October 8, 2020 • 43 mins
Cyborgs, cyberspace, mind-melting techno. In the mid-’90s, the future had arrived. To find out what happened to it, Hari pays a visit to philosopher Manuel DeLanda, and to the legendary artist ORLAN, who he first encountered at an academic conference like no other.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Once upon a time, I was depressed, so I
decided to become a philosopher. I was in my early twenties,
and what I really wanted to be was a novelist.
(00:36):
I'd spent a couple of years very broke in London,
doing various gig economy jobs and lugging my record collection
in and out of a series of shared houses. During
this time, I'd written a hundred thousand words of cutting
edge experimental fiction which no one wanted to publish or
(00:57):
even read. I needed something radical to happen. I needed
a future. My solution was to enroll in a master's
program Warwick University, just outside the English city of Coventry.
My plan was, well, I don't really remember what my
(01:18):
plan was exactly. Read some books stored out my head.
On the fourteenth November nineteen forty it became a city
of destruction. The thing you need to know about Coventry
is that the way it looks owes a lot to
the Nazi Luftfaffa. They bombed it more or less flat
in World War Two. The little town that grew into
(01:40):
a famous place of guilds and crafts and medieval ceremony
into a rich trade town into a great center of industry,
into a burned, bombed city. Coventry was reimagined by city planners.
It didn't die, who wanted a rational modernist machine for living,
(02:01):
but ended up with the city center dominated by an
elevated concrete ring road jammed with cars. Coventry had taken
an economic battering during the Thatchy years. You get what
I'm saying. It was not a glamorous place. The most
famous cultural product of Coventry was the band The Specials,
who wrote a song about it called ghost Town. All
(02:33):
the clubs being closed down, my record collection and I
moved to this ghost town in nineteen ninety three. I
was innocent enough to believe that philosophy would be a
noble pursuit. I pictured a group of serious people trying
to find the truth, possibly wearing robes. What I found
(02:53):
instead was a state of war, and soon I was
in the trenches with the rest of them. This is
Into the Zone, a podcast about opposite and how borders
are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru.
(03:16):
This episode is about the present and the future. It's
about minds and bodies. It's about biology and machines. It's
about a time long long ago, when we were cyber
(03:38):
in my new country home. I found bitter personal rivalries
and dreams of well paid jobs on the other side
of the Atlantic, and there was a culture war at
least as bitter as the red and blue of the
Trump era. On one side were the analytic philosophers, who
(03:59):
felt that thinking ought to be rigorous and logical. To them,
the main job of philosophy was to distinguish between truth
and falsehood. Wrote books with a lot of quasi mathematical notation,
and thought of themselves as logical traffic cops, saying which
concepts could go ahead and which had to stop at
(04:20):
the red lights. On the other side were the followers
of Jacques Derrida, French god of deconstruction. The deconstructionists had
come over long years in the university bar to suspect
that the only reality was in the words of the
philosophy books they read. There was nothing outside the text.
(04:44):
These philosophers were poetic and melancholy as far as I
could see. Their ultimate aim in life was to write
essays that sounded as if they'd been badly translated out
of French. Both groups of philosophers were, in their own ways,
unutterably tedious. Luckily for me, there was a third group
(05:04):
in the department. They liked a lot of the same
things I did, including things that weren't philosophy at all,
things such as science fiction, movies featuring people turning into machines,
fractal patterns, techno music, mind altering drugs, experimental fiction, and
(05:27):
above all, a new thing called the Internet. When I
arrived at Warwick, there were only about one hundred and
thirty websites. Have a think about that. Today they're around
one point six billion. I got online using a modem
that made a sound like a sick transistor radio. After
(05:52):
this thing spent a while strangling itself, I might click
a link. Then I could usually go and make a
cup of tea while it loaded. But I didn't care.
The Internet was amazing. It connected me to a whole
new world of subcultural weirdness. Instantly. I could talk to
witches and new foccultists and make out with people pretending
to be unicorns in the text based hot tub of
(06:14):
a multi user domain. It was way better than coventry.
This was cyberspace. That's what we called it. The word
seems quaint now, conjuring up graphics of kids literally surfing
the pixelated waves on PC keyboards. Mostly cyberspace existed in
(06:38):
our dreams, and those dreams were largely formed by the
writer William Gibson. I had that feeling of, you know,
that post geographical feeling. This is him in a documentary
made in two thousand called No Maps for These Territories.
I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic, extended
(07:02):
nervous system for the last hundred years or so, and
it's really starting to take William Gibson's nineteen eighty four
book Neuromancer has the famous opening line, the sky above
the port was the color of television tuned to a
dead channel. It was more than a science fiction novel.
(07:25):
It felt uncanny, like a prophecy of the future. It's
the story of a hacker traveling through the Matrix, a
global internet that manifests as a kind of virtual reality.
Somewhere in the matrix, a sophisticated AI has become conscious.
There's a lot of flying through imaginary cityscapes of Neon
(07:45):
and Matt black Towers. Neuromancer posed questions that were very
interesting to me. About how humans were becoming connected to machines,
how we were linking ourselves together into networks, how machines
were becoming intelligent and bodies were melting into data. Many
(08:09):
of the grad students in my philosophy department were obsessed
with those same questions, and they did what grad students
everywhere do. They organized a conference to talk about it.
They called it Virtual futures. All of a sudden, the
body finds itself in an amidst extraterrestrial space. The body
(08:32):
cannot come. The title virtual Futures referred to William Gibson's
short story The Gernsback Continuum. The Gernsback Continuum is about
an architectural photographer who's hired to take pictures of futuristic
nineteen thirties buildings think chrome and fins and curving concrete.
As he shooting pictures of these decaying old buildings, he
(08:55):
starts to see things to hallucinate people from the future.
Not his own future, but the future that people imagined
when those buildings were new, one with ray guns and
flying cars and food pills. We imagine futures that never
come to pass, imaginary futures that stay as kind of ghosts.
(09:17):
They're not our actual future. They are virtual futures. A
quarter century later, I'm living in a future that contains
some of the things I imagined, and plenty more I didn't.
The future we imagined back in the nineteen nineties now
seems unbelievably far away. Recently, I was going through some
(09:44):
old stuff and found one of the flyers for the
Virtual Futures Conferences. It's hard to say what's going on
exactly because it's really badly photocopied, but I think there's
some kind of hybrid human insect machine sex happening. The
description just says philosophical conference papers have titles like Meltdown,
(10:09):
viewed to Immersion, cyber Apocalypse now, and if you weren't
getting the message, apocalyptics, Cybernetics. The Virtual Futures Conferences. Eventually
there were three, and I went to them. All connected
me to people who are still some of my best friends.
They changed my life, and it wasn't just me. I
(10:32):
was very aware in medicine that the body was being
increasingly observed through machines and that you could see deeper
beneath the skin than ever before, and actually it was
creating a crisis. Rachel Armstrong was a discontented junior doctor
that the people that we saw in the ward were
(10:54):
being abstracted into data. Each space was based on the boy.
