1. "Modern Primitives": The Accelerating Collision of Past and Future in the Postmodern Era

Today, largely thanks to publishers such as Re/Search and Loompanics, Autonomedia, and Amok Press, many people are familiar today with the "modern primitive" movement. They know that it involves some sort of strange juxtaposition of high technology and "low" tribalism, animism, and body modification - a kind of 'Technoshamanism,' if you will, at once possession trance and kinetic dance. In books like William Gibson's Count Zero , ultracomplex Artificial Intelligences (AIs) take on the personality of Haitian Voudoun deities, seizing the minds of initiates through neural networks, creating an ersatz technoreligion.

The idea of the "primitive" is of course one from anthropology's abandoned socioevolutionary past. While invented to simply function as a descriptive for temporal phases, it inevitably also functioned as an evaluative term, suggesting that those societies to which it was applied were inferior in terms of literacy, knowledge, technology, social organization, or moral judgement - in a word, they lacked 'civilization.' The notion was of course inescapably ethnocentric, since it assumed that all societies on the planet were on an undeviating climb toward the standards of Western culture with regards to religion (monotheism), marriage practices (monogramy), economics (the free market), governance (representative democracy), etc. The 'primitive' was at once reviled and romanticized, especially by Romantic artists fascinated with the taboo and the exotic, and philosophers swayed by the image of the unfettered Noble Savage.

While a more culturally relativist anthropology has sought to cleanse the perjorative ideas associated with 'primitivism,' preferring to describe idiographically rather than evolutionarily the less 'advanced,' pre-modern, indigenous societies of the planet, the notion of the "primitive" remained a powerful one in Western culture, which internalized representations of "primitives" from both within (the Native Americans) and without (Oceanians, Africans, etc.) To many people within Western civilization's orbit, (which increasingly encompasses the entire planet), the "primitive" still signifies a premodern, "untainted" alternative to industrialization, capitalism, and the European Enlightenment. It represents a preferred "Golden Age" past, of things left aside in the march of "progress", to which might be juxtaposed a dystopian technological future.

And, then, of course, there is modernity. What it means to be a modern is still being argued about, as well as whether we have left the condition of modernity behind. If anything, modernity was probably the vision that the future would be radically different (and most likely better) than the present. Certainly, in the arts, modernity was associated with Futurism, involving a penchant for action, speed, power, abstraction, and change, as well as other movements in the avant-garde - Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, etc. Modernity basically meant experimentation to many people; a refusal to be fettered by conventions of the past, and a demand to shock the morals and traditions of the bourgeouisie. New territories - the unconscious mind, for example - were being opened to investigation and creation.

Postmodernism, if anything, is in essence a combination of modernity and the premodern - a genre blurring of the abandoned and the untried. In a world where the old (tradition, superstition, folk beliefs, etc.) is increasingly being abandoned, there can be nothing more new and avant-garde then to reintroduce it once more... thus the ironic state of postmodernity. There can be no more postmodern movement than that of the "modern primitives," determined to follow the simultaneous tracks of the past and the future toward their inevitable collision. Having at once embraced a mythical "low-tech" past and a mythical "high-tech" future, the "modern primitives" are preeminent denizens of the postmodern, cyclical-time era...

The "modern primitives" like Stelarc and Fakir Mustafar are perhaps best known for their use of body distortion, modification (elongation, coloration, etc.), and piercing. Many moderns were familiar (from visual anthropology) with the practices found in less 'civilized' cultures such as footbinding, elongating the neck or skull, or ritual incision. Body manipulation is not anything alien to modernity, with its use of more antiseptic and clinical plastic surgery, but then neither is tatooing or piercing either. Moderns never gave up the urge to inscribe and mark the body, or to alter and distort its features... indeed, Foucault's biopolitics suggests that a preeminent feature of modernity was the pursuit of unnattainable somatic norms, especially for women. Still, many people see body marking (tatooing) as transgressive, exotic, and 'primitive,' and this is one reason why modern primitivies embrace it as a custom.

