Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/ES Cyberama/Brenda Laurel

Text File | 1994-07-14 | 27KB | 423 lines

MONDO 2000 Interview with Brenda Laurel
In Conversation with Jas. Morgan

[Intro by Sally Rosenthal]

M2: Well I've seen you roll your eyes at Jaron's notion of becoming a "virtual
lobster." Do you find that guys have limited and limiting ideas of what VR can
be? And given no technical difficulties, what would you like to be?

BL: Me? Well, probably a lizard. It's not "lobsterness" that bothers me. I
celebrate "lobsterness." [Ann Lasko Harvil] talks about the lobster a lot. I
just interviewed her for a SIGGRAPH article. It's not the lobster that I ever
had trouble with, I think the lobster is fine. It was Jaron's assertion-as he
talks about it in public-that well, you decide you want to be a lobster, so you
reach behind your left ear, and you pull this lobster out, and you dive into
it's body. And the thing that Jaron never wants to talk about is how the lobster
got there. I mean how is it that somebody knew you wanted to be a lobster? Or
how did you tell the computer that you wanted to be a lobster, and what a
lobster looked like? You know, all those kinds of problems you could just arm
wave? In public conversation?

For me that's extremely important and maybe the most interesting thing. It's
like we as artists have to either anticipate the desire for lobsterness
[laughter], or we have to build systems with "virtual stuff" in them that people
can shape in the context of being inside the experience. Because I don't think
the future of VR is a bunch of guys sitting at home with Swivel 3D and RB2
running on Macintoshes, and then occasionally poking their heads in to see if
the lobster's there yet.

M2: But the male/female modalities in VR, boys & girls...

BL: As far as boys and girls and VR, I've said before and I'll say again, I
think that, in general boys have this fantasy about leaving their bodies. And I
think that's a cultural artefact of the priesthood who gave us computers. And
that generation is just passing away.

M2: Now how is they just passing away?

BL: Well my observation is that since I started with computers in '76 is that
the majority of men that I've found working in that field were of a particular
sort. They were people who, in general ,were not socially very interested or
well adapted. I don't know whether the lack of adaption comes from a lack of
interest or vice-versa. But there's a personality type there that I think is
being replaced by a new generation of fusion people.

BL: There was a conversation that I had at Hackers in, I think, was 1989, there
was a womans group. There were 13 women out of like 300 atendees, and there was
a womens session. And so we all went. All the women went. And some of the men
went, mostly out of the sense of social responsibility. And the girls were
complaining about how much discrimination they'd suffered, and they couldn't get
on the mainframe, and people turned off their password, and the usual rants. And
this one man, who I know, whom I won't name, who's just a brilliant programmer
and a good friend said, "Well maybe what you don't understand is that the reason
that we were in computers was to get away from you." And that had a huge impact.
Somebody finally had said it. And I think that although it's not about getting
away from women, it certainly was in the early days, a profession that was
chosen by people who weren't particularly interested in social intercourse. And
so, as a result, the body didn't seem to be very important to these folks. I
mean, the typical hacker stereotype dosen't come out of thin air, right? The
generation of folks that I'm talking about are overweight or underweight and
ill-groomed and unhealthy and consume nasty substances and live their lives in
the computer. And so it's no wonder that their fantasy is to leave their body.
[laughter] 'Cos it's never mattered for much, they already have!

BL: When a new generation of people comes in, young women, young men, old women,
like me, there's a completely different paradigm. Which has to do with an
awareness of the relationship between body and mind and kind of an implicit
rejection of mind/body duality. And so, although that does tend to break down
along gender lines in the handfull of pioneers that have been around for six
years in this business, it's critically not going to be just that. It's going to
be about the artistic sensibility. And really it doesn't even break down as
artists and engineers anymore, I don't think. It did five years ago. And the
people I grew up with were of those two types. And now there are these people in
colleges and like Brian Hughes and people like Sandy Stone-whose not even a
young person, particularly-and the kids that I meet on college tours who are
fusion people. They have these majors about ethnographic studies and computer
science. So it's a real new age. And this dichotomy is largely historical, but
we have to remember the weight that the patriarchy carries. And the old
preisthood is now ensconsed at NPT and IBM and Apple to a certain extent and
their going to keep doing their personal influence, right? Although it's
history, demographically, it still counts institutionally and we have to be
aware of it, we have to be able to call it out.

