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Digital Delirium Introduction (Part 2)
"Now We Are Alone in the Wires"
It's a Quake kind of day in San Francisco and we're taking our retro-fitted bodies to an interactive art installation at Limn's, a cool 50s going on 2030 furniture store in SoMa, which in that perfect hybrid wave coming off the coast today doubles as cyber-city's hippest multimedia arts site.
"Dig It: Digital Art - The Next Generation" has been advertised as "art produced in the cyberstudios of Multimedia Gulch." One installation in particular immediately catches our attention. It's titled brokenBot, and it's a perfect tech-trash counter-gradient digging its way like a digital bur against the antiseptically confined rows of computer art all around the white-on-white walled room. BrokenBot is visual cybermayhem, a kind of mutating video/sound arcade from hell. A series of amputated, flickering screens minus their cosmetic housing are clumped at strange angles on a broken welded metal table, thick rows of black wires snake out of what looks like the rusted remains of an undersea diver's helmet, dirty fuse boxes blink on and off randomly, dusty circuit boards thick with mud slither in space, a wierdly out-of-place smell of black paint and gas fumes burns its way into your lungs, and this whole end-of-millennium scene of media debris for the time after communication is webbed together by violent images. Filmed executions - a shiver, shake and quiver - smell the gas and feel the bolts of electricity as real bodies gasp for a last breath, while bleeding out of the double-looped green and red/orange screens. A perfect tabernacle for the burned-out flesh and cynical nerves of the brokenBot body. In digital art, the next generation can be tomorrow or could have been yesterday. BrokenBot mutates from a yesterday site to a tomorrow space. The accompanying text catches perfectly the spirit of terminal amputations:
technology victim (eyes her) generational consumption. child torn to shreds digitized reprocessed marketed sold. breeds commercially viable product demographic. soviphobia pushes child from planet and back. now we are alone in the wires.
A few days later, we follow the trail of brokenBot to the cyber-home of its artistic creators, just down the street from the now abandoned original site of Wired magazine, which has taken flight with the chi-chi cocktail, jitterbugging, Hollywood glamor on my mind set to the twilight side of SoMa. It turns out that brokenBot was created by a brilliant group of artists from Construct, a breakout Web design company. Painters, architects, software designers, musicians, writers, 3D visionaries: Construct is a cyber-guild for the digital Renaissance.
We're talking to the artists/hackers, observing cold, shadowless images of impossible spatial perspectives, 3D flesh, and dark comic strip-like visual desert homages to the spirit of Max Ernst after the shockwave, when we smell the familiar brokenBot scent of black paint and gas fumes. So we check under the table, and sure enough, there's the debris from the brokenBot installation. A really perfect digital aesthetic: art as a broken mirror of life in the ruins of media debris. Digital figure one day, digital (junk) ground the next.
Life as brokenBot, alone in the wires.
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