Escape Velocity (27 page)

ing tableaux of ritualized dominance and submission: one man bludgeoned by another, a third pinioned in a ring of fire and set ablaze from the neck up.

Information Machine is a junction box with a series of circuits branching off it: the body, technology, religion, and politics, all of them paths for power. Of course, power is not only a cultural phenomenon but a natural one as well. Having considered technology as a religion and religion as a technology, Therrien turns, finally, to a contemplation of power in the most literal sense, as an elemental force.

"I like the feeling of live electricity, the power that's present there; it's something that's always fascinated me," he says. "I'm interested in electricity as an analogy for life and at the same time death." Therrien is intimately acquainted with the dangers of high voltage: He once felt the kiss of 220 volts while thwapping with metal drumsticks on an electrified plate he mistakenly thought was dead (it was, until someone switched on the power without warning). Moreover, the Icehouse is uncomfortably close to an electrical substation, and the growing concern over the potentially hazardous effects of long-term exposure to electromagnetic fields has not escaped Therrien's notice. Still, he is seduced by the brutish beauty of the substation, with its hunkering transformers and gargantuan cables.

"I'd love to have a nice little bungalow among all the transmission towers, although I wouldn't want to spend more than a few minutes there a day," he muses. "There are these gigantic power cables going down the street-I think they're four-hundred-thousand-volt lines-and when you stand near them, you can feel an incredible hum underneath. You can hold up a fluorescent tube and it will illuminate, just from the immense power in the air!"

Therrien the rhapsodist has much in common with the awestruck journalist who asked of London's Battersea Power Station in 1934, "Is it a cathedral?" (The station's architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, also designed the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and was later said to have erected two houses of worship, "one for God, one for Electricity."^^) In Comfort/Control performances, Therrien makes use of "electricity as a metaphor for a supreme being."

"When people try to explain God, they do it on a spiritual level," he says. "Well, what is God made of? Does He have mass? It seems to me that the only thing God could be, if God exists, is electricity or some type of

electromagnetic force or radiation. The descriptions of God as pure and white and Winding in illuminated manuscripts sound very much like electricity. It's electricity, in essence, that makes our integrated circuits sing-all of those electrical impulses running through us, making the body's mechanism move. In Frankenstein, electricity is a life-giving force; now, they use defibrillators to bring people who are dead back to life. I would love to be hit by lightning and live. The idea of having all of that power, supposedly as much as a nuclear explosion, pass through your body is absolutely phenomenal; it must be like being touched by God. When I see the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with God reaching out and touching Adam, I envision a spark gap-zapF'

5/ RO BOCO PU LATION

Sex Times Technology q

E a u a 1s the Future^

I

Cybersex in The Lawnmower Man. © 1992 Mew Line Productions, Inc., and AUiedVision/Lane Pringle..'{ll rights reserved. Photo by Douglas Kirkland; computer animation bj Angel Studios, Carlsbad, CA. Photo appears courtesy of New Line Productions, Inc.

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Sex Machines

Different writers have described "the sexual frenzy of factories," obsessive rhythms, exhalations, cries, panting sounds, shining dart-pointed instruments, articulated rods dripping w^ith svv^eat, simulacra of inexhaustible loves. Could not man himself become a machine in his amorous activity and make love indefinitely, like a machine?

-Marceljean^

James Brow^n's sentiments, exactly. In "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," Brown reinvents himself as a plug-in stud, tireless as a punch press but still salty with sweat, soft to the touch. He imagines himself a prosthetic ally enhanced satyr who retains enough of his humanity to be able to savor the pleasures of the flesh. Cyborged, Brown has the best of both worlds, thrilling to the fevers and "cold sweats" of human passion but performing with locomotive endurance.

Brown's fantasy is only one narrative thread in the conceptual knot that Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1951, called "one of the most peculiar features of our world-the interfusion of sex and technology."^ This bizarre union, according to McLuhan, was "born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.""* This last motif, to which McLuhan gives only perfunctory attention, has been taken up in cyberculture, where it is ornately embroidered in collective fantasies.

In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, McLuhan uncovers the logic of Henry Ford's assembly line in a lingerie ad. Nature's Rival "four-in-one proportioned girdles" accomplish what nature cannot, he observes, turning out copies of Hollyw^ood starlets w^ith mechanical precision. In like fashion, the fetishizing of number sequences (36-24-36)-a statistician's idea of erotica-transforms w^omen into "hot numbers," their measurements "plotted as an abstract curve."^ Musicals reduce tapping, kicking chorus line beauties to interlocked machine parts, a truism borne out in Busby Berkeley's 1933 movie, Footlight Parade, where skimpily attired dancing girls, legs spread, are arranged in a giant rosette suggestive of a Curtis radial aircraft engine.

Inverting the advertising logic that invests consumer goods with sex appeal, "feminine glamour ads and the modern beauty chorus insist on their relation to the machine."^ Contemplating the unhappy results of human sexuality yoked, through advertising, to the demands of the marketplace, McLuhan sees women alienated from their own bodies. Made to submit to the techniques of industrial production, female anatomy is disassembled into replaceable parts: "[H]er legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill-work on a car."^

On a deeper level, McLuhan perceives the debilitating effect of incessant titillation by Madison Avenue: a sexual burnout that demands greater and greater Jolts of voltage to bring the libido twitchingly alive. The end product of this condition, he argues, is the Dr. Strangelove-idin elevation of annihilation to the status of an orgasm:

Sensation and sadism are near twins. And for those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.*

Now, forty-plus years after McLuhan's prescient observations about "the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death," the intertwisted themes of eroticized machinery, technologically mediated sex.

sex with technology, and the rerouting of carnal desires into high-tech orgies of destruction are woven through cyberculture.