M2: So in the historical context do you think that there is a masculine and
feminine modality to the composition of virtual worlds?

BL: Well, again it is a lot generational. I think the male/femaleness of it is
true and real, but that's really an artefact of the fact that women more than
men tend to artistic sensibilities and men more than women tend to engineering
and other kinds of sensibilities. In other words gender is an artefact of some
other basic sort. And I think it's going away because the culture is taking it
away. The place where it's most obvious is in all the issues around sexual
applications of VR, because women are just finding a way to have a voice around
their own sexuality and own it and find it OK to make representations about it.
So it's that side of the application possibilities, the erotic side. Because you
can't do sex in VR until you have tactile. [laughter] But you may do erotica and
porn. The people who are expressing that desire and formulating it's content are
men because they're more comfortable with that. But I think that's changing fast
and this may be a medium where women have a chance to explore that stuff more.

And that leads me back to my lizard, I mean I've done bisexual now I want to do
trans- special, you know?

M2: Species symbiosis, Brenda?

BL: Yeah, right!

M2: Well, in the non-historical context, and for people who are not familiar
with people like Brian Hughes, would you describe what you mean by this "hybrid
person" that is currently emerging?

BL: Well, I think it has to do with the power of VR as a cultural paradigm.
Computing didn't attract these renaissance folks to the same degree I would say
as interactivity as a medium is now attracting them. The people who were
attracted to computing in the early days were a different lot than the people
who are attracted to it now because it's becoming manifest as a medium. There
are a lot of people who know how to work with media and who have interests in
media and concerns about media, right? And that's a more pan- gender,
pan-cultural thing. That's part of it, but that's not all of it.

Sandy Stone's been a cyborg since day one. She is utterly in a relationship with
technology in a way that's extremely interesting, and has also at the same time
what I would consider to be off the scale in terms of humanistic energy. She's a
very current, very fast thinking, fast moving philosopher. She's attracted to
this because it just got interesting. You know, it wasn't interesting when Von
Neumann was doing it! It's interesting now! And I think in terms of the young
people that I'm seeing, it's that personal computers have made the idea of being
involved with computers an accessable one. So an artist may fantasize about
computers, or a sociologist may fantasize about it now in a way that they
couldn't have twenty years ago. And so their energy gets directed in that way.
And then tools have come up to the point where folks like that can start to
actually do something. So it's a really wonderful crossroads.

M2: In you latest book, Computers as Theatre, you make the point that you don't
consider these things tools, but that you consider them a medium...

BL: Well a medium can represent tools. A medium can also represent agents and
companions and friends and worlds, right? I mean that's Alan Kay's notion of the
medium, and I subscribe to it. The way in... Ivan Illich uses this word,
"conviviality," and the point is that the way in is now accessable. The way into
writing a novel became accessable a few centuries after Gutenberg. The way into
film became accessable, really, with the video camera. And the way into this
stuff is starting to become accessable to a slightly larger population because
people have bothered to develop higher level tools. Where it has to go is the
way of the printed word, where it has to be accessable to everybody and where
there's no context difference between the authoring language and the
presentation language. You don't write in a different language to write a book
or to take a photograph. You have to know something about the technology but
you're working in the language of images. And that's because computers have just
found out in the last decade that that's what they are. People who care about
computers are [???], that's what they are.

M2: What do you percieve will be the evolution of language?

BL: I was just talking with my husband about that, and it's interesting. That's
a really hard question, Jas.

M2: Well let's break it down into smaller bits. This brings to mind Burrough's
idea that when you hold up a picture of a rose you immediatly know what it is,
but when you hold up a card with the letters r-o-s-e written on it, in your head
you read r-o-s-e first before cognition. So there's another level of translation
involved. Do you find a similar dichotomy between hieroglyphic and phonetic
language as there is a dichotomy between presentation language and authoring
language?