Rachel thought she was going to a computer conference. She
hoped it would help her be a better doctor. I
got way more than I bargained for body space back
to the body. That was the first time I'd come
across those extreme ideas and the most incredible performances. A
(11:18):
woman with blue hair from underneath the table, with this
cyberbabble and techno music. It was speaking to me, but
I didn't know what it was. I think the best
way I would describe it was punk. There's a saying
about a sex Pistols gig in Manchester in nineteen seventy
(11:41):
six that everyone who was there started a band. That's
how it was with Virtual Futures. People who were there
started art collectives and record labels and magazines. They became architects,
musicians and filmmakers. But at the time it seemed marginal
and if I'm honest, also a bit ridiculous. But then
(12:04):
that feeling of ridiculousness is sometimes how you feel in
the presence of some thing genuinely new. The audacity was
in a way the best thing about it. I mean,
this was a really industrial carpet setting, with kind of
cheap furniture and very rudimentary technologies. Bizarrely, there we were
(12:27):
on a windswept university campus at the edge of an
unfashionable town in a country known for the past, not
the future. Virtual futures was a way of refusing all
that of claiming the future. And the most viscerally futuristic
thing in my life was music that's hyperon experience. Two
(12:59):
guys from the County of Suffolk who made underground dance
music we called this kind of music hardcore or jungle.
It was a style that came out of the rave scene.
It was diy music made in bedrooms with cheap equipment.
You can hear that it's built around drum brakes from
old funk records. In jungle, the breaks are sped up
(13:34):
beyond the capabilities of any human drummer. Acceleration was the
key to everything. The world seemed to be getting faster,
the future rushing towards us, and this music sounded like
it was breaking free of human limits. It was an
(13:57):
example of the thing we thought we saw all around
us that the human present was heading towards something totally new,
a time when human beings maybe wouldn't even exist anymore.
The post human. That's a word like cyberspace or the
phrase information super Highway. That seems very nineties now, along
(14:19):
with the excessive quoting of William Gibson's writing, Fragments of
Music from the Countless Speakers, Smells of three Monomers, Paddies
of prime firl. I remember one presentation at Virtual Futures
that took place in a darkened room where two young
men in black fatigues pointed a strobe light at the audience,
(14:41):
set very slow, so we were basically blinded about once
a second by a super bright light while they played
very fast industrial music and shouted at us about the
imminent dissolution of our bodies. The thing that made it
hilarious was that we were all sitting down one uncomfortable
(15:04):
plastic chairs in a lecture hall. Headlining Virtual Futures that
first year was a character who looked like he'd stepped
out of Neuromancer. He too was dressed all in black,
black leather jacket, dark glasses, black hair tied in a ponytail,
(15:29):
his name was Manuel Dalanda. Manuel is a philosopher, but
exactly the kind of philosopher we loved, an outsider, a maverick,
a philosopher who connects philosophy to loads of other cool
stuff in chemistry and history and social theory. Recently I
tracked him down and I got to talk to him
(15:52):
at his home in Manhattan. He lives alone in an
apartment in a pre war building near Grand Central Station.
His place is, like him, very focused, kind of monkish.
I got my films into the Widney Biennial and so on,
so everything was guying Joe's joy. Realized that filmmakers are
the proletariat of the art world in New York, and
(16:16):
I hated that Manuel grew up in Mexico. In the
late seventies and eighties, he was part of the legendary
New York downtown scene. He made super eight films that
combined street footage with hand drawn special effects and found
images from pawn and war movies. With his friend Joe Coleman,
(16:37):
he staged some abrasive and confrontational performances for Manuel. Going
too Far wasn't far enough. When the highbrow theoretical publisher
Simia Texts brought the famous French philosopher Gille de Leurs
to town. They invited Manuel and Joe to perform something
radical in air quotes, something that would feel transgressive. Manuel
(17:02):
and Joe decided to visit the seven plagues of Egypt
on the audience, and we attacked it with everything we had,
and we had freshly the capitated house head and a
pig's head. We had live animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats,
crickets to stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his
(17:23):
gear for exploding, and he just was just complete chaos, Yeah, exploding.
One of Joe Coleman's party tricks was to attach explosive
to himself and set them off. If you want, you
can find a video on the Internet of one of
Joe Coleman's performances. It's kind of messed up. He's wearing
(17:44):
a suit with what looks to me like a sheep's
head hung around his neck. He seems like he's playing
a character, yelling at the audience like a preacher. He
bites the heads off some live mice, then takes a
cigarette lighter to a fuse sticking out of the front
of his shirt. People are screaming, scram laying to the exits.
(18:16):
By the time I met Manuel Dalanda at Virtual Futures
in nineteen ninety four, he'd stopped blowing things up with
Joe Coleman and started writing books. Philosophy books are supposed
to have abstract titles, preferably connecting two important words, like
being and time or reasons and persons. Manuel's book was
(18:38):
called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. In it,
he imagined a robot historian looking back at the evolution
of his species. He told a science fiction story about
machines using humans as their reproductive organs until they could
develop the capability to copy themselves. It was a way
(19:01):
to talk about his idea of non organic life and
to approach many technical problems in philosophy. But importantly, it
was also cool. It was a vision of the future
that spoke to us directly. As we dance to jungle
and experimented with connecting ourselves together via the Internet. We
felt as if we were half machine already, that we
(19:23):
were cyborgs, cybernetic organisms. Speaking with Manuel plunges me right
back to all the things that entranced us about his work.
He combines a love of chaos with a ruthlessly analytical mind.
One of the first things that I did when I
(19:44):
came to New York was to trip an acid multiple times.
I mean we're talking about two hundred times problem in
about four years, at the same time studying analytical philosophy.
And that became even more so when I bought my
first computer in nineteen eighty, a huge industrial computer. Once
you get into computers, once you start programming computers, you
understand analytical philosophy much more because all computer languages are
(20:08):
basically derived the logic systems that bertrand Russell and Frega
and so I created. So you're programming and you're really
dealing with the stuff these guys are dealing with. So
I was into analytical philosophy, but acid, which I continue
to take, and I continued victor this day four times
a year, artificial intelligence and robotics. Although that is one
(20:28):
way of crossing the threshold, you know, giving metal, so
to speak, consciousness. I also had in mind things like
the atmosphere of planet Earth. In the atmosphere of planet Earth,
the seas and the river's clause, the atmosphere, you have
all kinds of creatures that emerges spontaneously. Some of them
(20:48):
we name hurricanes because they last long enough and they
have enough energy to causals damage that we need to
name them Hurricane Katrina in bar Urricane Nancy. But then
there are thunderstorms. Thunderstorms are incredible sculptures, incredible machines made
out of clouds with thunder and lightning inside, and they move,
and at any one point in time, the seven or
(21:09):
eight thunderstorms on the planet, there's always some of them
dancing around. They give birth literally to tornadoes. When I
think of a thunderstorm filled with energy and lightning and
giving birth to tornadoes, it's very hard for me not
to think about it as a kind of product all
life self organization, even in the matter when you begin
(21:32):
to realize that, in addition to DNA and proteins that
these things don't have, that we share those processes of
self organization with them, and that life would have never
been able to take off in this planet had it
not been for those previously existing processes organization, do you
begin to question the difference between the living and then
on living. I mean, the really kind of trippy thing
(21:55):
about worry. The age of intelligent machines is asking the
questions about what does happen when not just any old machines,
but machines of war develop a kind of autonomy. I mean,
we're familiar with that in popular culture. We think of Terminator,
we think of the war of the machines against the people.
