SEX MACHINE ART:
FROM MECHANICAL REPETITION INTO ELECTRONIC FLICKER
by Joseph Nechvatal
To quote Deleuze: "The subconscious is a factory, a machine for production."
In 1912 Marcel Duchamp along with Appollinaire and Picabia attended a performance
of "Impressions of Africa", a
play by an obscure author named Raymond Roussel. Roussel greatly admired
the works of the author Jules Verne which he read over and over again, fascinated
with their extraodinary voyages and machines, with bachelor scientists completely
absorbed in positivist exploratory dreams taken
to delirious extremes. Duchamp later credited Roussel with the inspiration
for his Large Glass, "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even".
In 1912 Duchamp started producing paintings
and drawings depicting mechanized sex acts such as "Mechanics of Modesty"
and "The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride". At the same point
in time Freud was explaining in his lectures that
complex machines in dreams always signify the genital organs. Roussel invented
language machines which produced texts through the use of repetitions and
combination permutations. This
machine like logic provided his art with a seemingly pure spectacle of endless
variety of textual games and combinations flowing in circular form. Within
this writing process he described a number of fantastic machines, including
a painting machine in his novel "Impressions of Africa". This
painting machine wonderfully describes and foresees the arrival of computer-robotic
technology and it's application to visual art which we have available to
us today, nearly a century after he envisioned it. It is through Roussel
where we might start to map a certain lineage in the avant-garde through
out our century; passing through Duchamp, the Futurists and Productivits,
through Jackson Pollock, Tony Smith, Ad Reinhardt, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd,
Sol Le Witt, Yve Tanguey and Joseph Kosuth. Roussel's themes and procedures
involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism, cryptograms and torture
by language - all formally reflected in his working technique with their
inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments; all giving
the
impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy usage and
baroque play of mirrored form. Roussel's technique and the process he developed
lends itself well to the creation of unforseen, automatic and spontaneously
inventive movements which gives the reader the feeling of
prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions
of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic state
of mind which after the initial dazzling creates one predominant overall
effect; that of creating doubt through mechanical discourse. The image of
enclosure is
common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back, systematically
imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the labryrinthian extensions
and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts, which make all speech
and vision undergo a moment of annihilation. Roussel presents
to us the model of silent perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical
machine which functions independently of time and space; pulling the artist
into a logic of the infinite. "The process evolved
and I was led to take any sentence." Roussel's last book, "How
I Wrote Certain of My Books" is the last of his conceptual machines;
the machine which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental
machines he had formerly described and put into motion, making evident the
machine which produced all of his machines - the mastermachine. All of these
machines map out a space which is circular in nature and thus an abstract
attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce
the old myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed
mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by Western
imagination: space that is rigid and
forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the treasure (for example
the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth) - and the other space
of polymorphosis, the visible transformation of instantly crossed frontiers
and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells and of
symbolic replacements (the space of the Minotaur). Mechanical imagination
opens up a universe without perspective. It combines a vertical point of
view which allows everything to be embraced as if within a circle with a
horizontal point of view which places the eye at ground level where it can
see what is in the immediate foreground. Once inside this nonspatial place,
this fictional world
analogous to reproduction itself, a plethora of possibilities imposes itself
like a dark machine creating pure repetitions hollowing out the void with
accumulated movements without stop. The bachelor machine of Duchamp continues
Roussel's mechanical line of thought along with Franz
Kafka's mechanism for torture through tatooing in the "Penal Colony".
Roussel's mental machines for textual production caught the imagination
of our century. In 1972 the bachelor machine was already there, waiting
for Deleuze and Guattori to hook it up to the body without organs, to plug
it into the logic of the desiring machine to achieve the total interconnectivity
of the infoworld through schizo-capitalism. The French Decadent School which
took shape after 1880 preaching the abolition of social structures spawned
psychoanalysis and avant-garde art. Duchamp is linked to the decadent French
symbolism through Roussel and his eccentric, baroque and exuberant text
machines. Breton was the first to point out the bond linking the preoccupations
of Duchamp, Jarry,
Brisset and Roussel creating a new intellectual tradition made from the
experiments of the Symbolists. This intellectual tradition makes up for
me one of the most significant avant- gardes for
art in the 20th century. From Roussel Duchamp learned inflexible symbolic
reasoning founded onthe obstinate exploitation of various systematic patterns
which in the end opens form up onto vast
and strange domains where concepts can freely play. When Duchamp, Picabia
and Apollinaire attended the theatrical presentation of "Impressions
of Africa" at the Theater Antoine in Paris they found they enjoyed
the play enormously with its mad carnival of frenzied action and deliriouslanguage
with all of its word games and mathematical subversive structures. This
interweaving
structure of systematized obstinacy forms the generator which drives the
artwork to an aesthetichigh. Consciousness then intervenes and further embellishes
the experience. "A poem is a machine made out of words." William
Carlos Williams The mechanomorphic impulse of Duchamp's works from 1911
- 1912 and the machine works that follow after position Roussel as an inescapable
point
of reference for the avantgarde of our century. The machine in our century
through these artists becomes the symbol of total bliss through pure mentality
and auto-sexual autonomy in contradiction to the horror which mechanized
war has brought to the century. By hypnotizing our attention the machine
frees us from troubling obsessions and personal hang ups through the alternative
model of android life; intimating both our rush of desperation and our ecstatic
release,
refracted through a web of glazed impersonality. If the machine as a representative
of order was a fascination Duchamp utilized to balance out the ages ineptness,
whether of the mind or the flesh, his mechanamorphic production and machine
forms refigure the human body into an almost mechanized substance. In "The
Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even", which positions a
central bride machine between 2 bachelor apparatus, Duchamp with the strictness
of machinery,applies fantasy to seduction and masturbation. We as viewers
can use his art as a vehicle for self-transcendence into a kind of dream
work, a kind of nonsense sex. By mechanizing sex and dreams this nonsense
of the sex machine converts sexual energy into artistic energy. As Joseph
Kosuth has noted, "All art after Duchamp is conceptual in nature because
art only exists conceptually." Pierre Jaquet-Droz created the first
robotic mechanical figure in 1774 called the automatic scribe. Through the
technology developed for the creation of mechanical time pieces,Jacquet-Droz
created our first robotic image. It still can be seen at the Musee d'Art
et Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland. The robot-boy dips his pen into ink
and pens a short love letter. In 1745 the first automatic weaving loom was
invented. The loom control system was the forerunner of the
early computers with punch cards. It is computerization which turns an ordinary
machine into a robot. With the invention of the weaving loom we have the
first example of how a conceptual system can be imposed onto a machine.