BL: Well I think they tend to colapse over time in a medium that becomes
established, and in a medium that becomes popular as opposed to a medium that
remains esoteric. A lot of the problem with science education and math education
in America today is that the medium of communication about those subjects
remains esoteric, it remains a priesthood. Ideally what will happen to our
personal languages, the way we communicate mono-a- mono, will be that we will
come to have, as we are now, a better way of integrating visual imagery into the
way that we communicate with each other. It's interesting. In film it was true
and in computers it was true. One of the first things that happens when you
introduce visual imagery is that there's an immediate thrashing about for a
syntax of it. And I think that's well on the way. In a perfect world, at least,
the tools for being flexible enough with visual imagery in the way that we
construct communications for each other will become available enough that syntax
can "grow legs." And evolve the way that it always does in a culture. And unless
some massive economic dislocation happens that prevents all of the things that
are evolving in the world from evolving, that's right around the corner. And to
me that's all to the good. And the thing that my husband says, that is
instructive, is that people talk about that as "post-literacy." And this is
another bone I have to pick with Jaron, he talks about "post-symbolic
communication." There's no such thing! Unless you want to become an
invertebrate! Everything is symbolic, everything has syntax, as my friend
Terence McKenna says. [affects a nasal Terence voice "What in the world is
text?" You know how he talks. So it's not a question of post-symbolic, it's a
question of post-Iron Maiden, post media-specific. We have the opportunity to
learn the syntax of multimedia information, and the more we reduce the
granularity of information through multimedia, the more that becomes esperanto
of the imagination.

M2: What signals will we see as language evolves toward this construct you're
talking about?

BL: We may not see them at all, because it may be that this country declines
into some combination of economic recession and political repression such that
people don't get to develop in this way. But assuming that they do, the sign
that it can happen is, in the near future, the ability for an average individual
to capture and store in the random access format, visual imagery. The big
bottleneck in multimedia right now is that I can't capture my world in moving
images or still images and add that to the database of a multimedia product. OK?
And in virtual worlds it's just the same. If I can't put my picture in there,
then interactivity is constrained to the world of changing form and structure.
And you never get to add content. But content is what it's about. So the way
we'll know that it's going the right way is when somebody announces next year
that there's an incredibly cheap read/write optical media. And if that happens,
which it will, in a world that's not overly regulated and constrained in bizzare
ways, the street will find it's use for things. And we will have a different
dialogue as a culture than the one we have now. We won't have a few information
providers which we must all interpret and an information world in which we're
only represented as numbers in a poll. We'll have a world in which we're having
discourse! Neil Postman said the telegraph destroyed American discourse in the
sense that information now came from places that weren't near you. And that it
didn't take any time to get there. And you couldn't do anything useful with it.
[laughter] Well the Global Village requires a bigger bandwidth than the
telegraph, and that requires the ability to store personal imagery.

M2: Let's talk a bit about you current projects.

BL: Well, Rachel Strickland, videographer and I, submitted a proposal to [BAM?],
so we got it accepted to build a virtual world next summer. And it's giving me
an opportunity to challange just about everything that I find wrong with how
it's going at the moment in VR. It's not going wrong, it's just going in a way
that it's time for somebody to change the water. And so we got this thing
approved called Virtual Coyote and we're going to be working with a lot of
texture mapped natural imagery for purposes of ambiguity, actually, because we
think that ambiguity is a key to the engaement of the imagination and that
polygons don't do that. So that's one thing that we're testing. And another
thing that we're testing that we didn't know that we were testing, but which we
are testing, is the whole problem of the trendiness of multiculturalism.
Because, we've based the design of this world on a lot of Native American
stories. We were trying to disrrupt the average American's notion of time and
space by presenting them with the context that was "other than." And the one
that we were exploring had to do with mostly costal California indians. And then
suddenly I realised that that looked a whole lot like appropriation. And that we
could be misinterpreted as positing to represent those cultures. And so there's
this new challange in the project which is to represent things about those
cultures, but to make it clear that the purpose of our representation is to
learn. And partake. But not to warrant that we have now understood, or to submit
what we're doing as an example of multiculturalism. I mean putting an Indian in
the window does not constitute multiculturalism! And so there's this real fine
line, because on the one hand you don't want to say "I can never learn from
other cultures," but on the other hand what you don't want to do is to create
the illusion that you've understood them. In the way that a person who lives in
them understands them. Multiculturalism, trust me, is the big buzzword of the
multimedia industry at this moment. IBM has invested 3.6 million dollars in a
project about multiculturalism. And their new slogan is "Multimedia is
Multicultural." Well this makes you nervous! "We'll go deal with the problem of
cultural diversity by putting it on Macintoshes." (!) You know? Well, I don't
want to be party to that. But at the same time, the reason that they're finding
it important to co-opt that energy is because it's real energy and it's because
we as mainstream Americans find ourselves suddenly in the absence of of an oral
culture. In the absence of a culture all, that we had anything to do with. And
so how do you recognize what your culture really is? And how do you recognize
your power to create culture but by looking at other cultures that have done
both of those things? It's a fine line, but it's an important one, and I'm going
to try to take it on, 'cos I think it's a huge problem.