What does make the modern primitive movement unusual is its pursuit of sensation. Borrowing from the S & M sexual subculture, the modern primitives suggest that one of the effects of modernization and industrialization has been psychic numbing. People no longer know either authentic pleasure or pain, and have forgotten the curious neurochemical ways in which they are interwoven. Piercing is more than just inscription; piercing of the genitals or other sensitive areas of the body means pain, especially during sexual intercourse... but it is a pain that becomes part of the ecstasy for ModPrims... there is this idea of a knowing through pain which modernity has forgotten.

When Mustafar or Stelarc hang themselves from hooks, or pierce themselves with sharp painful implements, they are only duplicating a practice found all over the world. It is a key ritual for many "primitive" and other societies for the person to go into trance and to demonstrate their "absorbtion" by the divine through the negation of pain and injury. The ModPrims claim that their performances are a pursuit of transcendence, proving the ability of the mind to go beyond the taxings and limitations of the body. Stelarc calls himself a "Cyberhuman," pointing to his belief that the future of human evolution toward a greater interconnection of men and machines will require humankind's mastery over (rather than suppression of) passion, suffering, and pain.

Futher, within the ModPrim movement, there is this sort of obsession over technological invasion of the body, through prosthetics, genetic modification, implants, and so on. This bodily invasion is at once feared (as a colonization by capital) and desired (by permitting people to directly neurally link into the "consensual hallucination" of Gibson's Virtual Reality.) The body is seen as information (DNA provides the 'code') and its invasion as either 'scrambling' (through viruses, cancer, etc.) or 'purification' (by removing 'noise' or 'distortion.') The technological modification of the body is seen as a reworking of the shamanic 'deconstruction' of a past era, where the shaman is torn apart by the gods of his tribe, and then his bones and flesh are replaced with quartz or fire or something else...

The limitations of the body need not be obeyed. It can be made to live longer, or be healthier, through artificial organs and nanotech 'magic bullets.' It can be made stronger and more dextrous through steroids and enhancing nervous signal transmission. The mind can be extended as well, its memory or perceptions or intelligence increased. The "primitive man's" desire to imitate and become like his gods can be met. But ModPrims also know that there is the danger of forgetting the body as well - that in cyberspace, people will no longer be "in tune" with their tangible physicality... thus they push for ways in which the "feedback" from the Matrix will be at once tactile and visual...

ModPrims also embrace the rave as a sign of the uniting of past and future. The rave is at once 'primitive,' with its gathering of 'tribes' of young people for the experience of Levy-Bruhl 'participation mystique' through kinetics and MDMA (Ecstasy), and 'futuristic' (or modern) with its use of digitally sampled and remixed music, laser and light effects, and multimedia expositions. Ravers at once dress in way that signifies past and future - piercing their ears with computer chips, wearing 70s (or earlier) clothes with futuristic hologram jewelry, combining the fashion of folk and punk. They consider themselves the heirs of the 60s counterculture, and also its antithesis, since they reject its anti-technology, pro-natural, 'peace and harmony,' and idealist emphases for a more pragmatist, aggressive, and techno-positive viewpoint... to the raver, whether a drug is synthetic or organic is besides the point.

Besides raves and piercing, ModPrims are perhaps best known for their attempts at juxtaposing magick and science. Publications like Virus 23 juxtapose Crowleyan occultism with chaos theory, Neo-Paganism & Wicca with memetics and information theory, and use of ancient hallucinogens with the latest findings in neuroscience. Shamanism is shown to have a basis in quantum mechanics, and Hermeticism in astrophysical cosmology. Fringe science publications, full of diagrams of Tesla machines, antigravity motors, UFO propulsion systems, free energy devices, perpetual motion machines, and radionic/psychotronic boxes, combine at once the impossible fascinations of past eras with the latest technological principles...

