Escape Velocity (22 page)

Beyond their obvious function as sales pitches and public relations strategies, such attractions are part of a larger whole-the Disney theme parks, themselves a commercial for what Scott Bukatman has called a "future . . . dominated by a benign corporate sponsorship providing effective population control, abundant consumer goods, and the guarantee of technological infallibility.'"*^ In "the World of Motion, Presented by General Motors" in Walt Disney World's EPCOT (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) Center in Orlando, Florida, every American's God-given right to

choose a car of his own over the drear, suspiciously sociahst alternative of public transportation is w^rapped in stars and stripes: "When it comes to transportation, it's fun to be free," proclaims the accompanying jingle. After a ride consisting of a series of Audio-Animatronic tableaux purporting to be a history of transportation, visitors witness "The Bird and the Robot," a performance starring a robot toucan and a Unimate Puma 500 robotic arm, the sort often employed in automobile assembly plants. The seven-minute performance strives to disabuse spectators of what Isaac Asimov called "the Frankenstein Complex" harbored by humans who "[insist] on considering the poor machines to be deadly dangerous creatures"; the narrative assures listeners that industrial robots are their benevolent mechanical helpmates, that they should welcome the automation of dirty, dangerous factory jobs."^^ When "The Bird and the Robot" ends, the audience is herded into a showroom full of GM cars and sales representatives.

No mention is made of the fact that automation displaces or at the very least "de-skills" humans, reducing human laborers who work side by side with machine assemblers in computer-controlled manufacturing plants to button-pushers or parts-stackers. Nor do we hear of the "technostress" that sometimes follows in the wake of automation. A 1986 series in a Japanese newspaper on "The Isolation Syndrome of Automation" told of workers in a state-of-the-art factory that used "automated . . . tools and robotized machining centers." According to the author, several employees

began to complain that they "felt like robots" as they operated and programmed the automated machinery during the day; one local parent complained that all his son did all day long was push a button.'^^

Inhumane as it is, the fate of the button-pusher-being bored to death-is certainly preferable to that of Bob Williams, an overseer who was killed when a twenty-five-hundred-pound robot slammed into him in Ford's Michigan Casting Center auto plant. Robot manufacturers' now-familiar argument that "unattended systems" have the potential to save lives must be weighed against the memories of workers killed by factory robots in industrialized nations. An Omni article about Williams's death chronicles the action brought by his survivors against Litton Industries, the company that manufactured Ford's automated system.

What became apparent as [the attorney for Wilhams's family] went over the . . . case was that there was nothing venal involved. But there was a form of mechanistic indifference, a neglect of the soul in favor of the passion for a perfect machine. The god was productivity. Humans were meant to serve it."**

Finally, the encomiums to automation of "The Bird and the Robot" neglect to inform the audience that reskilled workers who find positions in data entry will not necessarily be free of occupational hazards: "terminal illnesses" such as eyestrain, back problems, repetitive strain injury, and possibly even cancer and miscarriage resulting from the electromagnetic fields generated by VDTs are well-known by-products of the silicon sweatshop.

Then, too, the ease with which computers facilitate panoptical surveillance and information-age Taylorism sounds a sour note in GM's theme song. "[TJhe use of keystroke software to monitor and pace office workers has become a routine part of job performance evaluation programs," reports Andrew Ross. "Some 70 percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or other forms of quantitative monitoring of their workers."'*^ The Dream Machine, a social history of the computer based on the PBS series The Machine That Changed the World, considers

the case of TWA ticketing agents who work on keyboards while answering phone calls. This gruelling work is made even worse because the company monitors the productivity of workers by recording their number of keystrokes, the time they spend on the phone, when they leave their desks for lunch or to go to the toilet. Such practices, an electronic version of those used in Dickensian sweatshops, are widespread.^°

A TWA agent interviewed in the last episode of the five-part series provides a chilling update of the Tri-City Labor Review's portrait of assembly line "automats" when she claims that the demands of her job, which require that employees perform like "robots," cause human workers to "break down."

The semiotician Umberto Eco, who has called Disneyland "an immense robot, the final realization of the dreams of the eighteenth-century

mechanics who gave Ufe to the [Scribe],'' has also noted that it is "a place of total passivity" whose "visitors must agree to behave like its robots."^' There is less metaphor here than might be imagined. The only role available to Disney "guests" is that of the consumer-of junk food, knickknacks, and most of all, images: Kodak "Picture Spots" are everywhere and seemingly everyone has a camera. Furthermore, Disney's ubiquitous security and unremitting surveillance ensure that most visitors use designated walkways, observe the ban on flash photography in rides, and keep their hands inside the moving vehicles at all times. One of the more curious side effects of this unthinking obedience is the tendency to applaud the actors in Disneyland's robot dramas-actors who are, after all, nothing more than polyester-and-fiberglass skeletons stuffed full of pneumatic and hydraulic systems, sealed in Duraflex skin, and controlled by computers. On the other hand, such behavior makes a strange sort of sense: The image of happy shoppers mechanically applauding technology freezes the essence of the Disney theme parks in a single snapshot.

The mechanized spectacles of Goldstone, MacMurtrie, and Pauline put an off-center spin on the stories told by Audio-Animatronic sales-bots in Disney attractions, airport bars, and megamalls. It is no coincidence that Pauline concocted the term Disneyfication to describe the vacuousness his motorized roadkill is intended to guard against: his mechanical puppet shows, like those of his colleagues, reject the received notion that we should relax into our assigned role as passive consumers of high-tech commodities whose intricate workings are a mystery to us and whose design and function are entirely out of our hands. Reminding us that those who cannot control machines are, more and more, controlled by those who can, Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone argue for the liberatory power of techno-literacy. They refuse what the cultural critic Donna Haraway calls "a demonology of technology"-the self-defeating strategy of indicting the tool along with the toolmaker-and recycle or appropriate outright the products of industrial and military culture.

