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