Computer hackers often call themselves "wizards," for good reason. Abstruse computer programs are not all that dissimilar from blasphemous incantations; electrical logic diagrams often look like mystical Tables of Correspondences from olden times; complex systems are inevitably suspect to the interference of unguessable entities variously called "bugs," "glitches," or "gremlins." The technoshaman/computer hacker knows that he is part of an elite whose knowledge is mystifyingly undecipherable to the general public, and that society has placed an almost religious faith in the power of computers to solve the problems of society, from traffic routing and personal communications, to psychiatric diagnosis and aiding athletic performance...

The ModPrims eagerly embrace technoshamans like Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Terrence McKenna, and Jose Arguelles. The I Ching really becomes a computer code, connected to the rhythms of history and the codons of the DNA sequence. The hallucinogenic mushroom really becomes an extraterrestrial colonizing spore, seeking to link human consciousness with its cosmic roots. The use of mystical drugs like LSD really becomes a means to activate normally dormant "circuits" within the "biocomputer" known as the brain, thus making "metaprogramming" possible. Human-animal communication becomes at once a technological duty, and a necessity for realizing the interconnectedness of "Gaia," or the collective identity created by organic life on the planet...

The ModPrims themselves point to the collision of the past and future. Reading McKenna, they point to the cycles of history, and the way in which many linear trends (scientific invention, etc.) are reaching bottleneck points where they may accelerate exponentially (this being thought to be "TimeWave Zero," or the "Omega Point.") The Principia Cybernetica Newsletter advances the idea that the new webs of telecommunications networks are creating a "global brain" in which humans are the individual neurons. Others suggest that the Human Genome project may unlock the means for humanity's next great evolutionary advance. Many ModPrims think that we have passed out of linear, past-to-future, historical time, and entered some other new kind of cyclical time or maybe even the "end of history"...

People interested in materialist analyses of culture wonder whether this efflorescence of modern primitivism, with its explicit rejection of older notions of linear progress and evolution, has anything to do with the changing material basis of culture. Has the fact that we have entered a post-industrial, service/information economy, 'disconnected' from material production because of automation and other forces, similarly 'disconnected' people from the idea of a rational, orderly march of time? Such a sense of time was essential to industrialism, in which time was money and the Puritan criterion beyond all others was time-efficiency, e.g. not 'slacking' or 'wasting time.'

In his book "Time Wars," Jeremy Rifkin suggests that many of the conflicts between groups may have been over competing notions of time. Rifkin sees the conflict of our era as being between 'industrial' time, which is individualistic, atomistic, quantitative, utilitarian, artificial (clock-based), centralized, and mechanistic; and what might be called 'postindustrial' time, which is communitarian, participatory, qualitative, empathetic, rhythmic, cyclical, decentralized, and organic. From the 'industrial' viewpoint, time is a resource for the progressive creation of wealth, which is not to be squandered. Perhaps from the 'postindustrial' viewpoint, time is a resource for human lives and experiences... recognizing entropy, the person living in 'postindustrial' time knows that material 'progress' is not indefinite or without external cost.

In these times of health fascism and body image disorder, even the most toned-up can always find something that needs a little more work. But hardly anyone can be prepared to take things as far as the Australian performance artist Stelarc. When he looks in the mirror in the morning, he sees a body that isn't so much out of condition as obsolete, something that doesn't need a weekly workout so much a total workover. "The only was I see is that the body is mass produced but at the moment it doesn't have any replaceable parts. OK, we're making artificial organs. But this is just a medical approach. What we really need is a design approach. If you have a heart that wears out after 70 years, this to me is an engineering problem. We should start to re-engineer the body."

Over here recently to plan a performance for the EDGE'92 festival which will take place in London and Madrid in May, Stelarc gave a presentation on his work to the Blue Skies conference on art and technology in Newcastle. Listening to him ponder his various plans to hollow out the body and fill it full of useful high test machinery in preparation for a life in space, you might have been forgiven for thinking he'd already severed most of his links with the planet. However, he can't just be written off as an art world space cadet. Over the last 20 years, in performances involving sensory deprivation, suspending himself in mid-air, wiring his body for sound, filming his insides and hooking himself up to a robotic 'third hand' to stage odd little test runs/dramas which mix up the 'natural' and the automated, Stelard has made compelling use of body art to bring into focus the possible fate of the body in post-human age.

