ELECTROCRATIC ART SCIENCE

I. ELECTROCUTION BY SCIENCE: THE NEW ART:
The traditional role of art to liberate new perception about the relationship of the human condition to the natural context (human and environmental) has been irrevocably compromised by new technology. The artist finds herself caught between the hyper-abstract extremes of pyrotechnical special effect and transfigural, transcendent mechanization.

Sensorarily dazzled by the first and neurologically ground-to-a-pulp by the second, her vocation seems to lead to either abdication of sense or sensibility, or both. Whatever the case, her sensibility has been technologically extended, colonized and encapsulated -- and these, not as parallel actions but as simultaneous. Consequently, her response, personally, socially and politically, is a technological response whether or not she wills it or wants it.

Contemporary power and technology are enabled by electric and electronic advance. So much so that the new political-economical context might be called "electrocratic;" that is, government by and for electric and electronic instrumentation. If a servo-mechanistic artist finds herself opposed to technological advance, she is either a luddite or an anti-electrocratic subversive.

The altruistic luddite, simplistically-speaking, attempts to damage and abandon the machine. The subversive, on the other hand, recognizes that humanity is the sum of its technologies, genetic and synthetic. Therefore, that it is utopian and useless to attempt to divert or divest humanity from its birthright. The subversive recognizes that it is the non-human aspects -- that is the negative affects of technology -- that have decentered the natural human subject and rendered it relatively obsolete.

Consequently, the subversive can respond in either a negative or a positive way. She can "humanize" the technology by identifying with it, personifying it, and extending more biological qualities to it, which allows it more negative control over humanity and the environment. Or she can study its negative affects and regulate it by educating the senses, by limiting its extent and control, or by abolishing it altogether.

It is wrong-headed to assume that technology has always been embraced and incorporated into culture, or that it is neutral in its effects. The Pre-Columbian Indians refused to employ the simple wheel because it destroyed ritual aspects of their religions. The Japanese refused to exploit western munitions like the seventeeth-century rifle because it would destroy internal power relations. The Chinese refused to integrate nineteenth-century medical practices because such would destroy culture and tradition.

The instant that technology is utilized, it gives power to those who utilize it, power out of proportion to those who do not. Since such advantage is not shared, or shared unequally, it causes political-economic havoc. And since it becomes controlling it cannot be easily dismantled while, nevertheless, it monstrates and dismantles without thought or intention.

Hence, contemporary context is such that the powers that be have initiated technological innovation without thought, and, subsequently, the artist finds herself in an irrational physical and mental conundrum. It is not surprising to find her radically ambivalent toward technology. But, unfortunately, her deep ambivalence is part of electrocratic pathology too. Therefore, it is for the best if she tackles it head-on without popular romance or zippie enthusiasm.

The utilization of electrical and electronic instruments has certified the advance of science and technology over art. While the scientific paradigm has usually been associated with enlightenment philosophy, logic, reason and objectivity, and the artistic with aesthetic philosophy, the irrational, the subconscious and the subjective, both paradigms have changed. That is, electrocratic art science is neither one nor the other; it is, at worst, post-modern, and, at best, a critique of the electrocratic post-modern.

The post-modern is a symptomatic, physiological and cognitive response to the electrocratic experience. It is neither the disease nor the essence. Therefore, the advance of electrocracy will quickly supercede post-modern desire and understanding. While the modern was generally in keeping with the scientific and industrial progress of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, the post-modern has been defined largely in terms of antithesis to the modern. That has given rise to an anomalous artistic comprehension, and to an artistic product fraught with paradoxical considerations of Symbolism/Post-Symbolism (Dada-Surrealism), Form/Anti-Form (Cubism), Purpose/Play (Absurdism), Design/Chance (Cagism), Finished Art Object/Process-Performance- Happening (MTVism), Presence/Absence (Minimalism) and so on. Not surprisingly, the usual critical response has been against interpretation, toward deconstruction in favour of the ironic, the indeterminant and the mutant, et cetera. In short, toward the autistic.

Electrocratic art science is the pure human response to the essence of the electrocratic, that is, to raw electricity and base electronics. This article attempts to articulate the progression of electrocratic art science from Nikola Tesla, its pre-eminent inventor-adapter, to two contemporary art scientists, Barry Schwartz and David Therrien. While Tesla articulates electricity instrumentally, Schwartz and Therrien are somewhat antithetical; the first defies electrocratic electrocution by remaining ancillary to it, the second defies and engages it by entering directly into it.

II. ELECTROCUTION BY ART: THE NEW SCIENCE:
1. The nineteenth-century principal behind electrocratic art science is the sensational Nikola Tesla. Tesla was the oftimes estranged inventor of, among other things, the alternating-current generator (AC/DC), the Tesla coil, incandescent and neon lighting. In addition, he theorized about laser technology, discovered radiowaves and x-rays, was the first to take x-ray photographs and the first to apply "remote control."

Tesla was also a spectacular showman. His copper Tesla coil was capable of furnishing a million volts of electricity. While currents of lower frequencies are very dangerous, paradoxically, alternating currents of very high frequency travel through the body without apparent damage. As the potential rises, electrical discharges are produced and issue freely from the coil. These emanate in small sprays of sparks or in tiny lightening threads. They can burn and prick.

But once the discharge streams continuously, if one is holding a large conducting object like a bar of metal, nothing is felt but a slight resonant buzz. Therefore, Tesla was able to light globes and tubing at touch. Individual bolts of hissing electricity might be three-feet long or longer, and as thick as a boa constrictor or thicker. Using a metal plate, Tesla would cut such and roll the severed lengths into fireballs. Then he would toss the sizzle to his spectators.

