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Chapter 1 (Part 2)
Spasm: Riders of the Crash Zone
Spasm is, in part, the story of the dark outriders of virtual reality. Three individuals - Steve Gibson, Linda Dawn Hammond, and David Therrien - who, like Old Testament prophets wandering in the desert, are the new rugged individualists travelling through the sprawl of the digital frontier of the Year 2000. A music hacker, who rides the crash zone of sampler technology to bring back the sounds of the body recombinant. A body hacker, who records in her photography the coming shape-shifters of digital reality. And a high-voltage electro hacker, who has reinvented his body as a suicide machine, half-flesh/half-metal, in the desert of Arizona.
I have a hyper-rock band called Sex Without Secretions. Not an art school sound, but a real death-metal sampler music band. Unfortunately, one night our lead guitarist got himself shot in a bar in Buffalo after someone in the audience yelled out: "This is all intellectual bullshit." That's how I met Steve Gibson, a music hacker who came highly recommended out of the darkest outlaw regions of cyber-space: an electronic sampler musician who had actually broken the secret codes of digital reality, made the S-1000 Akai sampler break out into strange hybrid songs, and transformed himself in the process into a mutating android processor.
It was a typical cold winter night at Foufounes Electriques in Montreal, a kind of Blade Runner bar where primitivism meets high tech and where bodies go to download into music. Gwar was performing, you know the band that likes to advertise itself as "twelve ex-art students from Virginia" - whatever that means - and who specialize in sacrificial blood rites: hosing down their audience with simu-blood, chopping off papier-mâché penises, and goat butting. In other words, an all-American band. In the midst of the pandemonium, I noticed a photographer, Linda Dawn Hammond, right at stage level calmly taking pictures. She came dressed for the occasion with a see-through plastic raincoat over black leather, blood red hair, and Camden Town heavy-stud leather boots. As I found out later, while her Gwar photographs were interesting, this was just a job on the way to her real work: a spectacular, and perfectly unknown, photography project - 3-Part Body Series - that captured, in a haunting, deeply evocative way, the fetishistic rituals of crash bodies occupying the outlaw margins of virtual reality. Like a Dianne Arbus of cyberspace, but only better, Hammond's photography was the truth-sayer of body hackers who travel as shape-shifters across the digital galaxy.
For years, I have been hearing rumours about something extraordinary going on in Phoenix, Arizona. The Icehouse and David Therrien. Unlike the heavy macho crash machines of California, that appear lost in the brilliant glare of the virtual reality simulacra, there was something very different happening in Phoenix. And all the rumours kept circling back to David Therrien, a high-voltage electro hacker, who had actually created a fantastic android oasis in the desert, a Gallery of Machines: electric inquisition machines, suicide machines, INDEX machines, comfort machines, 90 Degree Machines, and Fetal Cages. The Icehouse, then, as a culture lab for seducing the inert world of cold metal, making the algorithmic codes of sampler culture break out into techno-screams, forcing it to announce that technology is no longer a specular commodity nor even an icon, but that final evolutionary phase of living species existence. David Therrien is the alchemist of digital reality, the first and best of all the American desert prophets. And I knew that I had to take a nomadic migration to Phoenix, to The Icehouse, to see for myself the hybrid products of his alchemical computer lab.
In part, Spasm is about these three deeply romantic figures, working in isolation and certainly outside the canons of official culture. Their works are perfect screens for our violent descent into the speed space of virtual reality. To the extent that virtual reality is a global aesthetic, occupying no specific territory but invading all of space and time, these artists are the pioneers of the swiftly emerging digital frontier, dark outriders of hacker culture who recover in advance the android sounds, recombinant photographs and burning electronic flesh of digital technology.
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