Consequently he's becoming a big hit with critics like postmodern panic theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Echoing their fin-de-millenium terminology, Stelarc himself talks about living in the last day of the human, a post-Frankensteinian world, in which the boundary between humans and machines already blurred. With cosmetic surgery anlmost an impulse purchase these days and people talking seriously about leaving their bodies behind to enter the digital landscape of a virtual world, it's easy to see his point. What's challenging is the the upbeat spin he gives al this. We may turn into weird technological hybrids of flesh and metal, we may even become the aliens UFO spotters expect to appear from the skies, but for Stelarc this isn't depressing or frightening, its exciting, something to celebrate. At the Blue Skies conference, Stelarc's own expanations of his work had an ecstatic, deliberately confrontational edge, and contained mainly of snappy slogans and aphorisms ("The important thing now isn't freedom of information, but freedom of form, freedom to mutate and modify your body"; "Information, not gravity, is the force field which will modify and shape the body of the future"), the effect of which was heightened by his rumbling cartoon mad scientist laugh.

He's good enough to suggest that he could carve out an alternative career as a stand-up theorist (like the Krokers) or even a cyberpunk SF author. Perhaps he could even cut it as a research boffin. Although his jerky third hand may seem more then a primitive gesture, it invited NASA enough for them to invite him over to lecture their scientists about how it worked. Currently he's based at the advanced Computer Graphics Centre, where he's experimenting with a 'third arm' and virtual limbs. However, Stelarc says his work isn't about hard science, that it's just a playful exploration of technological possibilities. Playful isn't quite how you'd describe his suspensions. Here hooks were inserted into his body and he was suspended naked over different landscapes and cities (he was arrested when he tried it in New York). At first sight, the supensions seem to slot into a well established tradition of body art, concerned with reinventing religious details rituals of pain and endurance. Although he admits that they were painful, Stelarc distances himself from what he sees as the outdated fundamentalism of much body art. The suspensions are about exploring "the primal image of the body in space. We dream of flying. There were lots if primitive rituals which involve suspending the body and now we have astronauts floating in zero g." At the Blue Skies conference, Stelarc faced a similar set of objections from feminist and Green critics who argued that he was just a future jock hung up on techno-visions, another boy dangerously obsessed with his toys.

Certainly, it could be argued that Stelarc has constructed his blueprints for the body of the future in a social vacuum. Perhaps the potential will exist in the future for people to redesign their bodies. But it seems likely that this kind of thing will only be available to the rich, and that it will be accompanied by a kind of de-evolution amongst the poor. However, his performances are obviously attempts to rethink our current attitudes to technology and to look beyond paranoid scenarios about machines 'taking over'. If you think about it, a few hundred years ago a persion with an rtificial hart would have been burned at the stake. Overall, I think we're projecting our rather obsolete emotions onto machines. There's no reason for these machines to be imbued with agression like us. The problem is really a human one. We're carrying around this evolutionary baggage of agression and jealousy, this chemistry that generates survival instincts, which we don't really need anymore. In fact, in a technologically enhanced world, perhaps these emotional urges are amplified to the point of being destructive, of threatening the whole planet.

3. Survival Research Laboratories (SRL)

In the 1970's a group of motorheads led by Mark Pauline decided to let the machines speak for themselves. They watched the technology go in the direction it wanted, which was usually a wee bit out of control, but that's the way of willpower. They went to old military sales and they snuck in at night to the junkyards and metal shops and they were scavenging the metal guts of the machines they could find and they mended together computers and cervo tracks and old agricultural components from all around the industrial USofA.

Today, the techo-scavengers known as Survival Research Laboratories are infamous across the globe. Despite the obstacles put before them by a growing number of authorities that do not share their aedgy aesthetic, SRL continues to put on shows whenever possible.

Planned New Devices Or Devices Under Construction

Remote controlled Flying platforms using pulse-jet engines or enclosed-propellers are in the planning and experimentation stages. Deso Molnar (the owner and pilot of the Jesus Head Jet powered GO CART in the recent SRL performance) is working on initial development.