M2: Do you have a strategy for implementing this?

BL: [laughter] No, I have a philosophy! The next year is about figuring out what
the fuck the strat... Well I do have a strategy in the sense that I'm working on
a multicultural project with Simon & Schuster in the multimedia world. And the
strategy is to make the authors of the content also the authors of the structure
and the interface, to the extent that we can. So that we're not appropriating
content and putting it into White Western form and structure, which is the
essiential sin of appropriation. But that we're working like mad to create tools
that are free enough of our cultural biases where the subjects of our
investigation can create our own forms and structures. And that may be utterly
impossible, but it's worth trying.

M2: So, now we know the strategy, what about your philosophy?

BL: The philosophy that we should recognize and respect and honor other cultures
is an incredibly important one in the world today. I've talked to Tim Leary
about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe and he says
"This is great! This is great! Even though it's lead to awful violence, it means
that people are hanging on by their teeth to their cultural heritages. And that
they're trying to reconstruct them. And if we were smart we would do the same
thing, and maybe America would become a different collection of entities." Tim's
big fantasy is that Vancouver to San Diego would become a country. The point is
that multiculturalism is not about "review it, take it as nod, and then become
global." It's about "recognize it, honor it, support it, preserve it."

M2: What is the thing that you find most disturbing about the Rave Scene?

BL: It's that there is this utter emphasis on global culture. And we don't know
what that is except that we think that we're constructing it. And there's an
utter numbness to personal culture, family culture, local culture. Any kind of
context for us as human beings. "The Brave New Teenager," you know? And the
Brave New Teenager is at risk if they sever the cord of spiritual continuity
from their individual and family and national and ethnic cultures. We can
advocate and move towards global culture, but global culture has to be "I be, I
see." It has to be the Vulcan standard. Not the Federation standard. We cannot
throw out the baby with the bath. It's too late in the game to have to
reconstruct our spirituality and our ways of communicating and revering our
elders. And it's too late, and too long to say "I don't care what the Inuit
believed, because I'm a Global Villager." I was talking to Todd Rundgren last
week and he said "I'm a global citizen, and I don't have a country and I don't
have a culture." And in a major way I'm behind that. Certainly my country has
failed me. Irrefutably failed me. But I do have an individual culture and I have
a family culture and I have an ethnic culture...

M2: You have a genetic culture.

BL: And a genetic culture.

M2: You have a genetic wisdom...

BL: And I have gifts to give. And if we decide that any gift which has a
coloured or cultural nametag attached to it is not an acceptable gift, then we
are in deep shit! So when I stand in a neo-Dyonisian rite, with sampled sound
which has no connection to rap or funk or ju-ju or jazz, I gotta say to myself
"We have thrown out the baby with the bath." And it's no surprise to me that
there is a complete absence of eroticism in these gatherings.

M2: Oh, yes! You've finally helped me piece some of this together! That's the
big thing that they play up. You go there, and nobody has to hit on each other,
but nobnody wants to meet each other either...

BL: Yeah!

M2: It's regressed below the Village People...there's not even an Indian and a
construction worker anymore...

BL: Yeah!

M2: And when you're so completely devoid of culture, sampled sound, like Gary
Numan in the early 80's with his hit, "Here in my car, Here in my car..." I
mean, his style was no style.

BL: No style. And we're living in a world...it's not just sampled sound...it's
sampled information. It's sampeled experience. Neil Postman,of course, is the
master at articulating this, but the evening newscast fragments what we might
learn about the world into a sample. It's utterly meaningless. It doesn't have
enough depth or length to support any kind of content that might hook one up.
And so my advise is, "Let's not throw out the baby with the bath." Let's get
radical. I mean radical isn't, saying "I have no paths, I have no future, I have
no identity, I have no country." It's saying "I have all these things, I have my
wisdom, I have my personal power, and I am placing that in the service of a
global community. That's completely different! So I have a real issue with the
Rave shit. And that's why I remain a Deadhead.