The first digital calculating machine was designed in 1823
by Charles Babbage for the British Post Office. A more advanced application
of punch card digital technology was developed by Herman Hollerith for the
U. S. Census Bureau. It was this sort of pressure of having to handle increasing
quantities of information that drove society towards the
invention of successively more rapid and subtle computing devices throughout
the 20th century.Electromechanical calculating machines became faster and
faster during World War II, but their speed and reliability were limited
as long as they depended on moving parts like switch delays and electromagnets.
It was only with the advent of transistors in 1948 and the microchips which
followed which enabled the creation of the computer controlled robots we
have today. In 1930 at
M.I.T. the first analog computer was made. Punch cards were still used,
but so were electrical switches, thus the Mark I was still electromechanical
and not electronic. The first electronic computer was ENIAC, a digital device
that came into use in 1946 out of the University of Pennsylvania. It made
use of vacuum tubes and was the size of an entire room. With the development
of electronic miniaturization we arrive at the era of personal computing
and the
industrial robot. Computerization increases our ability to transmit and
handle information. Robots are computerized machines which mimic the action
we associate with human beings. In their repetition of mechanical activities
it is easy to imagine they mimic the physical movement involved in sexual
acts and also in the ecstatic repetitive chants of tribal transcendence.
What computerized
robots do is to essentially break down any movement into simple arithmetic,
Through these mathematical operations we can program a computer driven robot
to preform perfectly in our fantasy of the infinite. Thus the attraction
of the idea of sex performed through mechanical aids.
Under the pressures of the computer-robotic technological revolution we
as artists are compelled to review our conceptual structures and desires
and their corresponding dimensions in the imaginary,
the symbolic, the virtual, and the real. Particularly, the transformation
of the image of the body's sexual expression and its externalization into
technological media, with the transformation of sexual
energy into waves of electronic energy and immaterial signals can one find
a predominant transformative drive behind the avant-garde of our era. We
can see this in a very clear way with the
spread of the new technology through out our current culture. For example,
just as pornography fueled the desire and eventual need for video rental
stores world wide; on line compuserve sex lines drive the development of
interactive computer networks today. Computer sex talk makes up the largest
portion of the computer network business. People enjoy the detached anonymous
sexual interaction on line which allows them complete freedom of fantasy
and expression within the safety
of auto-sexual physical gratification. The exchange of X-rated pictures
via computer networks makes up the majority of visual imagry exchanged on
compuserve.Cybersex and virtual masturbation bring the detached machine
sex of Duchamp right into the heart of our society today
and into the forseeable future as well. Theater and painting, followed by
photography and the cinema, have all called on the body's tremendous qualities
to which no description, neither that of
the lover or the doctor or the police can do proper justice. Cybernetics
and computerized imaging have come to depict the human animal as a machine
again, renewing the tradition of the 18th
century clock makers and their beautiful android automatons. Cyberspace,
this territory which stretches out from hypertext to the world wide computer
network, from virtual reality simulation to
video games, is the domain of the digital bride, engaged in a sexual activity
without place, reduplicating without duplication, reiterating without repeating.
As with the conceptual machine work of Roussel, cybersex is a coldly concerted
and particularly dizzying activity. It is a sexual activity lost in an infinite
navigation from one sort of encounter to another in which the affirmation
of the other keeps appearing and disappearing in the play of mechanical
maneuvers or mechanisms
destined to avert gratification. This is where the bachelor apparatus in
repeating itself ad infinitum with its descriptions, explanations, talks
and commentaries all fail to function in transmitting the
power of the machine to function as an alter-ego. Certainly it is true that
there is hidden in the computer something so strong, so ominous, and so
pregnant with the darkness of infinite space
that it excites and frightens us. That is why the innumerable ramifications
of mechanical desire helps us to utilize our unconscious mind. And that
is the real answer to why computers are interesting in art. We admire their
inhuman beauty. They return us to the experimental and to a state of sexual
desire and restlessness. The neural processes they mimic are our own deepest
desires and meticulous obsessions. The repetition of machines is the repetition
of our sexual acts with their duplication of eggs, sperm and blood. Roussel
told Pierre Janet, the famous Parisian psychiatrist who systematized dynamic
psychiatry at the turn of the century providing the basis of Freud's
advances in the discovery of the unconscious that he, "Bled over every
phrase." Roussel's repetitions, for example in his descriptions of
eggs on plates and the multiple allusions to the odor
of urine after the eating of asparagus is typical of this poetic-mechanical
apparatus helping take us further into the area of the unconscious and the
sexual. This intellectual history which maps out arts
role in creating social allegory, along with the mechanized mass killing
of World War I and II, the holocaust, Hiroshima; and the discovery of psychoanalysis
which is rooted in sexual symbolism offers us an interesting context in
which to view the possible role of the computer and robotics and art.
Sex-magic, technology, or both?
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