Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing.

Massumi, Brian

"The fiction is already here, and the role of the writer is to invent the reality." This was J. G. Ballard's prefatory formula for the impending Crash of 1973, when body-machine couplings, lubricated by free-floated images, were to invent the real promise of a posthuman hybrid having already arrived. Twenty years after impact we are lingering at the site anew, things being more like they are now than they have ever been before (to paraphrase the only American president whose name is a car). Accident-chasing and invention are precisely the program of this selection of recent publications on the collision of fiction and reality in contemporary technoculture--although one would have to add "artist" to "writer," then blur the distinction, for the formula to capture the richness of the role played out in the present texts.

Culture on the Brink is the ninth volume in the Dia Center for the Arts' highly successful series "Discussions in Contemporary Culture." Timothy Druckrey's introductory essay invokes Ballard's cyborgian formula only, it would seem, to equate "invention" with "demonstrating that disaster will be the likely consequence" of the "insidious" march of technology now trampling under keyboard an "uninformed" public whose very bodies are in danger of being "superseded" by the mouse. Fortunately, this apocalyptic tone, and the post-Baudrillardian model of technological change as a total epochal eclipse of all earlier orders, is not shared by most of the contributors. The offerings are in fact satisfyingly diverse in topic and approach. Essays cover a wide range, including labor and consumer culture in the information age (Stanley Aronowitz, Herbert Schiller, Langdon Winner), biotechnology and information (Kathleen Woodward), AIDS and women (Paula Treichler), the Human Genome Project (Joan Marks, R. C. Lowentin), "smartness" (as in "drugs," "bombs," and "appliances"; Andrew Ross), artistic appropriations of technology (Billy Kluver, Tricia Rose), and a number of issues around virtuality, artificiality, and information (Wolfgang Schirmacher, Gary Chapman, Margaret Morse).

The collection even contains two pieces that directly call into question the "prosthetic supersession" theory of technological advance. Simon Penny suggests a fragmentation-multiplication model, arguing that VR replaces the unified humanist body with two partial bodies in complex interaction, one of which is still unabashedly corporeal, if not all that it used to be (a series of long footnotes to his essay citing empirical studies on altered states of perception are worth the read). Elaine Scarry, in a beautiful essay on dolls-as-limbs that is a highlight of the volume, makes prostheses do things many authors wouldn't. The result is not a supplanting, but a kind of animated "positioning" creative of culture. Scarry is careful not to sound the technophobic note: "If our artifacts do not act on us, there is no point in having made them." The final section of the collection reviews the Gulf War--gone but, if these writers have their way, not forgotten (James Der Derian, Avital Ronell, Kevin Robins, Les Levidow). The only piece included that would label itself squarely as "art" is a short section from Laurie Anderson's Stories from the Nerve Bible. But the best critical contributions, like Scarry's, bend the distinction between the critical and the creative.

The publication of Crash: Nostalgia for the Absence of Cyberspace accompanied an exhibition for which it is not the catalogue. As the book's editors, Robert Reynolds and Thomas Zummer, explain, the exhibition repopulates Ballard's Crash site with artists who are "working with what might be called 'breakdown technologies'" and who "reappropriate and reconfigure objects, systems of representation, production and reference, inducing a kind of wild semiotics (the computer used as a blunt instrument. . .)." The aim of the book is not to "document" the exhibition, but rather to transpose it--to repeat its multimedia project in print, accepting the difference that entails. The work of the exhibition's artists is not so much "represented" in the book as sampled. It is made to collide with snippets of creative writing, pieces by critical writers writing creatively, and pieces by creative artists writing critically.

The aim is to produce an effect "analogous" to what transpired in the associated but independent space of the gallery. Crash is a most laudable attempt to reconceptualize the exhibition catalogue as a transmission between media, instead of a framing of one by another; in other words, as the title implies, to make the catalogue a reverberating event.

K/K R&D take the unfashionable step of working in analog in what is supposed to have been a digital world by now. Where Reynolds and Zummer's Crash artists work from the culture of "breakdown technology" and apply it toward artistic construction, K/K R&D (Ken Kaplan and Ted Krueger) construct artistic technology in the hope of bringing on a measure of cultural breakdown. Mosquitoes, no. 14 in Princeton Architectural Press' "Pamphlet Architecture" series, presents a series of techno-cranky works of the same name. A "mosquito" is an interactive mechanical construction oddly suggesting sentience in spite of its highlighted artificiality. It is suspended in a public space, there to serve as a sharp but minor annoyance. The insect-inspired sculptures respond to input from their surroundings, for example by sensing the movements of passersby and translating them into a repertoire of distracting mechanical reactions. The mosquito "collects" movements through a social space and feeds them back into it in a way calculated to materially disturb the pattern (one noisy mosquito's mission was to make it impossible for architectural students to concentrate in the library). At the same time, they are meant to provide grist for critique by making the social relations inherent in the fed-back movements visible (and audible). K/K invites us all to aspire to mosquitodom, in rebellion against the tyranny of "dogma" (what exactly that is they fail to specify, but it would appear to include anything theoretical). "In a world of suffering, pain, deprivation, want, and alienation, Kaplan and Krueger offer suffering, pain, deprivation, want, and alienation" (Lebbeus Woods, in a concluding essay). They also offer a provocative reflection on the continued relevance of the analog, and an invitation to become servo-bug that few human pests will want to refuse.

The Seattle-based artists' collective whose activities are chronicled in Invisible Rendezvous set out in the late '70s to convert the Modernist slogan "form follows function" into a Ballard-esque "function follows fiction"--except that they arrived at the crossroads where fiction and reality collide from a reconstructive direction, with no will to destruction and breakdown, and no negative critique. If not for its dismissive air, Burlesque might be more appropriate than Ballard-esque, since in the group's history there is not a hint of cataclysm, even deferred, only a cascade of collaborative community activity fueled by Dada-inspired humor. In spirited and accessible language, Invisible Rendezvous describes a running experiment in group authorship, after the "death of the author," on a bulletin board named IN.S.OMNIA.

Significantly, the group came to the electronic medium through a series of increasingly ambitious site-specific performance events called "Invisible Seattle." The idea was to virtualize the city by involving as many of its citizens as possible in a collective reimagining of it. The goal was to produce a novel of Seattle by Seattle. Newly accessible computer equipment, integrated into installation events, made feasible the gargantuan task of collecting and "editing" (recombming) the fragmentary contributions of Seattle's teeming found-authors into a final narrative. The next step to a bulletin board was a natural one. But with it came an important shift, from the street to cyberspace, and from automatic writing to hypertextual message linking. Rather than inspiring a real community to virtualize itself through fiction, the bulletin board projects made a virtual fiction secrete a real, nongeographical community. The bulletin-board fiction was virtual in that it was neverending linkage, without plot or denouement, pure addictive expression as its own reward. The community was real in that it evolved its own customs, passions, history, and constraints. It was also more than the sum of its parts: thanks to their many 'nyms, each of its members was many. Invisible Rendezvous is an excellent and entertaining meditation on the connections between site-specific performance and cyberspace, recombinant culture and creative community, machination and identity, multiplicity and expression. It suggests that these are perhaps not as far apart as our apocalyptic impulses in the face of new technology might suggest.

Brian Massumi is the author of User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Minnesota) and (with Kenneth Dean) of First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Autonomedia). He is also the editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minnesota).