M2: Another aspect that nags me about the Raves is that you walk into a room
filled with any species of this week's technology that they can possibly manage
to fit...all of it blinking at you at once...

BL Well, I think there's a tremendous amount of eliteism in the producers of
these scenes. Because they believe that the "Gee Whiz" factor is enough. In
fact, to be fair, it may not be elitism, it may be some sort of magical realism,
you know? That if "I just show the outward and visible sign of this new
technology that it will alter everybody's consciousness" But the fact is that
interactivity is intensly personal. You cannot demo it. And you cannot project
it. Now if somebody wanted to carefully and lovingly craft a communal virtual
reality they could do it. And in fact, I'm working on it, and I want to. But to
say "I'm gonna blast you one eye from somebody else's VR experience," or "I'm
gonna give you sampled CG," is just Gee Whizz bullshit! It's right up there with
Crack for stupid.

M2: Well, tonight they're rioting in the streets of California. I can't help but
think of the need for a kind of telepolitics, a kind of teledemocracy...

BL: In my role as techno weenie, right? I think that utterly it could accomplish
a global revolution. The electronic agora, the electronic town hall, the
electronic meeting with Ross Perot...

M2: Well, we are talking about a discourse...

BL: The numbers are wrong for there to be deep discourse with everyone. But if
we believe that we talk to each other well, and that Joe Beet's from Iowa and
Fred Smith's from California can do an OK job of representing us, then it could
work. I'm so impressed by John Hawkenberry's new program. His new NPR program
that's a national call-in show. There's one 800 number and people call in from
all over the country... NPR, as a medium, as a channel, gives huge amounts of
time to the stories that they deliver, as opposed to the broadcast media. And
Hawkenberry's Talk of the Nation has topics from abortion to funding of public
television to what women dream about. What he does as a talk show host is that
he engages each caller in a dialog. And it goes on for a long time. And it's
representave democracy. And it's the best! It's like ad hoc representave
democracy. If we could be having those conversations with each other, if I could
know more about what's going on tonight in San Francisco, from "in people" who
are living tonight in San Francisco, than I know about it from KRON, I might
actually get involved in the situation, it might become my issue. Even though
the numbers are wrong, in terms of ten million who want to talk and one
bandwidth, one broadcast channel. Representative democracy works that way. And I
think it might be, actually, amazingly, way cool. Even though I have huge issues
around Ross Perot's personal funding of his campaign, and also I want to know
where he got it, and what ethic lead him to believe that it was OK to get it
that way, I've got to say, I will vote for him for two reasons. One, because he
has proposed this thing, which is utterly the right thing. And, two, because I
want to blow up the two party system.

M2: And he's doing a good job of bringing the two party system down...

BL: Yeah! If he gets even ten percent he's going to make a huge difference.

M2: Now you have some involvement with a TV show due to air this autumn...

BL: It's a television series that's based on... it began as a comic strip in
Details magazine by a guy named Bruce Wagner, who is a novelist and has done
also several screenplays, and it's about VR, it turns out. So I met this guy at
CyberArts, a friend of Roger Trilling, who's a friend of mine, and Bruce was
writing this thing called Wild Palms for Details. It's a plot. The story is
about a loose conspiracy to use VR to continue to bludgeon us with our current
media enviornment. In other words it's a nightmare of one-way VR. I met him, and
I talked to him, and he made me a character in his strip. I guess because he
liked me. So I started showing up in his strip, under my own name, and then he
wrote a treatment of it and sold it too... Oh God, Oliver Stone was interested
in it... And Oliver Stone and he sold it to ABC as a series? As a six hour
series. Then Bruce hired me as a consultant for the script of the series 'cos it
had to do with VR of the future and he wanted to know what that might be like.
And then as we worked on it he said "You ought to audition for it," so I have
this really strange involvement with it as a script consultant and as also a
potential an actress in the series. The reason that I chose to work on a series
that portrays VR in a very negative light is because I think it's important that
we consider VR in a very negative light! And also that we understand, as [????]
keeps trying to tell us, that there are conspiracies, in the world, that are
casual, or formal, and conscious, or unconscious, but that they exsist. So
that's what I'm doing, I'm going on this wierd odyssy with these Hollywood guys.
And it starts in September on ABC!