Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed and among others the nature of the principal of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: . . . . Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein
One of my favorite images from the history of the future is from 1746 when Jean-Antoine Nollet, the Abbot of the Grand Convent of the Carthusians in Paris, tested the then controversial theory that electricity operated over distances, instantaneously. Early one morning, 200 monks formed a line over 2 kilometers long. Between each monk was an almost 9 meter iron wire. Nollet used a Leyden Jara proto-batteryto initiate a current that caused the monks to start swearing, contorting, or otherwise reacting simultaneously to the shock. Success. And certainly one of the earliest recorded twitches.
Fast forward
September 20, 1786.Luigi Galvani causes the legs of a dead frog to twitch by touching muscles and nerves with a metallic arc. 1816. On a dark and stormy night, after discussing the principal of life and telling ghost stories with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley has a dream that is to become the novel Frankenstein, perhaps the most famous and enduring inanimate made animate. April 10, 1996.Stelarc performs (is performed by?) Ping Body, during which Internet protocols cause his body to twitch. October 17, 2003. Twitch opens at aceartinc gallery including Garnet HertzsExperiments in Galvanism-an Internet-activated frogs body.
I offer this highly truncated history of the twitch, which doesnt even include Elvis Presleys appearance-above the waist-on the Ed Sullivan show or Humphrey Bogarts twitchy Captain Bligh (what is the difference between a tic and a twitch, anyway?), not as a geneaology for the exhibition but as tokens of the rich history, both scientific and imaginative, of animating the inanimate. The two are inseparable. It is not possible to have one without the other, whether it is technology and imagination or the inanimate and the animated or death and life. The twitch is like a switch. Turn it off and the animate dies. Turn it on, and the inanimate comes to life.
What interests me about Twitch, the exhibition, is the way it shifts the issues away from technology per se; and away from the cyborg specifically. The five twitches presented cannot help but be tokens of such things, but at least from the vantage of the present, not of a future already passed. What is life(like) in the 21st century?
For one thing, its sort of like a nervous system. As McLuhan famously said in 1964 (arguably before it was true), we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace. For David Rokeby, in fact, its a Very Nervous System. We are nervous, perhaps, about our acoustic exoskeleton in VNS. Our boundaries expand. The human-environment interface becomes blurred as we play the room. And that is the twitch-switch. One moment it is as if we are animating the previously silent room. The next, it is as if the placement of the tones is stretching us; making us move in ways that we would not normally move. It is pleasurable. Even a release. Very Nervous System is a token of the animated environment that is ubiquitous and responds fluidly to our presence, just as we respond to its responsiveness. Its a bit uncontrollable, like a twitch. Part pagan, part techno utopian, in the end, its just a bunch of networked switches that together create a very, very nervous system.
Several years ago, Garnet Hertz sent me in the mail something he called, in a handwritten note, the worlds smallest server. It was something vaguely silicon chip-like in a plastic bag in a folded letter in a plain envelope. I tried to look at it, but I didnt know what to do with it, so I hung it on my wall:
Garnet Hertz
Worlds Smallest Server, 2000
Silicon,rare metals and protocols
1.1 cm x .75 cm x infinity
Some generation of this server is twitching the suspended (in mineral oil!) frogs legs in Experiments in Galvanism. The allusion to Luigi Galvani is, of course, intentional. But Hertz is not merely performing at a distance what Galvani required physical contact for. He is reimagining the notion of animal electricity (Galvani thought the electricity resided in the animal, not externally) through miniaturization. A table is solid to the touch, but a mass of movement at the atomic level. By switching scale from human proportions to nano measurements, it is possible to imagine, for example, using skin temperature and galvanic skin response (conductivity) to power various miniaturized devices. The point is not whether this scenario is literally true (at this time) but that the twitches of Hertzs frog legs and the switch of scale are tokens of new questions about the nature of the principal of life.
Nicholas StedmansThe Blanket Project has the virtue of being completely mundane. That is, like a table or a chair or a pen, we understand the interface of a blanket completely. We know what its for and how to use it. Except for that part about it moving around. It is true that throughout history there are tales of blankets moving of their own accord to ones partners side of the bed, but these are mostly apocryphal and have never been proven. Nevertheless, Stedmans choice of a blanket is at least in part because of everything we do know about it. As Rich Gold, one of the gurus of ubiquitous or calm computing has written, ubi-objects are tacitly and invisibly embedded into daily social life. That is their virtue. And why it is so surprising when they do something unexpected. The reference here, of course, is to Claude Shannons mathematical theory of information. To tell someone that it is cold in Winnipeg in February is not much of a surprise, so its information value is small. To say, however, that a blanket is moving of its own accord is very surprising, so its information value is relatively great. The twitch-switch with The Blanket Project, is not so much that it moves as that it is so unexpected that it would move. It is about a twitch in our expectations.
Closely related to expectations are perceptions. Both Erika LincolnsScale and Kevin YatessUntitled, small-scale sculptures play on perceptions. Lincolns twigs twitch in the sense that while the branches are in constant, rhythmic motion, when the viewer shades a light sensor, their movements speed up, although in contrast to Stedmans blanket, almost imperceptibly. And with Yatess figures, the movement is truly imperceptible. Yet it is there. In our minds. Not so much that we think we see them move, but in our minds eye, it is impossible not to imagine these dead figures as having had life. According to the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, the minimum requirement, so to speak, for narrative involves the passage from one equilibrium to another. Yatess imaging of death is so lifelike that we must flesh out the narrative from this disequilibrium. Its an involuntary twitch.
The works in Twitch, the exhibition, each deal differently with ways of and issues about animating the inanimate. By placing these works in contact with each other, curator Risa Horowitz has identified the twitch as a critical switch between states, not only between animate and inanimate but also equilibrium and disequilibrium. We not only can but are in some ways compelled to create narratives with these twitches. And for me, the stories are tokens of things to come, which cannot be known but can be imagined with both horror and fascination.
Copyright Steve Dietz 2003, 2004
Published in the catalog for the exhibition Twitch, curated by Risa Horowitz, aceartinc., Winnipeg, 17 October - 22 November 2003
One of my favorite images from the history of the future is from 1746 when