Issue number ten of the "neurozine" bOING-bOING is given over to "sex candy for happy mutants"; the cover portrays a young woman wired for pleasure, a computer cable plugged into her crotch and B-movie contraptions clamped onto each breast. Articles include "Virtual Sex: Fucking Around with Machines" and "Confessions of a PC Porn Fanatic." The February 1992 Elk titillated its readers with a cover line heralding "the BRAVE NEW WORLD OF COMPUTER SEX," and, in the following year, the premiere issue of Wired featured an article on "Digital Sex," the April U.K. edition of Marie Claire promised "Hi-Tech Sex: Orgasm by Computer," and the November 5e/f bruited "High-Tech Sex: New Ways to Push Your Buttons."

The now-defiinct Future Sex hitched the advertising industry's latest synonym for "new and improved" to history's oldest come-on. Described in a WELL blurb posted by its editors as "the only magazine that explores how high technology is changing the way we think about sex," Future Sex promised multicultural erotica "wrapped up [in] hypermodern design." The cover of the magazine's second issue is a guaranteed attention-getter. Male and female infonauts float in cyberspace, both scantily clad in photorealistic computer renderings of virtual reality gear. The man sports a computerized strap-on. The woman wears a bra fitted with robotic hands that are poised to fondle her breasts and a G-string equipped with what looks like a high-tech vibrator. "CYBERSEX," announces the cover line, "strap in, tweak out, turn on." The editor and self-styled "queen of high-tech porn" Lisa Palac looks forward, in her opening essay, to the arrival of "erototronics"-"smart" garb that immerses the wearer in computer-generated, fully interactive wet dreams.

Disappointingly, there was nothing terribly futuristic about the sex in Future Sex, which consisted of the usual beautiful people feigning masturbation or fornication for the camera lens. The "futuristic" content in issue three, for example, is limited to a cyber-porn story about "tele-sex" between a virtual blonde and a virtual zebra, reviews of soft-core CD-ROMs, and ads for the decidedly low-tech medium of telephone sex, masquerading as dangerous liaisons in cyberspace, "get plugged into erotic expression," urges one, while another ("the original cybersex") prepares the customer for his or her quantum leap into a science fiction future:

minute; couldn't the nineteenth-century owner of one of Alexander Graham Bell's "speaking telephones" have done this?

Palac, an antipornography activist-turned-"sex-positive feminist," has produced a spoken word CD called Cyborgasm, a "virtual reality sex experience" that exploits 3-D effects created with Virtual Audio, a technology used in virtual reality sound tracks.^ The sticker affixed to the CD's mailing envelope ("the future of sex is inside this package") suggests that sex involving high-tech interfaces capable of transmitting otherworldly sensations to hot-wired users is no longer science fiction.

Tearing open the padded envelope, one finds a CD, poster, "eco-goggles," and "cyberubber." On closer inspection, this last item appears to be an ordinary lubricated condom; the cybernetic quality that distinguishes it from garden-variety rubbers lies, apparently, in the "cyborgasm" logo emblazoned on its wrapper. The eco-goggles, which are intended to block out visual distractions, turn out to be black spectacles printed on a sheet of cardboard. In order to have what the directions call "the best Cyborgasmic experience," the user is instructed to sit alone, in the dark, wearing nothing but headphones, condom, and cardboard goggles. Presumably, he or she has taken the precaution of concocting a plausible explanation in case housemates barge in unannounced.

The CD consists for the most part of narrated fantasies in the Penthouse Forum mold, accompanied by heavy breathing and obscene squelchings; it is decidedly uncybernetic, although a vibrator puts in a brief turn for the grand finale. As the CD plays, the grunting, grinding, and heavy breathing of simulated coupling begins to sound mechanical and, finally, comical. Cyborgasm brings to mind the arch-punk Johnny Rotten's supremely snide observation, "What is sex, anyway? Just thirty seconds of squelching noises."'^

Palac's CD makes use of the oldest virtual realities known to humankind: playacting and storytelling. Unfortunately, listening to simulated sex or hearing about sexual fantasies is nothing like having sex. Furthermore, where's the cyber? Cyborgasm's narrative content is utterly unrelated to technology and the interface itself-a CD player, a pair of cardboard goggles, and a condom-is not exactly the cortex-to-computer hookup that fans of Neuromancer have been clamoring for. As Chris Hudak notes in his blistering Mondo 2000 review of the CD, "[TJhe failure here is a

conceptual one, and it's right down there with the ones and zeroes-there is nothing remotely 'cyber' about any of this. It's a fucking CD. Literally''^^

The problem with Cyborgasm, as with Future Sex, is that sex seems to have changed little since the first naked ape stood erect. Sex that is itself futuristic, as opposed to more of the same conducted against a futuristic backdrop, would require the revision of existing notions of human sexuality and embodied consciousness, perhaps even the engineering of radically modified bodies. But how can the sex act be detached from the gestalt that results from long residence in this bag of water we call the body? In a science fiction future where consciousness is not confined to its traditional container but may take up residence in computer memories or robot bodies, it seems at least conceivable that human sexuality could be abstracted from any reference to embodiment, perhaps even from a recognizably human consciousness altogether. Nevertheless, current speculation regarding post-human sexuality is bounded by the inescapable fact that it is conducted from the vantage point of human beings, for whom the very notion of sexuality is defined in terms of embodiment and humanity. As the SF writer Rudy Rucker memorably observed, "I can't stand on top of my own head."'^