It gets into a very apocalyptic way of thinking very quickly,
(22:17):
what did you want to focus on war? Well, because
as a materialist, as someone who really took seriously the
idea that there's material culture in addition to symbolic culture,
the material culture of blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, electricians, and someone
who philosophers never think about. Then I began to think, well,
(22:38):
who creates those weapons of war? And then the battlefield
itself is a social space because chimpanzees don't fight wars.
They raid each other's tribes and communities, but they don't
really fight war. So war is a exclusively social and
human phenomenon. Yes, beliefs and symbolic ideas about God and
about patriotism do make you fight, or once you enter
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the battlefield and you begin confronting those flying metallic projectiles
and shock waves, close fire and bodies maimed and killed
and destroyed. It is all material. It is perhaps the
most material space, the one in which you cannot possibly
deny that there's a world that exists in the apparently
of our minds, because it's constantly affecting you. Ma'muel de
(23:23):
Lande's mind is its own planet. He amazes me as
much now as he did when I first encountered him
a quarter century ago. Many philosophers seem to think the
world outside the mind, it's almost impossibly far away, something
for someone else to deal with. But that's not Manuel,
(23:43):
and I don't believe that our senses give us access
to the world as it is. Psychophysicists have shown for
a long time we see only part of the electromagnetic spectrum,
the visible part. We hear only part of the audio spectrum.
If something is too fast, like a bullet striking you're
in the head, we cannot really see the bullet. Something
is too slow, like a rat decomposing, we don't see that.
(24:06):
We only see windows into the world had because we
intervene in the world to change it by technology, by
doing experiments on an everyday life, by cooking and and
changing substances in our kitchen we know a lot more
than our senses revealed, because we know our capacities to
affect the world and the capacities of the world to
(24:28):
affect us. When Manuel Delande came to our conference and Warwick,
it was his first lecture in Europe, and he met
his first cyborg, Stellarc, right off the plane. When I
(24:48):
arrived at my hotel, there was a Stellarc waiting for
his room, and so I got to talk to Stellarc
right away, which blew my mind. I mean, all the
post human ones, he was the only one who was
actually doing something about it. My body is connected to
a muscal stimulated system with the touch screen interface. You
(25:11):
attaching bizarre third arms, you know, robotic third arms, and
swallowing cameras so that they would go their way to
his stomach, doing all kinds of dangerous things in which
the materiality of your body what's at steak. Stellarc is
an Australian artist who started out doing the kind of
(25:32):
seventies performance art that involved enduring a lot of pain.
He'd have hooks put through his skin and have himself
suspended naked in a variety of positions and scenic locations.
Later he became interested in modifying his body with technology.
He was up for anything, swallowing things, attaching things, implanting them.
(25:57):
He was a very cheery fellow. Everyone wants to buy
him drinks. It also reminds me of an interesting story.
When I first made the film of the inside of
the left and right bronchi of the lungs, and I
realized that the track here was a wind tunnel. You know,
you breathed there up and down the track here, and
there was a wind tunnel. So I thought, at that
(26:18):
time we had the oil crisis and the concern about
energy conservation, and I thought, well, if I could implant
a little propeller device in the track ear and through
my regular breathing, I could in fact generate some electricity,
(26:41):
like the rest of us laughing along. Manuel de Landa
admired Stella's experiments on himself, but he didn't think much
of most of the philosophers he met at Virtual Futures.
When I asked him about academics, I triggered one of
his trademark epic rants think about this. Nineteen forty eight
(27:01):
was the beginning of the baby bomb. Roughly this assumed
that he lasted ten years all the way to nineteen
fifty eight, millions of little babies were produced at the
same time. Now, let's assume that you get ten here
when you're thirty years old. Let's assume that, so that's
nineteen seventy eight. All those thousands or millions of babies
got tenure, or many of those got ten ures simultaneously
(27:23):
in nineteen seventy eight. Between nineteen nineteen eighty six, a
massive amount of human flesh entrenched in universities right and
between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty six was the peak
of the fashion of repeating French philosophy without knowing anything
that you know. And so that means that all those
(27:43):
fakers and all those bluffers got ten here simply for
demographic reasons, and we won't get rid of them until
they die, because they literally are entrenched in every university
that I got to. So I already knew that when
I went to work, and so I went there with
the spirit of being very forgiving, but I couldn't really
(28:06):
keep it up. Eventually I began exploding, not literally exploding.
I should say, Manuel is speaking metaphorically here, and you
probably didn't see that. Hopefully, because when I explode and
start saying nasty things to bluffers and fakers, I look
nasty and I look mean, but nevertheless that I can't
(28:26):
help myself. I didn't notice any behind the scenes confrontations
between Manuel and this wall of human flesh. No, I
was too busy marveling at the most unforgettable performer at
the conference. Her name was and is in more Nor
(28:52):
sixty measure School, early twenty twenty. I'm in an artist
(29:13):
studio in Paris. It's a light industrial space cluttered with
amazing objects, sculpture, light boxes, photographs. Several fashionably dressed assistants
are hard at work while the artist herself is on
the phone. Orlane is a startling, glamorous figure, a woman
(29:34):
in her early seventies with vertical hair half white and
half black, and a pair of architectural glasses and horns.
Not massive devil horns, just tasteful bumps implanted under the
skin on either side of her forehead. At Virtual Futures
(29:55):
back in the mid nineties, Orlane gave what was probably
the most scandalous presentation of all, the one that people remembered.
All I knew about her was that she was a
French artist who spelled her name in all caps. Like
her one named Counterparts, dellac or Lyon, used her body
to make her art. You'll need some context for what
(30:18):
comes next. There was a strong feminist strand at Virtual Futures, I,
particularly concerned with what are the virtual futures of gender
and sexuality? Asked one panel, can patriarchy survive the emergence
of cyberspace? Well, obviously the answer to that one is
(30:41):
a resounding yes. There was an element of weird naughtiness
to it all. One day at Virtual Futures, I walked
into a session on cyber feminism and was surprised to
see someone I'd last known as a very serious feminist
theorist now here. She was kneeling on stage wearing a
silver dress and eighth hold Doc Martin Boots submissively tying
(31:03):
and untying the ribbons on a pair of ballet shoes
on the feet of an Australian artist giving a speech
on patriarchal databanks awareness about its relationship to these movement.