Similarly, wearing boots with five-inch cork heels, white tie and tails, Tesla would pass electricity through his body and bounce the electricity away with a piece of metal. He would stand on a platform surging with 100,000 volts. Sparks would shoot from him, and if he held his hands five inches apart, sparks would frisson between them. At the highlight of his demonstration at the World's Fair in 1893, he passed 200,000 volts of AC through his hands causing sparks to emanate from his head and hair in wild efflourescence. The crowd went wild.

Tesla thought that such infusions of electricity were beneficial for general physical health, and that they would be adapted by medical practicioners for use centuries to come. He also discovered that by varying the higher frequencies he could induce drastic psychological vacillation, from anxiety to euphoria and meditative states. Oppositely, when he experimented with extra-low frequency waves, they would help to empty his mind of thought and distraction so that he could experience "Truth."

2. The truth-challenging or death-defying of Tesla's electrocratic children is similar and different. Punk-electrician Barry Schwartz restructures Tesla's coil, charges it up, and then, cleverly, uses a TV tube or piano to conduct and broadcast electricity in psychedelic transfusions or buzz-sawing percussions.

In works 100% CONCENTRATED MUSIC and CONDUCTIVE ARCS, Schwartz wades into a large vat filled with mineral water and begins to strum electrified piano wires. The wires spark insousciently. Schwartz plays electricity wearing industrial rubber gloves customized with insulated thimbles. The electricity yaks in yowels, squeals in sqwauks, burrs barks, and drawls drones while it travels, jagged, Jacob's ladder-like, between parallel strings. And Schwartz uses just enough electricity so that the harp isn't permanently heart-stopping.

During the nineties, Schwartz turned sections of San Francisco's trolley system into a resonant, electronic harp. He attached contact mikes to the trolley wires and recorded Cage-style sound collages. In a 1992 event, he strung telephone poles with piano strings, charged them with an arc welder, and pummelled the strings with an insulated piezo-electric transducer -- a "hot-stick" -- to produce gratuitous sound.

Schwartz has been called a sculptor, a sound-artist and an electrician. He says, "Somehow they're all rolled into one." More a pro- than an anti-electrocratic subversive, more homeopathetic electrician and knee-jerk radical, he admits, "Almost everything I do is a reaction to passivity, [to] conformity, [to] that feeling of being controlled." Seemingly more unconscious and negative an electro-shaman, he also admits to believing in the animism, the demiurgency and the transcendency of the raw electric. He says that he wants to use it to artfully fuse technology and nature. Such fusion would be electrocution by art. [See: Mark Dery, "Shock Tactics" in WORLD ART, #1/1996 (pp.34-39), p.37.]

3. And the whole process remains no less electrocratic, controlling or heart-stopping in the art science of David Therrien. Therrien continues ungrounded. So the cultural fusion of technology and nature through electric and electronic media still results in electrocution.

But Therrien's art science is directly probative and consciously pathological in a way that Schwartz's is not. The jolt of Schwartz's comes from Schwartz's dangerous proximity to electricity. The jolt of Therrien's is much more complex, multiplicit and all-incompassing. Moreover, it is not compromised by machine or psychology in the same way as those who investigate virtual presence in developing VR. It is pure, unambivalent, unambiguous, terminal electrocratic art science. Furthermore, it attempts to articulate the profound ethics of electrocratic advance.

Impresario of the electrocratic, Arthur Kroker chronicles Therrien in SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1993):

Therrien's world is populated by crash machines . . . [a]nd not just crash machines but crash bodies too. Naked bodies trapped between gigantic rubber percussion pads through which shoot 16,000 volts of electricity; squashed bodies shoved into tiny circular steel cages and then suspended forty feet from the ground, all the while surrounded by a power field of high-voltage electricity. Or crash bodies strapped to the top of a gigantic crucifixion machine, the face of which is hidden behind a massive quartz light that without warning blasts alive, becomes blindingly luminescent, like one-thousand aircraft landing lights coming on simultaneously. This pyrotechnics not only for entertainment, but as a brilliant way of demonstrating our fate as passive passengers along for the ride on the violent trajectory of digital technology [p.113].

The only aesthetic qualifiers that might finesse Therrien's rude constructions would be the introduction of medical PET- and CAT-scan devices. Such would allow for more delicate elucidations into the finite electrocution of the mind. As it is, those who perform in Therrien's electrified FETAL CAGE, INDEX (Machines for the New Inquisition), and TECHNO- MUTANT MACHINES, are more crudely monitored by EKG, brain-wave and digital scans for signs of imminent death.

Electrocratic art science examines human physical and mental response to the instantaneous, the simultaneous, and the pitched descent toward the flatline. Just so, Therrien's art science is about absolutes, our ability to imitate them, and whether or not we are capable of the transition.

4. The institution of electrocracy in western culture is a singular departure for humanity, because with its institution culture and all that it signifies becomes pathologically regressive and terminal.

Electrocratic art science is the exposition of that consequence. It is no less worthy for being less decorative and more sensationalistic. It is no more grand or less wise for being about death.

The anti-electrocratic subversive is in the unique position of alerting the ignorant, the unconscious and the life-loving to the negative affects of electric and electronic instruments. Such individuals can be found everywhere among us. Some are suffering politicians, some exemplary artists.