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At the end of this century, technology is taking the
place of what we have defined previously as nature. It is
the environment in which we are situated and against which
we measure ourselves. Rogers' use of nature speaks not of a
desire for reconciliation with the natural, but investigates
our situation in the late twentieth century in which the
technological has become the natural. Many of us engage
daily with technology - automatic bank machines, voice mail,
cel phones, electronic mail, the Internet, computer games,
word-processing, and so on. In a very short time the use of
these technologies has become so much a part of our daily
lives that it is difficult for us to fully comprehend our
relationship to them and to the way our relationship to the
world has been mediated through them. Allucquére
Rosanne Stone, restating Marshall McLuhan's pronouncement,
"the medium is the message," indicates that it is hard to
see what technology does because what it does is silently
and pervasively restructure seeing.¹ Rogers' investigation
has to do with a venture Stone describes as "not into the
heart of 'nature' in search of redemption, but rather into
the heart of 'technology' in search of nature - and not
nature as object, place or originary situation...[but] as a
continual reinvention and encounter actively resisting
representation."²
As I enter the mouth of the tunnel
I confront, on a video monitor, set into the wall, the
vertiginous rolling images of railway tracks - in disrepair
- no longer functional as conduit between city or town but
here able to cause me to roll slightly from side to side as
I walk the length of the tunnel toward the twinned rolling
tracks at the other end. My rolling gait is partly an effect
of the sand beneath my feet which replicates the sandy
foundation of the tracks. The abandoned tracks recall with
poignancy the position that the railway held, in the popular
imagination, of the technology that would tackle
frontiers.
But wait - let me step back to my
entrance to the tunnel - a machine mantra spills out - a
roaring, lulling, dully repetitious noise. From in the
tunnel I catch the layered whisper of voices and, at
intervals, the jarring interjection of a buzzer-like
squawk.
Moving in the tunnel: Technology/Nature
as mediated and mediator
Once again, with firm steps to
counter the roll I move down the tunnel toward the rolling
tracks on sand - double exposures, layered and
shifting.
From monitors set into the tunnel
walls sing a discordant chorus of womens' and technological
voices in tentative operatic song. The human and the
techno-voices seem to mimic each other - mirroring back and
forth.
Nature as simulated, as highly-mediated representation,
here speaks to the relations most of us hold with it. The
nature most of us know has been trimmed, tamed, made civil
and agreeable. Technology is the frontier which challenges
us - the broad environment which we identify as nature.
A screen with abstract patterns
like molten metal - slower, denser than water - a reference
to water but yet it is not water - and out of this substance
comes a voice - female, corresponding with something animal
and technological.
The boundaries between organic and technological are
non-existent here as even those images that we might imagine
to be organic and the voices that are human are highly
mediated through the technological apparatus.
SQUAWK - the jagged buzzer sounds - disturbing, arresting - and an
image flashes on a screen further down the tunnel - too
quick for me to get near. I find myself engaged in a strange
and graceless back and forth and turning around motion as I
attempt to see the images - their movement from screen to
screen apparently random - before they close down, move on
to another screen - luring me with them.
Interactivity describes our ability to act with - in this
context -machines. The higher level of interactivity of a
software program or game, for example, the better its rating
- generally speaking. In the case of Rogers' work, the level
of interactivity is definitely high. However, it is the
audience, rather than the machines, who are called upon to
respond to certain demands - success rests on our level of
performance.
SQUAWK -
like a talk show / video game/ computer error buzzer, the
squawk signals a misstep - one that is always public.
Tree branches - moving, out of
focus, whispering, incomprehensible.
Stone describes "bandwidth" as "the amount of information
exchanged in unit time." The high-bandwidth of face-to-face
conversation incorporates speech, gestures and expressions
while the narrow-bandwidth of computer conferencing "is
restricted to lines of text on a screen." In a discussion
about phone sex workers (telephone also being
narrow-bandwidth), Stone describes the interpretive acts
undertaken when the construction of desire relies on voice
only. "In this circumstance, narrow-bandwidth becomes a
powerful asset because extremely complex fantasies can be
generated from a small set of cues."³ Rogers' video images
fall somewhere in between giving us visual as well as aural
information. Her installation, however, insures that most of
us will not be deft enough to catch all of the imagery and
leaves us in a protracted state of desire - and
interpretation of the fragments we can capture.
Reeds, cords, breaking, separating,
with siren-song - song of sorrow and beckoning - a
blasphemous beckoning.
SQUAWK - blurting sound - charged - resonates
through my body in its harshness.
Hair-like strands, long, sway in
circular motion.
The images shift incomprehensibly from suggestions of
nature to suggestions of the body - the hair, the undulating
movements - both technologically produced - both speak to
our embodiment - the body as site of technology's
encroachment, its investment.
The necessity of my chaotic movement in this condensed
space is at once exhausting and exhilarating. I am captive.
My restraint comes of my desire to know - a tension
results from my inability to take in the images completely.
The tension created in our sometimes failed and sometimes
successful attempts to view the images constructs a new
space for the body - an in-between space which lies
somewhere between embodiment and theoretical possibility.
Amber velvet fills a screen -
colour and touch sensuously divergent from the high contrast
graphic quality of most of the images.
The space of the installation speaks to the body's
relations to space and technology and how our situation in
both realms is changing - has changed.
The blurt, the jarring inserts -
they invade my sliding sideways tango with the screens while
they evade my efforts to actually get in front of them - to
see them - all the while they maintain control. I am
mesmerized by the movement -sinking into deep quiet thought
-SQUAWK.
This buzzer sound and the flashed
image are playful, frustrating, and annoying - and I have
anthropomorphized them before I realize it.
For all of the organization of the space and my
rationalization of it, my experience in it remains chaotic.
After being inundated, manipulated,
turned in circles by the screens, I return to the rolling
railway tracks at the ends of the tunnel. Their ongoingness
and seeming stability, are restful - even the machine noise
is welcoming.
It now seems familiar - I recognize
it and am assured by it - have become accustomed to
it.
The White Hall: Technology/Nature
as environmental
The crackle of pebbles underfoot,
gleaming, startlingly white pebbles, signals my entry into
another sensory experience. The expanse of white emptiness
is a relief after the cacophonous dark.
Absent are the referents. This is what technology has
come to give us - empty referents - the stand-ins for
nature, for embodied experience ...
My movements are my own here - no
quick turns, sideward slides, required. I can stand
motionless and take it all in.
A moonlit winter scene - but just a minute - this
beautiful is beyond beautiful. It is too fantastic, too
clean, too pure. It is a simulated snow scene without snow,
a moonlit beach without beach. While there is less clamor,
it is no less a technological construct than the dark
tunnel. It stands as nature absent and re-visited.
The brilliance of Rogers installation, captive and absent, like the
brilliance of the white hall, the space of simulations she
has constructed, are the resonances she has created between
nature, technology and the body.
notes:
1. Allucquere Rossanne Stone, The war of Desire and Technolgy
At the Close of the Mechanical Age. (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1995), 167.
2. A.R. Stone, "Virtual Systems," Incorporations, Zone 6,
(New York: Zone, 1992), eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford
Kwinter, 610. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 167.
3Ibid., 614 - 615.
VERA LEMECHA is an unaffiliated writer and curator
currently residing in Winnipeg. Her curatorial projects have
included: The Embodied Viewer; venus as torpedo: Faye
HeavyShield; Interstitial Spaces: Reva Stone; Ritual Coping:
Joanne Bristol, Bev Pike, Mindy Yan Miller; and Normal:
Leesa Streifler.
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