None of this, you understand, happened at normal philosophy conferences,
and certainly normal philosophy conferences didn't have or line. They'd
(31:24):
scheduled Orlane's talk for ten am on Sunday. A lot
of people, myself included, had been up late the night before,
stumbling around to ear splittingly loud jungle in the cavernists
and depressing Warwick Students Union. I was not in good shape,
and looking around I saw her. I wasn't the only one.
(31:48):
Orlane was a strange spectral figure who spoke no English.
Through an interpreter, she explained that she had recently done
a series of performances involving plastic surgery. I wasn't sure
I had heard right. She pressed play on a video
two minutes later. The lecture hall was a scene of carnage.
(32:11):
The video, all unplayed, was disturbing, to say the least.
Wearing a black pleated dress, she sits in an operating theater,
her face dotted with purplish marker. She's surrounded by various
objects that you wouldn't normally find in a medical setting,
vases of flowers, clocks showing the time in various cities,
(32:33):
people who might be nurses or assistants in flamboyant costumes.
Then a masked surgeon begins to cut her face open.
She isn't under general anesthetic. She's talking, reciting poetry to
the camera. As the surgeon lifts part of her face off,
(32:57):
she's still talking. The audience at Warwick quickly fell to pieces.
At least one person fainted. Another ran for the door,
holding his hands over his mouth to keep from throwing up.
Several more walked out. I stayed to the end of
Orlan's ordeal that there were parts I couldn't watch, and
(33:19):
I was very glad I hadn't even a heavy breakfast. Later,
after the shock had worn off, I was able to
understand something of what I just witnessed. Instead of having
surgery to make herself beautiful, Orlan made the surgery part
of a performance where she asked what beauty means. In
(33:43):
the surgery I watched, she had part of a procedure
that's used for facelifts. In another surgery, she had her
horns inserted. In another, she had li persuption. In all
of this, Orlan was the director, the controller, awakened, in
charge of things, not a passive victim on an operating
table suffering to look better for men. Orlan was an outsider,
(34:07):
someone who'd made herself look scary even monstrous, someone who
was prepared to do things others wouldn't dare both well welcome,
thank you. Twenty five years later, at all Our studio
in Paris, I was able to ask her about those
(34:29):
plastic surgery performances the past, the chapelle Celia so ce
presber control. It was a fight against the innate. The
(34:58):
face I have is a mask like any other, and
it's a mask that I didn't want. I didn't decide
the color of my eyes, the length of my nose,
of my mouth. Well, so this was an attempt to
get out of the frame. It was an attempt to
move the bars of the gage. Anatomy is no longer destiny.
(35:20):
Back in grad school, I'd found Alan's spooky and intimidating.
She's still very grand in the way that famous older
artists can be grand, but she's good fun. I bring
up a project she had back then to change her nose.
She wanted to have a monstrously large nose attached to
her face, the largest that it could physically support. No
(35:42):
surgeon would do it for ethical reasons, which himself is
kind of interesting, because plastic surgeons do some pretty strange
stuff without getting hung up on ethics. Alipok Kum transform
all ourn Arch is an eyebrow and points out that
(36:02):
I have kind of a large nose myself, which is true.
I think she's flirting. And then there's the issue of
her horns a pussy. Surely, tomp I wanted to do
something that wasn't supposed to happen, to bring beauty. If
(36:26):
I'm described as a woman who has two bumps on
her temples, you can consider that I am absolutely horrible, monstrous.
But if I'm seen, it can change. It doesn't always change,
but sometimes it can change because these horrible bumps have
become organs of seduction like any other. Since the days
(36:49):
of her surgeries, or Lane has worked with her body
in different ways. She's made robots, She's made work from
her vaginal flora. She's used her image in every conceivable way.
With her black and white hair. She's like a warmer,
more humorous Crewela de Ville. Her cartoonish appearance is part
(37:10):
of her work. We will see her own presuit, don't.
I always try to be alert, and when I see
when I feel something, whether it's technological but also a
social movement, a social phenomenon, I try to question it.
(37:31):
To see what I can do with it in which
direction I can twist it. So all Land's doing well.
I've just about recovered. But what happened to the other
attendees of Virtual Futures Like Rachel Armstrong, the young doctor
who came to the conference hoping to learn about computers
(37:55):
Virtual futures, she had her mind blown. She began thinking
in wild theoretical ways about how organization happens in living systems,
how life gets built. And that was where I started
my journey, and I came up with something called the
Cytoplasic Manifesto. I was really trying to look at the
(38:17):
organizing matrices before DNA apparently took over, and look at
the enabling conditions in which material organization could be possible.
Someone Rachel met at Virtual Futures said that with her
interest in the building blocks of life, she ought to
come and teach at his architecture school, and that's what
(38:37):
she did. Today she's a professor of Experimental Architecture at
the University of Newcastle. So I think the notion of
future is still up for grabs, and I think that
the Virtual Futures kind of made us think about the
pieces that we'd been presented with as for the pieces
of my future. I got my degree and I went
(39:00):
back to London, my head full of ideas about art
and technology and politics. I became part of an editorial collective,
making a magazine and putting on events, and started getting
paid writing gigs. For several years, I supported myself by
writing journalism, mostly about technology and music. But all the
time I was writing fiction, publishing stories wherever I could.
(39:25):
Eventually I sold a novel and was on the road
towards the ultimate goal of having my own podcast. The
future in twenty twenty has changed. It's not the future
of infinite invention that we imagined in the nineteen nineties.
Manuel de Lander is still single mindedly plowing the philosophical
furrow he began all those years ago. Or Lane is
(39:49):
more or Lane than ever an Orland studio. A distinguished
visitor has arrived. One of the members of France's Academy
de Bouzar Orlan is being considered for membership, a huge honor.
The academy has only sixty three seats. Someone usually has
(40:10):
to die before a new member can be admitted. It
represents the cultural establishment of France. While on the outsider
is on the verge of becoming the ultimate insider. Still,
(40:31):
other people from the Virtual Futures days are making art,
writing books. I could have made another five episodes just
about their work. But in twenty twenty one thing unites us.
We're all still imagining futures that may never come to pass,
at least not exactly in the way we think. But
(40:52):
still we imagine them, Still we dream. All these experiments,
(41:16):
weird artists, weirder philosophers. They gave us a roadmap for
the odd actual future to come, but they couldn't prepare
us for everything. My favorite definition of virus comes from
this guy named Peter Medawar who's sort of near twentieth
century biologists, and he said that a virus is a
(41:37):
piece of bad news wrapped up in protein. On next
week's season finale of Into the Zone, time capsules, tardigrades,
and perhaps the most important question of all, what is
life and what is death? And does that distinction even matter?
(42:00):
Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Mire La Belle is our
exact different producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for
this episode composed by Izzio Campo, also known as Student.
(42:20):
Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Peginatti, also
known as lip Talk. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,
John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick,
and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of
Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting
(42:43):
others know. The best way to do this is by
rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a
review and for a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired
this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at
Harry Kunzru. I'm nasty and I look neon, but nevertheless
(43:04):
I can't help myself. Harry Kunzru, See you next time.
