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Mimetic Flesh in Cyber-City
Mimetic Flesh in Cyber-City
~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~
Mimetic flesh? That's the street scene in cyber-city: San Francisco, Ca. Not so
much an ars electronica, but an _Ars California_:an art of digital living.
Certainly not a sociological rhetoric of evolution or devolution, but something
radically different. Mimetic flesh as a floating outlaw zone where memes fold
into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-culture reconfigures the
future of the molecular body. In Ars California, mimetic flesh is neither future
nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gen(e)ing.
Now we just got off the Net where we experienced data delirium with Gerfried
Stocker's manifesto for mimetic flesh, the one where he speculates about future
memes: stochastic minds, recombinant bodies, infoskin, molecular daydreams. When
we read this meme manifesto, our bodies of flesh, bone and blood sagged under
the terminal evolutionary weight of it all, but the electronic sensors embedded
in our nanoskin just went crazy. Like Alien 3, the electronic worms cruising the
blood lanes just below skin surface heard this call of a future technotopia,
flipped on their sensor matrix to red alert, whomped through the epidermal
bunker, zoomed out into fresh air, and were last seen heading straight for the
California coast.
And why? Because in _Ars California_, words are always too slow: the art of
digital life exceeds new programing languages. Java, Perl, C++, awk, C
shell--these are always outmoded codes for better client/server relations.
Spurning new programming codes and breaking beyond all the debugging barriers,
mimetic flesh fast-fuses memes and genes, molecularly hardwiring information
into the folded vectors of softflesh. In SF, memes have abandoned the art
academy, becoming popular culture for the 21st century. Just listen to the
street talk: a cool-looking city-wise Chicano in Killer Loop shades plays
Tex-Mex blues on his guitar while wearing a T-shirt that boasts: "I'm a
Professional Beta-Tester for Microsoft;" a businessman tucked away in an IBM
suit in-lines by while dealing mega-futures of Intel chips on his cellular
phone; an African-American with a hi-tech futures face gets into the elevator
armoured in a red windbreaker listing the brand-name icons for "The Corporate
Alliance of America's Leading Cyber-Companies;" a nano-technologist begins to
tell prophetic tales of the next human migration, the one where floating slivers
of the human species will be carefully wrapped in huge nanofiber skins and
allowed to float away into deep space, seeding the future universe. Or we're
walking down a sun-bleached street in San Francisco right under the Bay Bridge,
and we see a beat-up Winnabego with a Nevada license plate. It's got a big sign
out front advertising bargain basement prices on Java/ Sun computer packages.
It's a sun-real California scene: an old Winnabego, hi-tech gear, hard-drivin'
Silicon Valley type salesmen in a no-tech part of town, with no customers to
take their coffee and donuts and hi-tech packages except for some homeless guys
and ourselves. After asking us "Which way to multi-media gulch?" they realized
the error of their mimetic way, and closed up shop just as a couple of street
people settled down for some good eatin' and sleepin' inside the chain-link
fence. Mimetic flesh as daily life in cyber-city, the kind of place where the
virus of the tech future digs its way under the skin, like an itch or a sore or
a viral meme that just won't go away.
No one knows this better than the mimetic artists of SF. Not the corporate art
of Silicon Valley--the "house" art of Interval, Xerox, and Oracle with their new
age visions of wetware products for the digital generation--nor the subordinated
aesthetics of the fine art emporiums in official culture, but unofficial outlaw
art that's practiced in hidden warehouses and storefront galleries and ghetto
schools and other-side-of-the-tracks digital machine shops: an art of dirty
memes.
Dirty memes? That's what happens when mimetic engineering escapes into the
streets of cyber-city, and its scent is picked up by viral artists. Like Elliot
Anderson's multimedia algorithm, "The Temptation of St. Anthony," with its
brilliant psychopathology of obsessive-compulsive behavior, complete with 3-D
ghostly images of emotional discomfort and stuttering gestures, as the key
psychic sign of digital culture. Or Matt Hackert's dead horse flesh machines
complete with belching flame-throwers and whirring chain saws and rip-snorting
drills, and all of this accompanied by the robotic sounds of the mechanical
orchestra. Or Lynn Hershman's mimetic cinema with its application of
object-relations programming to the universe of Hollywood imagery. Or the viral
robotics of Chico MacMurtie's "Amorphic Robot Works" that encode in
robo-genetics all the ecstasy and catastrophe of the ruling cultural mimetics.
Neither technotopian nor technophobic, mimetic art in the streets of SF is
always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our)
mimetic flesh.
