The Speed of Darkness
Technophiles have a remarkable capacity for optimism. The history of belief in progress is a history of boosterism, celebration, and tantalized delight at the vision of a custom-tailored future just around the corner, brought a little bit closer by each technological innovation. Artists are generally less giddy. Though there have been plenty of shiny, happy futurists who flirted with polished-chrome fascism, they’re outnumbered by paranoid science-fiction writers and painters of apocalyptic scenarios. There’s a reason for this. Worship of technology usually involves a craving for control–over competitors real and imagined, over problems, over human limitations–and art is about finding a balance between control and the uncontrollable. An artist must acknowledge the fears and hungers, the setbacks and accidents and failures that don’t jibe with utopian fantasies of a push-button universe; artists must acknowledge that such a universe can turn dystopian very quickly.
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Laurie Anderson, who made her debut as a recording artist in the early 80s, has always addressed the uneasy symbiotic relationship between humans and gadgets. But the very novelty of her array of electronics and her mechanical persona frequently distracted audiences and press alike from the finer points of her occasionally dark material. To say that she was ahead of her time isn’t exactly accurate–she’s always been very much of her time, one of many artists fascinated by technology and many techies fascinated by art. As a result her current show, The Speed of Darkness (a “collection of stories and songs about the future of art and technology”), doesn’t seem like much of a creative stretch. But in this show she places at the forefront her growing skepticism about technology’s potential to save us. And who’s better qualified than Anderson to get at techno-queasiness from the inside?
The next step for a renegade content provider is to ask what the theater show is about, who the doctors are in the mental hospital, who’s pushing the buttons in the control room. And, the real question, do we trust them? By way of an answer Anderson compares “two epic American stories”: Star Trek and Moby-Dick. Both are voyages into the unknown in the closed society of a ship, and both ships have captains who are in complete control. In the showbiz version, Star Trek, all the plots revolve around an alien force threatening the captain’s control, “and losing control is the worst thing that could happen, and the whole rest of the episode is about regaining control.” But in Moby-Dick the captain is insane and obsessed, and the expedition ends in death and disaster. It’s clear which picture Anderson thinks more accurately portrays reality, but when she growls “Call me Ishmael,” she also leaves herself a convenient way out–by analogy, she too alone escapes to tell thee, no matter how crazy the apocalypse around her gets. Which may well make her a captain of a different sort.