Pushkin. Once upon a time, I was depressed, so I
decided to become a philosopher. I was in my early twenties,
and what I really wanted to be was a novelist.
(00:36):
I'd spent a couple of years very broke in London,
doing various gig economy jobs and lugging my record collection
in and out of a series of shared houses. During
this time, I'd written a hundred thousand words of cutting
edge experimental fiction which no one wanted to publish or
(00:57):
even read. I needed something radical to happen. I needed
a future. My solution was to enroll in a master's
program Warwick University, just outside the English city of Coventry.
My plan was, well, I don't really remember what my
(01:18):
plan was exactly. Read some books stored out my head.
On the fourteenth November nineteen forty it became a city
of destruction. The thing you need to know about Coventry
is that the way it looks owes a lot to
the Nazi Luftfaffa. They bombed it more or less flat
in World War Two. The little town that grew into
(01:40):
a famous place of guilds and crafts and medieval ceremony
into a rich trade town into a great center of industry,
into a burned, bombed city. Coventry was reimagined by city planners.
It didn't die, who wanted a rational modernist machine for living,
(02:01):
but ended up with the city center dominated by an
elevated concrete ring road jammed with cars. Coventry had taken
an economic battering during the Thatchy years. You get what
I'm saying. It was not a glamorous place. The most
famous cultural product of Coventry was the band The Specials,
who wrote a song about it called ghost Town. All
(02:33):
the clubs being closed down, my record collection and I
moved to this ghost town in nineteen ninety three. I
was innocent enough to believe that philosophy would be a
noble pursuit. I pictured a group of serious people trying
to find the truth, possibly wearing robes. What I found
(02:53):
instead was a state of war, and soon I was
in the trenches with the rest of them. This is
Into the Zone, a podcast about opposite and how borders
are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru.
(03:16):
This episode is about the present and the future. It's
about minds and bodies. It's about biology and machines. It's
about a time long long ago, when we were cyber
(03:38):
in my new country home. I found bitter personal rivalries
and dreams of well paid jobs on the other side
of the Atlantic, and there was a culture war at
least as bitter as the red and blue of the
Trump era. On one side were the analytic philosophers, who
(03:59):
felt that thinking ought to be rigorous and logical. To them,
the main job of philosophy was to distinguish between truth
and falsehood. Wrote books with a lot of quasi mathematical notation,
and thought of themselves as logical traffic cops, saying which
concepts could go ahead and which had to stop at
(04:20):
the red lights. On the other side were the followers
of Jacques Derrida, French god of deconstruction. The deconstructionists had
come over long years in the university bar to suspect
that the only reality was in the words of the
philosophy books they read. There was nothing outside the text.
(04:44):
These philosophers were poetic and melancholy as far as I
could see. Their ultimate aim in life was to write
essays that sounded as if they'd been badly translated out
of French. Both groups of philosophers were, in their own ways,
unutterably tedious. Luckily for me, there was a third group
(05:04):
in the department. They liked a lot of the same
things I did, including things that weren't philosophy at all,
things such as science fiction, movies featuring people turning into machines,
fractal patterns, techno music, mind altering drugs, experimental fiction, and
(05:27):
above all, a new thing called the Internet. When I
arrived at Warwick, there were only about one hundred and
thirty websites. Have a think about that. Today they're around
one point six billion. I got online using a modem
that made a sound like a sick transistor radio. After
(05:52):
this thing spent a while strangling itself, I might click
a link. Then I could usually go and make a
cup of tea while it loaded. But I didn't care.
The Internet was amazing. It connected me to a whole
new world of subcultural weirdness. Instantly. I could talk to
witches and new foccultists and make out with people pretending
to be unicorns in the text based hot tub of
(06:14):
a multi user domain. It was way better than coventry.
This was cyberspace. That's what we called it. The word
seems quaint now, conjuring up graphics of kids literally surfing
the pixelated waves on PC keyboards. Mostly cyberspace existed in
(06:38):
our dreams, and those dreams were largely formed by the
writer William Gibson. I had that feeling of, you know,
that post geographical feeling. This is him in a documentary
made in two thousand called No Maps for These Territories.
I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic, extended
(07:02):
nervous system for the last hundred years or so, and
it's really starting to take William Gibson's nineteen eighty four
book Neuromancer has the famous opening line, the sky above
the port was the color of television tuned to a
dead channel. It was more than a science fiction novel.
(07:25):
It felt uncanny, like a prophecy of the future. It's
the story of a hacker traveling through the Matrix, a
global internet that manifests as a kind of virtual reality.
Somewhere in the matrix, a sophisticated AI has become conscious.
There's a lot of flying through imaginary cityscapes of Neon
(07:45):
and Matt black Towers. Neuromancer posed questions that were very
interesting to me. About how humans were becoming connected to machines,
how we were linking ourselves together into networks, how machines
were becoming intelligent and bodies were melting into data. Many
(08:09):
of the grad students in my philosophy department were obsessed
with those same questions, and they did what grad students
everywhere do. They organized a conference to talk about it.
They called it Virtual futures. All of a sudden, the
body finds itself in an amidst extraterrestrial space. The body
(08:32):
cannot come. The title virtual Futures referred to William Gibson's
short story The Gernsback Continuum. The Gernsback Continuum is about
an architectural photographer who's hired to take pictures of futuristic
nineteen thirties buildings think chrome and fins and curving concrete.
As he shooting pictures of these decaying old buildings, he
(08:55):
starts to see things to hallucinate people from the future.
Not his own future, but the future that people imagined
when those buildings were new, one with ray guns and
flying cars and food pills. We imagine futures that never
come to pass, imaginary futures that stay as kind of ghosts.
(09:17):
They're not our actual future. They are virtual futures. A
quarter century later, I'm living in a future that contains
some of the things I imagined, and plenty more I didn't.
The future we imagined back in the nineteen nineties now
seems unbelievably far away. Recently, I was going through some
(09:44):
old stuff and found one of the flyers for the
Virtual Futures Conferences. It's hard to say what's going on
exactly because it's really badly photocopied, but I think there's
some kind of hybrid human insect machine sex happening. The
description just says philosophical conference papers have titles like Meltdown,
(10:09):
viewed to Immersion, cyber Apocalypse now, and if you weren't
getting the message, apocalyptics, Cybernetics. The Virtual Futures Conferences. Eventually
there were three, and I went to them. All connected
me to people who are still some of my best friends.
They changed my life, and it wasn't just me. I
(10:32):
was very aware in medicine that the body was being
increasingly observed through machines and that you could see deeper
beneath the skin than ever before, and actually it was
creating a crisis. Rachel Armstrong was a discontented junior doctor
that the people that we saw in the ward were
(10:54):
being abstracted into data. Each space was based on the boy.
