also in a very beautiful one. It is only through ignorance of the machine that these two bots can fall in love. ("You aren't receiving... Your phone is off the hook... your door is shut"). But I think that that reflected my anxieties as a kid more than it does now. In the end, there's something very poignant about machines falling in love. More, machines being created to fall in love. I mean, the line between machine and human is a very fragile one, and this video can give hope that love for love's sake can still exist in the age of machines. This is not a love about procreation, it's about being free of all anxieties and loving without resistance. Love for the sake of pleasure, not procreation. Creation. If only Chris Cunningham didn't have to make everything at least a little bit fucked up. But if we can make life only a little bit fucked up, I'd take it.
