Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 14

Hard as it may seem in this age of fiber-optic telecommunications, database networks, car phones, and computerized everything, a little more than a decade ago not everyone had answering machines, and almost no one I knew had call waiting, let alone home computers with modems. FAX machines were non-existent. The voices that answered the telephone emanated out of flesh and blood bodies not microchips, and life was a lot sexier.

It’s not that I’m any less addicted to, or dependent on the technology that has transformed our lives, than the rest of you. But I am also perturbed by how it appears to have affected human relationships. When reach out and touch someone is instantly equated with pushing buttons on a keyboard instead of the skin-to-skin kind, something has shifted in the communal psyche. Can a life be reduced to a digital code? When is “a kiss no longer still a kiss … as time goes by”? How does one build a history based on shared experience via computer, etc.?

The fantasies of science fiction are no longer fiction as we simultaneously inhabit parallel realities. There’’s the physical realm where we eat, make love, dance, get sick, go to war, and die in, make, consume, and destroy things in, with all the accompanying emotions and consequences. Then there is this new electronic universe of disembodied words and images that operates in quite another time/space continuum where the body is not subject to causality. What does it mean when we as a society not only choose to replace the tactile reality of our most intimate experiences in which we must face each other, with the safety of an anonymous electronic mind fuck, but recommend it as preferable. How do we reconcile the endless display of beautiful young bodies in heat used to sell everything, with AIDS and the hypocritical anti-sex ranting of the religious right? We call 976. How do we practice ““family values”” without pain in a nation without families? We join a network. Or watch TV.

These are the kinds of questions performance and media artist John Goss grappled with in his newest performance Forbidden Planet, which more aptly should have had a 2 after the title, as it picked up where the original sci-fi movie classic left off. Slick video projections of computer graphic movie titles in which the old MGM lion roared above the logo SILENCE=DEATH ¹ set the stage for the arrival of Alta, a “notorious intergalactic dyke,” self-consciously played by Mary Slusarski more like a wind-up Barbie doll Earth girl than a liberated alien. Having survived the destruction of her own planet by monsters from her father’s unconscious, and three hundred seventy eight days in hyperspace with eighteen perfect specimens of 24.6–year-old straight white manhood, our disillusioned and radicalized heroine arrived on Earth to find it heavily legislated against human pleasure. This is the authentic forbidden planet!

Alta’s antidote is to become the operator of a global phone sex network, propagating electronic intimacy. This seems a contradiction in terms that puts the definition of intimacy up for reevaluation. In a series of vignettes populated by predominantly male homosexual client users of the network, Goss examined the problems of sex and intimacy in the age of AIDS and telecommunications. Humor and irony characterized the more successful scenarios.

In Risk Trading, Calvin (Klein) and Perry (Ellis), two men on the phone sex line, took courtship from the first kiss to the final act, discussing at each step of the way what they wouldn’t do, then agreed to do it with conditions attached, so that by the time they got to fucking they were calling in their lawyers to negotiate a contract with appropriate protective clauses.

Perfect Match was a paradigm of alienation in the computer age — Press 1 to enter your profile, Press 2 for the Perfect Match bulletin, Press 3 to start the process, etc. The process is repeated for age, height, size, race, income, genital size, meeting preference — phone, letter, fax, video, modem, or in-person. At each selection preference the number of possible matches decreases until there is only one left. Guess who? None other than YOURSELF! The ultimate safe sex!

In the finale, Telecumference, Alta turned the international teleconference into a masturbating group orgasm with exclamatory moans and groans in six languages.

Goss set up a cause-and-effect equation that demonstrated that the solution is no solution. He framed this subject matter so that we might think about it in a larger social/political context, but did not get beyond clever illustration. It was a little bit like that recorded voice that asks you to PRESS 1, etc. But maybe that’s the point.

On the other hand, one might consider an even more insidious parallel. The Virus, that alien invader of both the body and the computer, does not distinguish flesh from circuitry.

Or is that just our way of trying to humanize our technology?