A WheeloCopter is assembled and will be ready for testing in about 6 weeks. This radical concept in wheeled vehicles applies the principles of rotor craft to a two dimensional plane. It's as difficult to describe as it will be for an audience to look at. See photo for more confusion. (not included)

Parts have been collected for computer-controlled Hydraulic Walking Leg Sets, capable of supporting and moving objects weighing 40 or more tons, in the manner of groups of foraging ants. The power plant is a 175 hp Boeing gas turbine engine. This will be SRL's first mobile jet engine powered device.

The Hand-O'-God is a giant spring loaded hand cocked by an air-cylinder with 8 tons of pressure. All parts are secured and construction is underway.

Some Of Our Recently Constructed Machines

A JET-ENGINE POWERED WHEELED VEHICLE has been constructed and was debuted in the _Ultimate Doom_ show. It uses a simple jet engine fabricated from a modified high pressure axial turbocompressor driven furnace burner with a Lear Jet combustor can . It uses a Kawasaki 750 motorcycle engine to power the turbine and associated pumps. A B-29 turbo compressor has recently been acquired and is being installed to add more thrust.

A 175 hp BOEING GAS TURBINE engine was set up on a pivoting frame and operated in the May 28th performance as an audience misery enhancer. It was pointed at the nearby crowd and swung to and fro. A strong smelling chemical was added to the diesel fuel at one point, adding to the desired effect. An afterburner fuel injection system has been added, allowing it to operate as a huge blow torch.

A 10 ft long Teleoperated Hydraulic Arm fitted with precision servo-valves and controlled from up to one mile away with an exoskeleton has been constructed and was used as an attachment for the screw machine in the May 28th performance. The exoskeleton controller attaches to the operators arm and precisely mimics the wearer's motions. It can be configured with an optional stereo head mounted vision system which is controlled by the movements of the wearer's head.

A portable Foam Generating Machine has recently been constructed. It uses standard high expansion fire-fighting foam and can generate 1500 cubic feet of thick free-standing foam per minute. Primarily intended for use on audiences.

A Six-Legged Running Machine (which will have a computer controlled active suspension system) was completed and featured for the first time at the SF Museum Groundbreaking performance. The leg drive system is modeled after the chain drive used on the Hughes Armaments Chain Cannon for sear bolt actuation.

A High Pressure Air Launcher, originally developed by NASA for use in avalanche control, is the basis for SRL's first teleoperated machine. It is capable of automatically loading and firing 26 beer can sized projectiles weighing 2 lbs each at 500 feet per second. The operator aims by head movement, viewing the target through a high resolution camera mounted on the gun frame. This device is CO2 gas operated, and so circumvents existing Federal Firearms Laws. A stripped down version was transported by air and used in a ritual assassination of Simon Leis, (the sheriff of Hamilton county, who busted Dennis Barrie for the Robert Mapplethorpe photo show) at the _Mechanica_ show, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio.

A 100 kilo Joule directable plasma discharge weapon or TASER, designed by Greg Leyh and built at SRL, was successfully tested and used in Europe in 1992. It is currently being rebuilt as an improved design without the sometimes troublesome spark gaps. We are currently looking for 50 kilojoule low impedance capacitors to increase the already formidable power of this device. Contact Greg Leyh at 641-8065 or 647-4960.

To give some idea of the sheer perversity and power of an SRL performance, the noise from a recent show at the Striercher Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria so alarmed hundreds of local residents who were unaware of the show that they called the emergency services the police, the army, and the mayor. A mere 50 km from the border of the former Yugoslavia, the Austrians thought that they were being attacked by Serbs. Even the Austrian Minister of Defense had trouble believing the police that it was only an art performance. While the Austrian army readied itself for war, the Defense Minister sent 20 police officers to the performance with decibel meters and other inscription devices to record the sound levels from the show. They recorded 108 decibels one hundred meters away. The local newspaper later accused SRL of giving the city and the military a terrible case of Kriegsangst, or War Fear. Pauline judged the show a huge success.