The use of computers and synthesizers in the present performance serve to exaggerate the dissociation between the minimalism of gestural and performative actions and the massive control of the experience suggested by the sound and imagery. The material, not the performer, now carries the richness of experience toward its target. Like modern architecture, audio technology gives us a means to create elaborate set of transparencies which coexist in time and space. Like architecture, audio always retains a sense of the illusory, creating spaces which, without our awareness, modifies our sense of self. The controls at hand, however, allow "painless" instantaneous disintegration without smart bombs. Again, divorcing of action from result squelches opposition.
There is an irony in the contrast between natural live voice and synthesized voice. The voice, once taken away from the body and reconstituted as a being without corporeal substance, without status or place, without viewpoint, without the fleshy vulnerability a bared throat offers, is re-incarnated as a new being. Perhaps a voice of authority, or an oracle which can speak from beyond the grave. It gives us a deliriously false confidence, this chest resonance without chest, these nasals without nose, plosives without lips or tongue, this singer of songs-without-throats. The voice, encountering the machine suffers the same series of dislocations which are perpetrated upon the animal bodies in the slaughterhouse. Unlike the random destruction of a road-kill, they are distilled, transformed - made into something else. Here we have excised melodies like bodily organs, trimmed away fat and gristle of meaning to reveal underlying harmonic and rhythmic skeletons. We have filleted and sliced the synthetic voice away from its bones only to reconstitute it again in a new guise, to ressurect it as a god, daemon, or spirit. Who is saying these things? Am I the only one who hears these voices?
"We entered an immense low-ceiled room and followed a vista of dead swine upon their backs, their paws stretching mutely towards heaven. Walking down to the vanishing point we found there a sort of human chopping machine where the hogs were converted into commercial pork. A plank table, two men to lift and turn, two to wield the cleavers, were its component parts. No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion. Plump falls the hog upon the table, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop, fall the cleavers. All is over. But before you can say so, plump, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop, sound again. There is no pause for admiration. By a skilled sleight-of-hand, hams, shoulders, clear, mess, and prime fly off, each squarely cut to its own place, where attendants aided by trucks and dumb-waiters, dispatch each to its separate destiny - the ham for Mexico, its loin for Bordeaux. Amazed beyond all expectation at the celerity, we took out our watches and counted thirty-five seconds, from the moment when one hog touched the table until the next occupied its place. The numbers of blows required I regret we did not count."