Rachel thought she was going to a computer conference. She
hoped it would help her be a better doctor. I
got way more than I bargained for body space back
to the body. That was the first time I'd come
across those extreme ideas and the most incredible performances. A
(11:18):
woman with blue hair from underneath the table, with this
cyberbabble and techno music. It was speaking to me, but
I didn't know what it was. I think the best
way I would describe it was punk. There's a saying
about a sex Pistols gig in Manchester in nineteen seventy
(11:41):
six that everyone who was there started a band. That's
how it was with Virtual Futures. People who were there
started art collectives and record labels and magazines. They became architects,
musicians and filmmakers. But at the time it seemed marginal
and if I'm honest, also a bit ridiculous. But then
(12:04):
that feeling of ridiculousness is sometimes how you feel in
the presence of some thing genuinely new. The audacity was
in a way the best thing about it. I mean,
this was a really industrial carpet setting, with kind of
cheap furniture and very rudimentary technologies. Bizarrely, there we were
(12:27):
on a windswept university campus at the edge of an
unfashionable town in a country known for the past, not
the future. Virtual futures was a way of refusing all
that of claiming the future. And the most viscerally futuristic
thing in my life was music that's hyperon experience. Two
(12:59):
guys from the County of Suffolk who made underground dance
music we called this kind of music hardcore or jungle.
It was a style that came out of the rave scene.
It was diy music made in bedrooms with cheap equipment.
You can hear that it's built around drum brakes from
old funk records. In jungle, the breaks are sped up
(13:34):
beyond the capabilities of any human drummer. Acceleration was the
key to everything. The world seemed to be getting faster,
the future rushing towards us, and this music sounded like
it was breaking free of human limits. It was an
(13:57):
example of the thing we thought we saw all around
us that the human present was heading towards something totally new,
a time when human beings maybe wouldn't even exist anymore.
The post human. That's a word like cyberspace or the
phrase information super Highway. That seems very nineties now, along
(14:19):
with the excessive quoting of William Gibson's writing, Fragments of
Music from the Countless Speakers, Smells of three Monomers, Paddies
of prime firl. I remember one presentation at Virtual Futures
that took place in a darkened room where two young
men in black fatigues pointed a strobe light at the audience,
(14:41):
set very slow, so we were basically blinded about once
a second by a super bright light while they played
very fast industrial music and shouted at us about the
imminent dissolution of our bodies. The thing that made it
hilarious was that we were all sitting down one uncomfortable
(15:04):
plastic chairs in a lecture hall. Headlining Virtual Futures that
first year was a character who looked like he'd stepped
out of Neuromancer. He too was dressed all in black,
black leather jacket, dark glasses, black hair tied in a ponytail,
(15:29):
his name was Manuel Dalanda. Manuel is a philosopher, but
exactly the kind of philosopher we loved, an outsider, a maverick,
a philosopher who connects philosophy to loads of other cool
stuff in chemistry and history and social theory. Recently I
tracked him down and I got to talk to him
(15:52):
at his home in Manhattan. He lives alone in an
apartment in a pre war building near Grand Central Station.
His place is, like him, very focused, kind of monkish.
I got my films into the Widney Biennial and so on,
so everything was guying Joe's joy. Realized that filmmakers are
the proletariat of the art world in New York, and
(16:16):
I hated that Manuel grew up in Mexico. In the
late seventies and eighties, he was part of the legendary
New York downtown scene. He made super eight films that
combined street footage with hand drawn special effects and found
images from pawn and war movies. With his friend Joe Coleman,
(16:37):
he staged some abrasive and confrontational performances for Manuel. Going
too Far wasn't far enough. When the highbrow theoretical publisher
Simia Texts brought the famous French philosopher Gille de Leurs
to town. They invited Manuel and Joe to perform something
radical in air quotes, something that would feel transgressive. Manuel
(17:02):
and Joe decided to visit the seven plagues of Egypt
on the audience, and we attacked it with everything we had,
and we had freshly the capitated house head and a
pig's head. We had live animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats,
crickets to stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his
(17:23):
gear for exploding, and he just was just complete chaos, Yeah, exploding.
One of Joe Coleman's party tricks was to attach explosive
to himself and set them off. If you want, you
can find a video on the Internet of one of
Joe Coleman's performances. It's kind of messed up. He's wearing
(17:44):
a suit with what looks to me like a sheep's
head hung around his neck. He seems like he's playing
a character, yelling at the audience like a preacher. He
bites the heads off some live mice, then takes a
cigarette lighter to a fuse sticking out of the front
of his shirt. People are screaming, scram laying to the exits.
(18:16):
By the time I met Manuel Dalanda at Virtual Futures
in nineteen ninety four, he'd stopped blowing things up with
Joe Coleman and started writing books. Philosophy books are supposed
to have abstract titles, preferably connecting two important words, like
being and time or reasons and persons. Manuel's book was
(18:38):
called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. In it,
he imagined a robot historian looking back at the evolution
of his species. He told a science fiction story about
machines using humans as their reproductive organs until they could
develop the capability to copy themselves. It was a way
(19:01):
to talk about his idea of non organic life and
to approach many technical problems in philosophy. But importantly, it
was also cool. It was a vision of the future
that spoke to us directly. As we dance to jungle
and experimented with connecting ourselves together via the Internet. We
felt as if we were half machine already, that we
(19:23):
were cyborgs, cybernetic organisms. Speaking with Manuel plunges me right
back to all the things that entranced us about his work.
He combines a love of chaos with a ruthlessly analytical mind.
One of the first things that I did when I
(19:44):
came to New York was to trip an acid multiple times.
I mean we're talking about two hundred times problem in
about four years, at the same time studying analytical philosophy.
And that became even more so when I bought my
first computer in nineteen eighty, a huge industrial computer. Once
you get into computers, once you start programming computers, you
understand analytical philosophy much more because all computer languages are
(20:08):
basically derived the logic systems that bertrand Russell and Frega
and so I created. So you're programming and you're really
dealing with the stuff these guys are dealing with. So
I was into analytical philosophy, but acid, which I continue
to take, and I continued victor this day four times
a year, artificial intelligence and robotics. Although that is one
(20:28):
way of crossing the threshold, you know, giving metal, so
to speak, consciousness. I also had in mind things like
the atmosphere of planet Earth. In the atmosphere of planet Earth,
the seas and the river's clause, the atmosphere, you have
all kinds of creatures that emerges spontaneously. Some of them
(20:48):
we name hurricanes because they last long enough and they
have enough energy to causals damage that we need to
name them Hurricane Katrina in bar Urricane Nancy. But then
there are thunderstorms. Thunderstorms are incredible sculptures, incredible machines made
out of clouds with thunder and lightning inside, and they move,
and at any one point in time, the seven or
(21:09):
eight thunderstorms on the planet, there's always some of them
dancing around. They give birth literally to tornadoes. When I
think of a thunderstorm filled with energy and lightning and
giving birth to tornadoes, it's very hard for me not
to think about it as a kind of product all
life self organization, even in the matter when you begin
(21:32):
to realize that, in addition to DNA and proteins that
these things don't have, that we share those processes of
self organization with them, and that life would have never
been able to take off in this planet had it
not been for those previously existing processes organization, do you
begin to question the difference between the living and then
on living. I mean, the really kind of trippy thing
(21:55):
about worry. The age of intelligent machines is asking the
questions about what does happen when not just any old machines,
but machines of war develop a kind of autonomy. I mean,
we're familiar with that in popular culture. We think of Terminator,
we think of the war of the machines against the people.
It gets into a very apocalyptic way of thinking very quickly,
(22:17):
what did you want to focus on war? Well, because
as a materialist, as someone who really took seriously the
idea that there's material culture in addition to symbolic culture,
the material culture of blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, electricians, and someone
who philosophers never think about. Then I began to think, well,
(22:38):
who creates those weapons of war? And then the battlefield
itself is a social space because chimpanzees don't fight wars.
They raid each other's tribes and communities, but they don't
really fight war. So war is a exclusively social and
human phenomenon. Yes, beliefs and symbolic ideas about God and
about patriotism do make you fight, or once you enter
(23:01):
the battlefield and you begin confronting those flying metallic projectiles
and shock waves, close fire and bodies maimed and killed
and destroyed. It is all material. It is perhaps the
most material space, the one in which you cannot possibly
deny that there's a world that exists in the apparently
of our minds, because it's constantly affecting you. Ma'muel de
(23:23):
Lande's mind is its own planet. He amazes me as
much now as he did when I first encountered him
a quarter century ago. Many philosophers seem to think the
world outside the mind, it's almost impossibly far away, something
for someone else to deal with. But that's not Manuel,
(23:43):
and I don't believe that our senses give us access
to the world as it is. Psychophysicists have shown for
a long time we see only part of the electromagnetic spectrum,
the visible part. We hear only part of the audio spectrum.
If something is too fast, like a bullet striking you're
in the head, we cannot really see the bullet. Something
is too slow, like a rat decomposing, we don't see that.
(24:06):
We only see windows into the world had because we
intervene in the world to change it by technology, by
doing experiments on an everyday life, by cooking and and
changing substances in our kitchen we know a lot more
than our senses revealed, because we know our capacities to
affect the world and the capacities of the world to
(24:28):
affect us. When Manuel Delande came to our conference and Warwick,
it was his first lecture in Europe, and he met
his first cyborg, Stellarc, right off the plane. When I
(24:48):
arrived at my hotel, there was a Stellarc waiting for
his room, and so I got to talk to Stellarc
right away, which blew my mind. I mean, all the
post human ones, he was the only one who was
actually doing something about it. My body is connected to
a muscal stimulated system with the touch screen interface. You
(25:11):
attaching bizarre third arms, you know, robotic third arms, and
swallowing cameras so that they would go their way to
his stomach, doing all kinds of dangerous things in which
the materiality of your body what's at steak. Stellarc is
an Australian artist who started out doing the kind of
(25:32):
seventies performance art that involved enduring a lot of pain.
He'd have hooks put through his skin and have himself
suspended naked in a variety of positions and scenic locations.
Later he became interested in modifying his body with technology.
He was up for anything, swallowing things, attaching things, implanting them.
(25:57):
He was a very cheery fellow. Everyone wants to buy
him drinks. It also reminds me of an interesting story.
When I first made the film of the inside of
the left and right bronchi of the lungs, and I
realized that the track here was a wind tunnel. You know,
you breathed there up and down the track here, and
there was a wind tunnel. So I thought, at that
(26:18):
time we had the oil crisis and the concern about
energy conservation, and I thought, well, if I could implant
a little propeller device in the track ear and through
my regular breathing, I could in fact generate some electricity,
(26:41):
like the rest of us laughing along. Manuel de Landa
admired Stella's experiments on himself, but he didn't think much
of most of the philosophers he met at Virtual Futures.
When I asked him about academics, I triggered one of
his trademark epic rants think about this. Nineteen forty eight
(27:01):
was the beginning of the baby bomb. Roughly this assumed
that he lasted ten years all the way to nineteen
fifty eight, millions of little babies were produced at the
same time. Now, let's assume that you get ten here
when you're thirty years old. Let's assume that, so that's
nineteen seventy eight. All those thousands or millions of babies
got tenure, or many of those got ten ures simultaneously
(27:23):
in nineteen seventy eight. Between nineteen nineteen eighty six, a
massive amount of human flesh entrenched in universities right and
between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty six was the peak
of the fashion of repeating French philosophy without knowing anything
that you know. And so that means that all those
(27:43):
fakers and all those bluffers got ten here simply for
demographic reasons, and we won't get rid of them until
they die, because they literally are entrenched in every university
that I got to. So I already knew that when
I went to work, and so I went there with
the spirit of being very forgiving, but I couldn't really
(28:06):
keep it up. Eventually I began exploding, not literally exploding.
I should say, Manuel is speaking metaphorically here, and you
probably didn't see that. Hopefully, because when I explode and
start saying nasty things to bluffers and fakers, I look
nasty and I look mean, but nevertheless that I can't
(28:26):
help myself. I didn't notice any behind the scenes confrontations
between Manuel and this wall of human flesh. No, I
was too busy marveling at the most unforgettable performer at
the conference. Her name was and is in more Nor
(28:52):
sixty measure School, early twenty twenty. I'm in an artist
(29:13):
studio in Paris. It's a light industrial space cluttered with
amazing objects, sculpture, light boxes, photographs. Several fashionably dressed assistants
are hard at work while the artist herself is on
the phone. Orlane is a startling, glamorous figure, a woman
(29:34):
in her early seventies with vertical hair half white and
half black, and a pair of architectural glasses and horns.
Not massive devil horns, just tasteful bumps implanted under the
skin on either side of her forehead. At Virtual Futures
(29:55):
back in the mid nineties, Orlane gave what was probably
the most scandalous presentation of all, the one that people remembered.
All I knew about her was that she was a
French artist who spelled her name in all caps. Like
her one named Counterparts, dellac or Lyon, used her body
to make her art. You'll need some context for what
(30:18):
comes next. There was a strong feminist strand at Virtual Futures, I,
particularly concerned with what are the virtual futures of gender
and sexuality? Asked one panel, can patriarchy survive the emergence
of cyberspace? Well, obviously the answer to that one is
(30:41):
a resounding yes. There was an element of weird naughtiness
to it all. One day at Virtual Futures, I walked
into a session on cyber feminism and was surprised to
see someone I'd last known as a very serious feminist
theorist now here. She was kneeling on stage wearing a
silver dress and eighth hold Doc Martin Boots submissively tying
(31:03):
and untying the ribbons on a pair of ballet shoes
on the feet of an Australian artist giving a speech
on patriarchal databanks awareness about its relationship to these movement.
None of this, you understand, happened at normal philosophy conferences,
and certainly normal philosophy conferences didn't have or line. They'd
(31:24):
scheduled Orlane's talk for ten am on Sunday. A lot
of people, myself included, had been up late the night before,
stumbling around to ear splittingly loud jungle in the cavernists
and depressing Warwick Students Union. I was not in good shape,
and looking around I saw her. I wasn't the only one.
(31:48):
Orlane was a strange spectral figure who spoke no English.
Through an interpreter, she explained that she had recently done
a series of performances involving plastic surgery. I wasn't sure
I had heard right. She pressed play on a video
two minutes later. The lecture hall was a scene of carnage.
(32:11):
The video, all unplayed, was disturbing, to say the least.
Wearing a black pleated dress, she sits in an operating theater,
her face dotted with purplish marker. She's surrounded by various
objects that you wouldn't normally find in a medical setting,
vases of flowers, clocks showing the time in various cities,
(32:33):
people who might be nurses or assistants in flamboyant costumes.
Then a masked surgeon begins to cut her face open.
She isn't under general anesthetic. She's talking, reciting poetry to
the camera. As the surgeon lifts part of her face off,
(32:57):
she's still talking. The audience at Warwick quickly fell to pieces.
At least one person fainted. Another ran for the door,
holding his hands over his mouth to keep from throwing up.
Several more walked out. I stayed to the end of
Orlan's ordeal that there were parts I couldn't watch, and
(33:19):
I was very glad I hadn't even a heavy breakfast. Later,
after the shock had worn off, I was able to
understand something of what I just witnessed. Instead of having
surgery to make herself beautiful, Orlan made the surgery part
of a performance where she asked what beauty means. In
(33:43):
the surgery I watched, she had part of a procedure
that's used for facelifts. In another surgery, she had her
horns inserted. In another, she had li persuption. In all
of this, Orlan was the director, the controller, awakened, in
charge of things, not a passive victim on an operating
table suffering to look better for men. Orlan was an outsider,
(34:07):
someone who'd made herself look scary even monstrous, someone who
was prepared to do things others wouldn't dare both well welcome,
thank you. Twenty five years later, at all Our studio
in Paris, I was able to ask her about those
(34:29):
plastic surgery performances the past, the chapelle Celia so ce
presber control. It was a fight against the innate. The
(34:58):
face I have is a mask like any other, and
it's a mask that I didn't want. I didn't decide
the color of my eyes, the length of my nose,
of my mouth. Well, so this was an attempt to
get out of the frame. It was an attempt to
move the bars of the gage. Anatomy is no longer destiny.
(35:20):
Back in grad school, I'd found Alan's spooky and intimidating.
She's still very grand in the way that famous older
artists can be grand, but she's good fun. I bring
up a project she had back then to change her nose.
She wanted to have a monstrously large nose attached to
her face, the largest that it could physically support. No
(35:42):
surgeon would do it for ethical reasons, which himself is
kind of interesting, because plastic surgeons do some pretty strange
stuff without getting hung up on ethics. Alipok Kum transform
all ourn Arch is an eyebrow and points out that
(36:02):
I have kind of a large nose myself, which is true.
I think she's flirting. And then there's the issue of
her horns a pussy. Surely, tomp I wanted to do
something that wasn't supposed to happen, to bring beauty. If
(36:26):
I'm described as a woman who has two bumps on
her temples, you can consider that I am absolutely horrible, monstrous.
But if I'm seen, it can change. It doesn't always change,
but sometimes it can change because these horrible bumps have
become organs of seduction like any other. Since the days
(36:49):
of her surgeries, or Lane has worked with her body
in different ways. She's made robots, She's made work from
her vaginal flora. She's used her image in every conceivable way.
With her black and white hair. She's like a warmer,
more humorous Crewela de Ville. Her cartoonish appearance is part
(37:10):
of her work. We will see her own presuit, don't.
I always try to be alert, and when I see
when I feel something, whether it's technological but also a
social movement, a social phenomenon, I try to question it.
(37:31):
To see what I can do with it in which
direction I can twist it. So all Land's doing well.
I've just about recovered. But what happened to the other
attendees of Virtual Futures Like Rachel Armstrong, the young doctor
who came to the conference hoping to learn about computers
(37:55):
Virtual futures, she had her mind blown. She began thinking
in wild theoretical ways about how organization happens in living systems,
how life gets built. And that was where I started
my journey, and I came up with something called the
Cytoplasic Manifesto. I was really trying to look at the
(38:17):
organizing matrices before DNA apparently took over, and look at
the enabling conditions in which material organization could be possible.
Someone Rachel met at Virtual Futures said that with her
interest in the building blocks of life, she ought to
come and teach at his architecture school, and that's what
(38:37):
she did. Today she's a professor of Experimental Architecture at
the University of Newcastle. So I think the notion of
future is still up for grabs, and I think that
the Virtual Futures kind of made us think about the
pieces that we'd been presented with as for the pieces
of my future. I got my degree and I went
(39:00):
back to London, my head full of ideas about art
and technology and politics. I became part of an editorial collective,
making a magazine and putting on events, and started getting
paid writing gigs. For several years, I supported myself by
writing journalism, mostly about technology and music. But all the
time I was writing fiction, publishing stories wherever I could.
(39:25):
Eventually I sold a novel and was on the road
towards the ultimate goal of having my own podcast. The
future in twenty twenty has changed. It's not the future
of infinite invention that we imagined in the nineteen nineties.
Manuel de Lander is still single mindedly plowing the philosophical
furrow he began all those years ago. Or Lane is
(39:49):
more or Lane than ever an Orland studio. A distinguished
visitor has arrived. One of the members of France's Academy
de Bouzar Orlan is being considered for membership, a huge honor.
The academy has only sixty three seats. Someone usually has
(40:10):
to die before a new member can be admitted. It
represents the cultural establishment of France. While on the outsider
is on the verge of becoming the ultimate insider. Still,
(40:31):
other people from the Virtual Futures days are making art,
writing books. I could have made another five episodes just
about their work. But in twenty twenty one thing unites us.
We're all still imagining futures that may never come to pass,
at least not exactly in the way we think. But
(40:52):
still we imagine them, Still we dream. All these experiments,
(41:16):
weird artists, weirder philosophers. They gave us a roadmap for
the odd actual future to come, but they couldn't prepare
us for everything. My favorite definition of virus comes from
this guy named Peter Medawar who's sort of near twentieth
century biologists, and he said that a virus is a
(41:37):
piece of bad news wrapped up in protein. On next
week's season finale of Into the Zone, time capsules, tardigrades,
and perhaps the most important question of all, what is
life and what is death? And does that distinction even matter?
(42:00):
Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Mire La Belle is our
exact different producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for
this episode composed by Izzio Campo, also known as Student.
(42:20):
Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Peginatti, also
known as lip Talk. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,
John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick,
and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of
Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting
(42:43):
others know. The best way to do this is by
rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a
review and for a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired
this episode. You can find me on Twitter at at
Harry Kunzru. I'm nasty and I look neon, but nevertheless
(43:04):
I can't help myself. Harry Kunzru, See you next time.
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