In a society guided, until very recently, by an unswerving belief in planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption, inexhaustible resources and infinite frontiers, the refunctioning and reanimating of cast-off or antiquated technology assumes the status of a political act. This notion, implicit in William Gibson's cyberpunk maxim, "the street finds its

OWN USES FOR THINGS," reverberates in Rick Sayre's comments on the low-tech aesthetic.

"Almost everything Chico and I build uses pieces of other things-old graphics machines, TVs, stereos and so forth," says Sayre. "Our prototype computer-control system . . . [is] a co-optation of consumer technology. The microprocessor isn't a PC-type thing, it's the same sort of embedded control you'd find in the family car or microwave oven. This is yet another [example] of overconsumption. I mean, nobody needs a computer in his microwave oven, yet people want it-they want an LED on their power drill, they want their iron to be able to talk to them-and it's an incredible waste."

Cannibalizing domesticated technology for parts, Sayre, Mac-Murtrie, and their compeers build feral machines-grungy, exuberantly ugly robots that, not yet housebroken, leak oil everywhere. Embodying the aesthetic of "impractical contraptions, irrational technologies" set forth by Pauline in his essay "Technology and the Irrational," they call to mind the "useless machines" of the Italian sculptor Bruno Munari, whose existential clock UOraX is rigged with hands that spin ceaselessly around a blank face." Pauline, who once staged an event called Useless Mechanical Activity, delights in converting machines "from things [that] once did 'useful' destruction into things that can now do useless destruction.""

But unlike Munari's poetic devices, the immaterial commodities produced by the artists in this chapter-a mixture of terror and merriment, smoldering wreckage and revelatory flashes-are unmarketable as objets d'art. Pauline and his brothers-in-arms insist on their autonomy from what they see as an elite, effete art world in thrall to private collectors and corporate investors. Their mechanical spectacles stand in relation to gallery art and corporate diversions as the memory of Coney Island-dubbed a "pyrotechnic insanitarium" in the early I900s-contrasts with the reality of the Magic Kingdom. Whereas the Disney dream of better living through technology is untroubled by libidinous urges, antiauthoritarian yearnings, and other imps of the perverse-"guaranteed safety for the broad spectrum of humanity whose mental health is predicated on denying that there is any such thing as mental ill health or, indeed, a mental life of any significance beneath the conscious level," as Richard Schickel puts it-Coney in its heyday flung wide the floodgates of the id.^'*

The only way into Disneyland is Main Street, U.S.A., a Wonder Bread version of Grover's Corners, complete with horse-drawn fire wagons and barbershop quartets; visitors entered Coney Island's Steeplechase Park through the Barrel of Love, a slick, spinning wooden drum that flung giddy merrymakers off their feet and into indecent contact with total strangers. Couples debarked from the ride that gave the park its name-a genteel roller-coaster in which double-saddled wooden racehorses galloped from start to finish along a rolling track-into a twisting, turning series of dimly lit passages that opened, at last, onto a brightly illuminated stage. There, compressed air from a "blowhole" swept the lady's skirt upward while a clown armed with an electrified prod jolted her gentleman friend in a particularly sensitive spot. Meanwhile, an audience of former sufferers howled with delight. After another blowhole or two and a few well-aimed whacks from a dwarf with a slapstick, the mortified pair slunk offstage and into the audience, to savor the humiliation of the next unfortunates.

The universally recognized symbol of Disneyland is of course the beaming, button-eyed face of Mickey Mouse; Steeplechase's emblem was a demented jester whose ear-to-ear grin insinuated that propriety ended at the park's gates. "Sudden disorientation, exposure of flesh, unaccustomed and rather intimate contact with strangers of the opposite sex, public shame, and strenuous physical activity resulted in a tremendous sense of release," writes the historian Judith A. Adams."

Then, too, a nascent class consciousness percolated through Coney, in midway games where largely lower-class revelers could, for the price of a few pennies, demolish mock china and crystal in a re-creation of a high-bourgeois Victorian sitting room. "The games at Coney," writes Jane Kuenz, "depended in part on the thrill of doing something you otherwise couldn't but may have wanted to: express openly an alienated and hostile relationship to commodities and the frustrations associated with a life in which you maybe had fewer of them."^^ Disneyland, by contrast, is a sexless, microbe-free monument to a normative future where the sole interface between the technocratic elite and the technologically illiterate masses is the point of purchase.

"Coney's amusement," according to Adams, "shattered all expectations of normality and paradoxically turned engines of work into joy machines, spectacle, and chaos."" The same could be said of the robot

dramas produced by Pauline, MacMurtrie, and Goldstone, which cast a new hght on the cautionary tales, so unsettling to machine-age capitalists, of automated factories run amok or steel-collar workers turned murderous. In mechanical spectacle, images of runaway machines and robots humanized by their glitches speak to a growing discontent with the notion that technology is best left to our military-industrial benefactors-a discontent that bears fruit in the popular desire to follow Pauline's lead in "re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry and science away from their typical manifestations in practicality or product."^^ The rituals of resistance staged by machine artists celebrate technocracy's malfunction-ings even as they dramatize cyberpunk fantasies of mutinous machines and techno-revolution.

4 / RITUAL MECHANICS

Cybernetic Body Art

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Comfort/Control. C 1992 Don L

Stelarc: I Sing the Body Obsolete

Knowledge is power! Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours-your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain-can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete.