Although my reading habits could at best be described as 'eclectic', I am not a habitual reader of science fiction, in fact, I usually avoid it.
However, there is one William Gibson short story that I found myself returning to throughout the course of my studies. I find that words conjure vivid images. I also found that in my studio practice if anything I tended to rely more on the written word than on images as a source of inspiration. What follows is a pr‚cis William Gibson's short story, then I will discuss my relationship to this text. (The text that I am referring to is from William Gibson's first collection of short stories, Burning Chrome [1993: Harper Collins] pages 37-50.)
Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on.
And saw them.
They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tyres like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing towards the city. They were both white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was very frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew somehow that the city behind me was Tucson - a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.
They were the children of Dialta Downe's '80-that-wasn't; they were the Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blonde and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here in the heart of the dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream it was their world. (p47)
The narrator here is describing an 'hallucination'. The character is an architectural photographer who's assignment is to photograph buildings for a British art historian called Dialta Downes, for her current project on 'American Streamlined Moderne'.
"Think of it " Dialta Downes had said, " as a kind of Alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams."
He starts to see things that he knows not to be there,
'Ever so gently, I went over the edge'(p42)
He comments just before he describes a UFO sighting in which he claims to have seen a "Twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing" pass over head. He takes his sighting to
Merv Kihn, a free-lance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Lochness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind. (p42)
Kihn provides the narrator with two explanations, firstly he reassures the narrator,
'Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain country simple: people... see things. People see these things. Nothing's there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably.'(p42)
Kihn gives an example, a case of a sixteen year old in Virginia who he had interviewed the previous week and claimed to have been assaulted by a 'bar hade'(bear head). He then moves onto his second explanation.
'If you want a classier explanation, I'd say that you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like fifties comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.' (p44)
When then he sees a futuristic city take the place of the real Tucson, and the couple appear in his headlights, the narrator does worry. He phones Kihn from a gas station.
But what should I do?
'Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They've got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need.'
What was he talking about?
'Quit yelling and listen to me. I'm letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep those Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose? (p48)
The narrator thinks about quitting the job, but instead heads of for Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there It was prime Downes country; to much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass near Disneyland... Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I'd seen in Arizona. (p49)
He finishes the job and sends the prints off. He follows Khin's advice and takes a taxi to a theatre that was showing Nazi Love Motel, but keeps his eyes shut throughout the show. The following week a congratulatory wire is forwarded to him in San Francisco, 'Dialta had loved the pictures'.
That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed to the nearest newstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to buy a ticket to New York.
The story ends with the narrator headed down the street anxious to find a park bench where he could submerge himself in 'his little bundle of condensed catastrophe' and read the 'hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in.' Jaron Lanier (the man who coined the term 'Virtual Reality',) says of Gibson,(the man who coined the term 'Cyberspace',) that,
He is a dark sarcastic writer in the tradition of Burroughs. His job is to comment on and illuminate the present. When he is writing about the future, he's really writing about the present. And when he is writing about cyberspace, he's not talking about virtual reality technology, he's talking about the media as it exists currently and how it is distorted by the corporate world, by politics and economics. He sees the future as a metaphor for the present.
Lanier, a self styled prophet of the new technology is far more optimistic about it's potential use than either Gibson or myself. Although Lanier might have coined the phrase Virtual Reality, Woolley (1992) attributes the concept to Sutherland and his dream of the ultimate display.
The ultimate display would... be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With the appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland in which Alice walked[1]
Sutherland's reading of Alice in Wonderland seems to have more in common with Nazi Love Motel than with the actual children's story. This then begs the question of whether such a technology ever free itself from it's original design?
When work began on the 'Infobahn' the aim of the exercise was to provide a specific solution to a specific threat from a particular quarter: a nuclear strike, launched by the East against the West. Bernard Aboba (1994)2 described the solution as being,
In the classical tradition of graduate students everywhere, the developers of the InfoBahn delivered an elegant solution that fell somewhat short of the objective: a network that was invulnerable to nuclear strike, but could be disabled by a Cornell graduate student with a basic knowledge of how it worked.[2]
It is from these inauspicious beginnings that the brainchild of the US Department of Defense, was born, imperfect. It left its parents house and moved into academe. There it thrived and grew strong and from there courted commerce. Now the InfoBahn, (call it what you like, information superhighway, internet, world wide web...) the net is tightening fast. The net, the communication system of the global village, decentralised, chaotic the (virtual) Electronic frontier land. The convergence of telecommunications, computers, media and electronics will have profound effects on our perception of the world.
Now when I walk the streets of my neighborhood I see many swastikas
sprayed on walls, but many more yellow arrows sprayed on the pavement.
The cables that are laid promise us the world in our living room, but at
what cost?
In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote that,
By 1969 the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun was publicly demonstrating a low cost 'telenews' system for printing newspapers in the home, and Matsuhita Industries of Osaka was displaying a system known as TV Fax. These first steps towards the newspaper of the future - a peculiar newspaper ,indeed, offering no two viewer -readers the same content. Mass communication, under a system like this, is 'demassified'.
It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc, etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization - away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art, mass-production, mass-produced education and 'mass' culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of our society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices - and our freedom exponentially.
Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and cultural wares available to him is however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns to its opposite.
We watched a lot of films in our house, both my parents had grown up as dedicated cinema goers, and I grew up with an almost morbid fascination with the history of Hollywood. In the Hollywoodland of fantasy, nothing is ever quite as it seems. It was the movies and the radio that provided the great escape from reality in my parents formative years. I grew up with television, film and radio, and now the current generation is growing up television, film, video, radio, cassettes, CDs and computers. Ethel Manning writing in 1936, quotes Aldous Huxley when he wrote,
"Good times are chronic nowadays. There is dancing every afternoon, a continuous performance at all the picture-palaces, a radio concert on tap, like gas or water, at any hour of the day or night... The better the time (in the modern sense) the greater the boredom... A few more triumphs in the style of the radio and the talkies, and the boredom which is now a discomfort will become an intolerable agony."[3]
I share Gibson's concern with the present and I would hope that my work reflects this. I grew up with that media and I grew up in a virtual reality. Although I was born and raised in Cardiff, I also lived in Hollywood. Film and television are so much a feature of contemporary life that we can barely imagine a world beyond their existence. In a culture in which the media is omnipresent, and in which the media web is tightening at an ever increasing rate, I felt nothing short of a need to explore this in my studio practice. The work of Marcus Thomas (the winner of the craft medal at the National Eisteddfod in 1994,) work draws on memories of his Welsh childhood:
the stern faces of the Welsh preachers in the chapel vestry, the china display, the Staffordshire dogs.[4]
To some extent I can identify with these memories as I compare them with my own Welsh childhood. The pious gossip after Church on a Sunday. The teapot of my grandmother. The china figures on the mantle piece. The plates that hung on the wall, My grandfather's medal. And the television, the electronic hearth that blazed in the corner, which I took for granted.
I can not remember a time before television, how different then my life
than that of my parents. Whereas I grew up in suburban 70's & 80s Cardiff,
my parents grew up in the Rhonndda of the 30s & 40s. Whereas I can
only remember switching on my first colour television, they can remember
switching on their first lightbulb. How quickly do we take technology for
granted. How quickly does our culture become submerged by it. When we are
awash in a sea of information, how can we pick out the truth from the lies
and the Dream and the Reality?
In 1897 Parish wrote that,
Fallacious perceptions of the other senses are also not uncommon. Many sufferers see the persecutors who torment them from a distance by means of magnetic and electrical apparatus. They entertain Kings and Princesses, and receive angels' visits; all these occur in a full state of consciousness. In some cases they are characterised by extreme monotony, and some are closely bound up with the dominant fixed idea which they illustrate.[5]
Clearly to a reader in 1897, the sufferers would have been considered mad, yet less than a century on the condition is endemic. Does that make the affected Victorians who saw such things more sane? Or does it render us mad? Let me turn the question onto you, what do you think of when you see a well dressed individual muttering into a small black box in a public space?
Hollywood: Madness, lies and mass media.
Hollywood, my childhood haunt, is the place where the Dream was a reality had loud voice and vivid colour. We know in our rational selves that in movies, nothing is ever as it seems. We know that as adults. We know the process of film, and we are willing to suspend our disbelief. We experience the consensual hallucination willingly when we actively sit down to watch something. But that is only one way of consuming the media. As a child I had a greater belief in what I saw. The box in the corner not only entertained and educated me but also mislead and marginalized me.
Hollywood lied to me about itself, and what it really was. Spencer Tracey to me was the young Edison, the man who invented the lightbulb and the man who invented the moving picture camera. Only later do I find this to be a lie.
Picture this, a scene that took place in Leeds in 1930, outside the workshop of Augustine le Prince. The occasion was the unveiling of a plaque which commemorated his invention of the moving picture. What follows here is a transcription of my typed notes taken from Christopher Rawlence's excellent book The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of Moving Pictures (1990)
Mayor: "I doubt whether many people realize what le Prince did for the world in creating an enormous amount of employment. We have only to think of Hollywood and other centers where they make films to bring home this fact..."
These remarks puzzled Marie. Moving pictures had not brought much prosperity to Leeds... the streets showed signs of depression. Shortly it was her turn to speak...
Marie: " I come as a witness from America to say that my father did make moving pictures in New York, Paris and here in Leeds. This is his single lens camera. This is film. (she holds up a 4 foot long tail of celluloid 4 inches wide.)
My father included sound in his early experiments. He used one of the first Edison Phonographs to provide music. I often heard him say that films would one day talk and have colour.
He also said that film would change politics and governments and he spoke of the tremendous influence film must have in stimulating feeling between nations...
I was sent to call for him for tea. It was a dark winter night. As I was walking across to the school buildings I saw a ray of light coming from beneath the door. When I pushed the door open I saw some figures who appeared to be moving about on a whitewashed wall. I did not know what they were. My father asked me what I wanted and before I knew what had happened, he had shut the door on me. I obviously wasn't meant to be there, but I suppose that I was the first child to see moving picture film.
My mother once said that he was watched during his experiment in Leeds. I understand that his workshop was entered and parts were taken away after his disappearance.
(It is perhaps ironic to note that the young Marie's first experience of the moving picture in 1888 is one of exclusion). In June 1890 le Prince demonstrated one of his projectors to the Secretary of the Opera National in Paris. On the 16th of September his brother spotted him on the Paris train in Dijon, after that he went missing. On the 24th of August the following year Edison applied for three patents for moving-picture apparatus. In December 1895 the Lumi‚res Brothers gave the first showing of projected moving pictures to a paying audience in Paris. One hundred years on from this a season of films is broadcast on television to commemorate a centenary of cinema. And now with cameras constantly monitoring us as we go about our daily business, we are all being framed.
In 1993, Birmingham City Council suspended an application for a citywide network of cameras because of concerns about how the images would be stored and used. In the absence of privacy protection, the council felt that the project should not go ahead.
The government took another view and, six months later, Downing Street announced that laws would be passed which would prevent councils from blocking installation of camera systems, by making their installation exempt from planning regulations.
Anyone can set up a CCTV system. There is no licensing system. There is no government oversight agency. The technology falls outside data-protection law, and once the government makes it exempt from planning regulations, it will be free of any constraint.[6]
Anyone, that is who can afford to install a closed circuit TV system. What we should know by know is what the big brothers regard as a common-sense solution, usually spells a loss of 'civil liberties' for his younger siblings, and is more often than not a solution which relies on inappropriate technology.
Andrew May, Assistant Chief Constable of South Wales, has urged victims of domestic violence to conceal video cameras in their homes to collect evidence.[7]
Not only does this suggest a staggering loss of grip on the reality of the situation faced by battered women, it also suggests an uncomfortable level of disbelief in the woman's story. I would also contend that this also implies an unpalatable tendency towards voyeurism. What next? No rape conviction without the video? Did video evidence help Rodney King? Who said the camera never lies. Louise Mc Keever, writes powerfully of the experience of being the surveyed as she grew up in Northern Ireland,[8]
SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY OR VALID POINT. I USED TO CRY WHEN MY MOTHER MADE ME GO TO MASS BECAUSE SOME OF THE STUFF THE PRIEST SAID SEEMED TO BE WRONG. YOU CAN SHOOT YOUR ENEMY SOFTLY WITH A CAMERA. WE LIVED BEHIND THE POLICE STATION, IT HAD A 78 FOOT CAMERA TOWER WITH TWO CAMERAS, ONE AT THE TOP AND ONE HALFWAY DOWN. YOU COULD SEE FOR MILES. IT SOMETIMES POINTED AT ME AS I REFILLED THE COAL BUCKET. VIRTUAL MORALITY. I WAS GOING TO SHOW A SECURITY CAMERA BUT I WAS TOLD IT COULD EXCITE PERVERTS.
It seems that if the lie is repeated often enough we make it become reality. In the religion of technology, (at whose altar we are all expected to worship) the lone genius inventor is both prophet and high priest. Edison is as much a part of the *Dream* as apple pie.
Textbooks still credit the invention of radio to Marconi, although the Supreme Court of the United States granted full patent rights to Nikoli Tesla in 1943. Tesla was another victim of Edison's success. Tesla, also the inventor of AC current, found himself up against the powerful Edison, 'inventor' of the less efficient DC current.
Edison put together a traveling roadshow which attempted to portray AC as dangerous, even to the point of electrocuting animals both small (puppies) and large (in one case an elephant) in front of large audiences. As a result of this propaganda crusade, the State of New York adopted AC electrocution as it's method of executing convicts.[9]
I grew up with the belief that Edison was a good man. Books have told me that he was more or less the personification of the American Dream. His most famous quote is undoubtedly 'genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration', but perhaps a more telling one is that 'Everybody steals in industry and commerce. I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know how to steal'.
In the Merry Old Land of Oz. In the introduction to Barbara Garson's Electronic Sweatshop, she writes that,
"The first time I used a computer was in 1981 as a data entry clerk. I entered the Office of the Future through a door that led into a windowless basement where dozens of women sat spaced apart, keying with three fingers of one hand. I felt like Dorothy stepping into Oz, only in this version the movie turned from color to black and white."
Primitivo Morales in a letter to Processed World (a 1980s magazine produced in San Francisco by dissatisfied 'wage slaves') also refers to Oz.
Me, I get too embarassed to talk of my hopes for a day that will probably come long after I've been recycled. Nor do I think that describing the Emerald City will give us a better idea of where to put our feet next in order to get there. But maybe I'm wrong.
May be he is.
At the height of the cold war, the heyday of the American Dream L.
Frank Baum's modernist fairy tales were banned from American libraries
on the grounds that it was thought to be 'unsuitable for young minds'.
Just as Gibson uses the future to comment on the present, Baum used the fairy tale land of Oz to comment on the America of his time, but whereas Gibson's vision is distinctly dystopian, Oz is presented as rather more utopian. The French critic Michel Abensour suggested that,
"The proper function of utopia is the education of desire."[10]
In Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, he describes a 'marvelous land' filled with all the modern conveniences that we have now come to take for granted, but it was as if women didn't exist.
From the seventh book onwards Baum was telling his readers that he is simply writing down the stories that he is receiving from Oz by means of 'wireless telegraphy'. There's a lot of technology in Oz, but, because of the social structure, that technology is used very differently. By placing that technology in a very different social context Baum is commenting on his own society's use of technology.
Oz had a mechanical man long before Karel Capek coined the term robot , Glinda's 'Great Book of Records' looks suspiciously like the internet and Ozma's 'Magic Picture' is quite probably the earliest surveillance system in literature. Oz makes no claims that it is a democracy. Ozma is the absolute ruler. However she is portrayed as the very model of a benign dictator. Official authority is used only for the benefit of all. It is said of Ozma (in The Scarecrow of Oz [1915])that, "Her happy subjects adore their girl Ruler and each one considers her a comrade and protector." But even with all this power, Ozma still has to darn her socks like everyone else.
The society that Baum describes in the Oz books is essentially non-competitive and altruistic. People enjoy their work and money is not used. This is explained by the Tin Woodman in The Road to Oz (1909).
"If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world. Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in Oz cares to have more than he can use."
Pacifism is the official policy of Oz. Even when Oz is threatened, in The Emerald City of Oz (1910) Ozma, the ruler refuses to fight and states that,
"No one has the right to destroy any living creature, however evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight - even to save my kingdom."
This is not to say that there is no army, however the Royal Army of Oz is strictly decorative and composed of eight generals, six colonels, seven majors, five captains, and a token private for all these officers to order around since is their job, to "order his men to fight. Since there are no men there can be no fighting"[11], writes Baum again in The Emerald City of Oz. However in the earlier book, The Marvelous world of Oz(1904) we are informed that the "Royal Army of Oz - ...Was another name for the Soldier with Green Whiskers," who carried a gun, but never loaded it "for fear of accidents."
In the civilized parts of Oz there is almost no crime, so there is no need for a police force. The most common offense, or suspected offense, is that of eating animals. In Oz animals are to be treated with as much respect as people, as long as they behave.
And if all of this was not enough to ensure that the Oz books were deemed to be unsuitable for young minds in the 1950's the worst is yet to come; Oz was a world in which women rule and have power. Women are also the main practitioners of magic and sorcery, the Wizard, a self confessed 'humbug' was taught real magic eventually by Glinda.
The centrality of Baum's female characters, does suggests strong parallels between his Mother-in law, Gage's writings on the Church and the State. What Gage insisted contended was that what men believed and said about woman was simply not true, that the records that men constructed were false, and that masculine authority was little more than a myth invented by males.
The Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum's 1900 character bears a striking resemblance to Edison, 'the Wizard of Menlo Park'. I'm not sure quite how it goes in the 1900 book but in the 1939 film, when the Wizard is revealed to be a fraud by Dorothy the Wizard says, "Oh no, I am not a very bad man, only a very bad wizard."
My interest in that film, which I had enjoyed as a child intensified when I discovered that the creator of the land of Oz, L. Frank Baum, had married a woman named Maud Gage "whose mother was a writer and leading suffragette."[12] Eyles then goes on to say that "His mother-in-law, Matilda, listened to the stories Baum told his sons at bedtime, and she urged him to write some of them down."
Baum wrote 14 Oz books between 1900 and 1919, before other people continued to chronicle Oz. Baum however did not just write children's books he also wrote plays, he wrote for and edited a newspaper, bred chickens, sold china and glass, and was an influential figure in the history of American window dressing but it is his role of early showman 'multi-media artist', and Hollywood film maker that most interests me.
The Wizard of Oz was an immediate success in 1900 and sold over 20,000 copies. Between 1901 and 1902 Baum adapted it into a stage production which opened in Chicago in June 1902. In 1904 Baum wrote the second Oz book, set this time entirely in Oz. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow (in Baum's stage production these key roles were played by Fred Stone and David Montgomery,) appeared in the book again as did a girl army armed with knitting needles and two new characters, Jack Pumpkinhead and the 'highly magnified and thoroughly educated' Wogglebug. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion did not appear in the second Oz story in which the main character is a small boy named Tip, who makes and brings to life the character of Jack Pumpkinhead. By the end of the book it is revealed that Tip is in fact the 'lovely Princess Ozma', the legitimate ruler of Oz who had been turned into a boy by the witch Mombi.
Now in terms of a turn of the century children's book, this 'sex-change' came as something of a surprise to me, though viewed in terms of a stage production, it makes more sense as it does evoke the cross-dressing that is the norm in our 'tradition' of pantomime. It is not surprising that the stage musical production of The Woggle-Bug adapted from the book The Marvellous Land of Oz (1904) opened in Chicago in June 1905. The girl army was transformed into a line of chorus girls, however the critics deemed it to be too simple and too childish, it failed to repeat the success of the first production, and the show lasted less than a month.
He eventually returned to writing about Oz in 1907, after writing Queen Zixi of Ix, Or the Story of the Magic Cloak(1905) and John Dough and the Cherub (1906) and other titles written under pseudonyms (Edith van Dyne amongst others). Ozma of Oz (1907) reintroduced the characters of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion and introduced the new characters Billina (the yellow talking hen), the Hungry Tiger, and Tik-tok, arguably literature's first man-made mechanical man.
From 1907 until his last book was published posthumously in 1920,[ incidentally the year of the death of Karel Capek the Czech author of Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.) ] with the exception of 1912 Baum produced one Oz book a year. The role of the Royal Historian was then filled by Ruth Plumly Thompson from 1921-1939, and then by John R. Neill, 1940-42 (the illustrator of all but the first Oz book). There have also been other Oz books by other authors as there have also been many other Oz inspired films. Baum himself was amongst the earliest film makers in Hollywood where he released his first film The Patchwork Girl of Oz way back in 1914, a year after the book came out. But that wasn't his first foray into film making. Way back in 1907 Baum hit on a novel way of publicizing his books. He had noticed the popularity of Travelogues with the audiences of the early movie shows. He combined his interests in performing and showmanship and developed a programme of 'Fairylogues' in which he would introduce his audience to the land of Oz. Fairylogue and Radio-plays (The term Radio-plays had nothing to do with broadcasting, but referred instead to a process developed by the Frenchman Michel Radio, who had developed a technique for tinting film with transparent colours) involved Baum giving an introduction, then he would step out of sight and narrate over filmed scenes, from the three published Oz books (and John Dough and the Cherub) using coloured slides of the illustrations from the books. He funded the project himself, but the cost of doing all that and touring it with a band of musicians was too high and the show closed in December 1908, in New York.
Matilda Joslyn Gage entered into the fray of the early Woman Suffrage Movement at the Syracuse National convention in 1852. The nervous 26 year old gave a speech that outlined some of the past achievements of women. Until this point the debate in the women's movement had been in terms of what women might do if... Gage presented the convention with a wealth of information on what women had achieved, in spite of the obstacles that had been in put in their way.
"She challenged, fundamentally, the belief (held by Stanton as well) that history was a process of gradual improvement, an evolution towards a higher and more civilized goal, and that the time had now arisen for women to take their steps and to become full members of the civilized community. Suggesting that there had been women in the past who enjoyed more freedom and who had played a greater role in the running of society represented a startlingly new frame of reference for many, if not all the women then involved in the woman's rights movement."[13]
This not only pointed to a need to reassess the orthodox view of history as being a linear evolution from a state of savagery to their current highly civilized contemporary state, but also questioned why it was that these women knew nothing of their fore mother's achievements? It also raised the issue of how did women came to 'know' and believe what they did about themselves - and who had told them? She insisted that what men believed and said about woman was simply not true, that the records that men constructed were false, and that masculine authority was little more than a myth invented by males.
"Obedience and self-sacrifice - the virtues prescribed for subordinate classes, and which naturally grow out of their condition - are alike opposed to the theory of individual rights and self-government. But as even the inertia of mankind is not proof against the internal law of progress, certain beliefs have been inculcated, certain crimes invented, in order to intimidate the masses. Hence the Church made free thought the worst of sins, and the spirit of inquiry the worst of blasphemies; while the state proclaimed her temporal power of divine origin, and all rebellion high treason alike to God and the king, to be speedily and severely punished. In this union of Church and state mankind touched the lowest depths of degradation."[14]
She lays the blame for this state of affairs squarely at the feet of the church, saying that it was the church which provided the logic for this to happen. Under male control, the church deemed woman inferior to men. Men, therefore felt free to 'steal' women's creative and physical energy. When women's resources have been taken, the Church considers it's assertion that women are inferior to be justified. It is in this form and through this process, that of masculinised knowledge and creativity is legitimised and that all but a trace of women's creative and cultural contribution gets passed on to the next generation. As this contribution was deemed to no longer belong to women, it was not theirs to pass on, the ideas of women were either devalued or passed off as the ideas of men. As time went by the same principles that informed the church, went on to inform the state, so that,
"Although woman has performed much of the labor of the world, her industry and economy have been the very means of increasing her degradation. Not being free the results of her labor have gone to build up and sustain the very class that has perpetuated this injustice."[15]
You will note that she refers to men as a 'class'. Whereas, Marx is pointing the finger at the ruling class, Gage is pointing out firmly that it is men that constitute this ruling class, at all levels of society.
"Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world, and although the last two decades a vast number of new employments have been opened to her, statistics prove that in the great majority of these, she is not paid according to the value of the work done, but according to sex"[16]
Gage saw "the scientific education of woman, in the training of her faculties to independent thought and logical reasoning," the "hope of the future."[17]
Picture this scene: A small ginger, freckled woman enters room full
of 11 year olds, she bustles towards the blackboard, and motions to us
that we may sit. Her eyes dart back and forth around the room. She draws
breath and in a voice much larger than herself, she asks the question.
'WHAT IS HISTORY?'
The question fell on puzzled ears.
Both of my parents were born in 1925, in the South Wales Valleys. They both left school at the age of 14 in 1939. During the Second World War my Mother worked in a large clothing factory making uniforms and my Father worked down the pits. Although they would both tell me what a dreadful thing the war was I noticed that they would talk about the past and especially the war in different terms. For my mother, her own personal war meant a lot of hard work, but it seemed filled with people, coping, having hard times and having good times, despite ... My Father would talk more in terms of things rather than of people, and always there seemed to me to be a faint trace of regret that he did not have the opportunity to do something other than 'keep the home fires burning'. This manifested itself most acutely when he watched a war film or the news of the Falklands on the TV he would be full of praise for those gallant men, and their fighting machines, while my mother would absent herself from the room. War films upset her and we worried whether my Brother-in-Law would have to go and fight in that pointless war.
When my father talked about history, the history of which he talked, corresponded to the sort of history that I was taught in school, the grand scale, the big changes and it wore a veneer of 'objectivity' and it taught me about 'noble' men.
When my Mother talked of the past, it was rich with detail, she talked of changes, but she also talked of the continuities. The sort of history that I was learning in school somehow seemed to suggest that we, the dwellers of in the present were somehow smarter or cleverer than those who went before us, that history was an evolutionary process towards our current highly developed state. I felt uncomfortable with that. It wasn't the people that changed, ideas change, technology changes, the environment changes, but that is not the same thing; adaptation is not the same thing as evolution.
History throughout the 'O' level curriculum, seemed to be entirely populated by men, Wars, Treaties and Weapons. When it came to 'A' level Art History, naively I thought that maybe there might be some women involved somewhere along the line... but no. I would ask on a regular basis, "where's the women?" I would be told that this was a valid question... but that more research needed to be done.
In 1984 I quit studying for 'A' level Craft Design Technology (CDT) and turned my hand to Ceramics. The school that I went to did not prevent girls from taking Woodwork and Metalwork (this is not to say however that it was encouraged) and in the third year, when the subject became optional, I was one of two girls who opted to continue. When it came to 'O' level options, I was eager to continue with the subject, however because of a timetable clash with Physics, a subject I allegedly had an aptitude for, and considerable parental pressure to take the more prestigious science subject, I wound up 'going through the motions' in the physics lab.
I would have been the first girl in the history of my school to have studied CDT to both 'O' level and 'A' level standard (I was due to take the 'O' level in 1984 and the 'A' level the following year) but I quit because of the constant name calling. The lesson that I really learnt as a seventeen year old in those workshops was that 'girls don't do technology.'
I became increasingly disillusioned and left school with one 'A' level. On the Art Foundation course in college, I was still asking the same question, and still getting the same old reply, "valid question, more research needs to be done." It eventually dawned on me that I was going to have to answer my own questions and it was my own exclusion from technology and women's maginalization from the grand historical narratives that has provided me with an angle.
For the last 2 and a half years I have been hitch-hiking on the InfoBahn, and making notes of my travels. I have travelled the world on the net. I have seen photos of great horror from Croatia. I have picked up potters' tips from Australia. I have read descriptions of experiments by amateurs who have made energy from nothing. I have read papers on possible links between electricity and cancer. I have hunted for jobs the world over. I have even been out of this world to the fictional space of Babylon 5. I could not even start to list all the places that I have been, but many of my early travels were in the honorable hacker tradition of being just the wrong side of legal. I worked on the principal that if you're around often enough and you look like you have a right to be there, the chances are that people will assume that you are indeed meant to be there, and will leave you alone. It worked well enough for a while, but I have now got to the stage where I feel that I want to actively participate rather than observe from the sidelines. I want to create a site that will be of use to my peers.
The proportion of women studying computing remains rather small, and is unlikely to rise considerably unless there is a perceptible change in the culture of computing, this is again unlikely. If women are staying away from computers in droves, should we not be working to demystify the machines and incorporate the technology into subjects which they do study?
Technology is seen as the 'great white hope' of our future. Money is being poured into the setting up of City Technology Colleges and, from 1993, the study of technology has been made a compulsory core curriculum subject to be studied up to age of 16 in schools. There is also currently much debate about the standards of teaching in Maths and Science and concern about the numbers of students wishing to take Arts and Humanities subjects rather than Science subjects. Science's response to this has been to ask for yet more money, and more equipment, yet this strategy has not worked in the past, and will continue not to work. When you are faced with a sick body of knowledge, a 'band aid' of cash does not heal the patient. Instead we need to examine the whole body of knowledge to find a cure.
From its very foundations, science has defined it's way of knowing in a gender based language. Francis Bacon's image of the (male) scientist putting the female nature "on the rack," underscores the way objectivity has been constructed not only in terms of the distance of the knower from nature but also in terms of an aggressive relationship toward it (or rather her). From it's very foundations, objectivity in science has been engaged with the language of power, not only over nature but over people and organizations as well. Such associations have spread beyond professional scientific communities; aggression has become part of a widespread cultural understanding of what it means to behave in a scientific way.[18]
Neither Science or Technology are gender blind, nor do they exist in a vacuum, they are powerful social constructions. I believe that, though this explicit shift toward the culture of technology has serious implications for all of us, the brunt is not being borne equally. As jobs are automated 'to take the drudgery out of life' new and even worse drudgery is being created elsewhere. New technologies require (at least at present) people to assemble them. The majority of those employed in the assembly of these technologies are women, not because of their 'nimble fingers' but because they work for less money and do can not readily protest about their conditions of employment. Of course one solution to this problem is to build more machines that build more machines and this is the approach that science seems to be hell bent on adopting, but frankly I can see little rationality in this approach to the problem. The grim legacy of the 'Enlightenment' still with us.
The internet is a valuable source of information. There is much wheat but there is also much more chaff. In the states there are moves afoot to try to censor the traffic on the AutoBahn. A moral panic is also starting to be whipped up against it in this country. The press are covered with stories of the internet yet nealy everyone I ask, has never been on it, there is much curiosity, but little hands on experience, yet John Redwood's *vision* is for there to be internet access in every classroom.
Suddenly I find myself in a privileged position. I have traveled a little on the internet, I started to use the internet largely because it is a choice between exploring something new and much hyped or resigning myself to the plastic world of 'Richard-and-Judy-Land' - the enforced nightmare of daytime TV that characterises unemployment and 'housewifery'. My time observing the net life has forced me to come to the conclusion that women must have a stronger presence on the net. If politics goes on-line, we cannot afford to be any further disenfranchised than we already are.
Jacked in to the Global Economy
In some ways trying to explain what the cyberspace of the internet is like something akin to trying to explain to someone who has never seen a film, what the editing process is like. The most overwhelming thing used to be the waiting. Yet it is strangely addictive. Like clay it is a medium that can be shaped in an infinity of ways. But without more general access I am in no doubt that it will become little more than a *wankland* for the technologically privileged.
When it comes to censorship there is the powerful argument that if you are liable to get upset by the content, you don't open the file. The libertarian in me agrees with this wholeheartedly. But on closer (self-)examination I am no libertarian. The issues are as complex as the network. The InfoBhan does not travel through Utopia. Nor is it likely to become the highway that helps to construct one.
In South Korea over 60 percent of fully employed women urban workers earn less than the minimum cost of living - a wage that makes it easier for companies to encourage or require overtime work. For Korean workers, the average work week is 54.4 hors. In December 1988 electronic workers at Motorola's South Korean plant staged a sit-in in the company canteen to gain company recognition for their union. Motorola locked the protesters in the canteen and sent in the kustade-a militant save-the-company corps consisting of managerial staff and other male employees. Many workers were seriously injured.[19]
Motorola is the company that produces the chips for Apple computers, the brand of machine favored by the 'creative' community. However this is not to say that companies such as Intel, the producers of amongst other things, the Pentium processor, have any better employment practices. This does cause me concern. It also causes me concern when we examine the burgeoning hi-tech an electronics industry on our own doorstop.
A part of my reply to Louise Mc Keever's statement read as follows,
I SHARE A BIRTHDAY WITH THE QUEEN. I WAS BORN IN CARDIFF. HOW DO THESE WORDS DEFINE ME? IN SCHOOL I WOULD WATCH THE COAL TRAIN GO OVER THE BRIDGE, MARKING THE HOURS. DO I FEEL WELSH? MY FATHER WAS A MINER BUT QUIT AND MOVED TO CARDIFF. HE ALWAYS SAID THAT HE WOULDN'T SEND A DOG DOWN THE PITS. THERE'S NO NEED FOR PITS WHEN IT'S CHEAPER TO BULLDOZE THE MOUNTAIN SIDE. IT KEEPS THE LABOUR [COSTS] DOWN. THE ONLY WORK NOW IS WOMEN'S WORK. ASSEMBLING BOY-TOYS THAT THEY CANNOT AFFORD AND WANT EVEN LESS. STILL CAN'T COMPLAIN, THERE'S PLENTY WORSE OFF THAN US THOUGH, INNIT? THEY SAY THAT WE SHOULD EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY AS OUR FRIEND, INNIT?
When King Coal fell, there was job loss on a massive scale throughout South Wales, and sunrise industries dawned. (Government incentives attracted industry into the area, low rent, low tax.). What jobs were created were largely in the 'hi-tech' sector. Women's work, low paid, low skill, *nimble-fingered* jobs. Wages in South Wales are amongst the lowest in the country, and women's wages are about on average two thirds of that of men; and that's if you're lucky enough to have a job... unemployment is high.
To become a part of the on-line community takes a serious amount of cash. Just as someone does not purchase a flash car unless that one can afford the petrol, neither does one become an internent server unless on can afford the electricity and phone bill. And besides which, the kids are more likely to whine for a Sega Megadrive and Sky TV than an internet link... and besides all that, everyone knows...women don't do technology.
Gage's analysis is echoed in Donna Haraway's work more than one hundred years on. In a recent interview she states that,
"What's clear from popular culture is that large numbers of people are at least aware of the crisis we're facing, a crisis of historical consciousness where the master narratives will no longer soothe as they have for a couple thousand years, in Christian culture at any rate"[20]
Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1985), was an attempt to create a mythical reconception of nature, which embraced the technology of the era in which we are living. She makes it explicit in the article that, (in Constance Penley's words)
"Nature was not immune to the contagion's of technology, that technology was part of nature conceived as everyday social relations, and that women, especially, had better start using technologies before technology starts using them. In other words, we need techno-realism to replace a phobic naturalism."[21]
But this is unlikely to be an easy task. My recent experience in a Cybercafe has borne this out (see webdiary). We cannot un-invent technological 'advance', and if we try to ignore it we do so at our own peril, for while the crafts has been 'navel gazing' and asking itself most earnestly where it fits in to the Art/Craft dichotomy, it's high-tech silicon cousin the computer chip has been busily revolutionizing society with extremely worrying consequences.
However this is not to say that we can afford to turn our back on their usefulness. My entry point into the (virtual) world of computers was through a painting package, and I could see quite clearly that it was useful and relevant to my work, and enabled me to try out many different variations of an idea, (and blasphemy of blasphemies) it was fun. It was not a 'state of the art' machine, but it did provide me with an excellent (virtual) testing ground for ideas.
I am not in love with the machine, nor with the culture that surrounds it. I can see it's usefulness not simply in terms of graphics but also in a host of other applications. Not as it has been suggested somewhat ludicrously to 'hack into the US defence network' but in more obviously useful, realistic, and mundane things such as writing articles, applications for funding, letters, producing my own publicity and publishing on the web. I am realistic enough to realize that as a woman involved in the arts such skills as being able to create data-bases and spreadsheets is of obvious value. However this 'unfeminine' interest in technology is, to a great extent, viewed as deviant and I have encountered much sexism (not only directed at myself but toward all women) in my quest to become computer literate, some of it overt, but much of it covert. My experience is echoed in the words of Virginia Woolf when she wrote,
"do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that 'grandeur and power' of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will not use force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them. And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war"
Throughout the whole of my education when I have asked "what about the women?", the response has always been "Good question. More research needs to be done." This still holds true, more research does need to be carried out, however research alone is not enough, what is urgently needed is action. Equal opportunities policies are nothing more than words on paper without a concerted effort to implement them. Cynthia Cockburn in 1984 assessed the progress made by the Manpower Services Commission in enabling young women to cross gender contrary areas of training and work. She identified two key factors.
Cockburn's recommendations included strategies such as single-sex streaming, supportive training policies, women teachers in technical subjects and intensive work with young men on sexism.
I believe that a more playful and creative approach to technology could have a useful role to play in the demasculinisation of technology, but that in order to do that we have to realise that the silicon in microchips is not inherently evil and that it is not the machine that we should fear but the culture that surrounds us. We are already involved in technology, and it's about time we faced up to that involvement critically and confronted 'the semiotic phantoms in the machine.'
F.L. in a letter to Processed World, wrote,
My personal preference is that we stop carping about technology and learn to use it for our own purposes. Computers are not going to disappear. Our hope and our opportunity is in creating alternative structures or 'information networks', if you will, from which 'common people' can begin to learn and speak openly with one another. Here's our hance to form true grassroots organizations without the constraints of 'mass media' redefining the movement' out from under us on a daily basis.
This too is my preference, however without the access to the technology or the means of letting different voices be heard this is just another utopian dream. One part of Med-O's response to F.L.'s letter which I find to be particularly resonant is when s/he raises these questions,
Is a personal computer 'valuable' if it's manufacture requires burning out the eyes of a young Malaysian woman?If income level should not determine access to resources what should?Intelligence?Artistic talent? Moral character? Community activism?
I do not have the answers, but I do know that these are questions that urgently need to be addressed. I hope that 'weblands' contributes in some small way to doing this, but like most things, I can't do it on my own. Your thoughts are urgently needed.
1:Woolley (1992),p41 citing Ivan Sutherland(1965)The Ultimate Display
2:Bernard Aboba (1994) 'The Information Highway: A Democratic or Totalitarian
Force' from the on-line journal Internaut. aboba@internaut.com
3:Ethel Manning (1937) Confessions and Impressions Penguin,London,
pp91.
[Fifteenth impression of her autobiography published first in 1936]
4:Moira Vincentelli Marcus 'Thomas at Aberystwyth' Crefft issue 75
5:Edmund Parish Hallucinations and Illusions (1897)
6:Simon Davies 'Welcome Home Big Brother' Wired May 95 1.02:p63
7:ibid. p62
8:Louise Mc Keever is currently a Fine Artist studying in Cardiff.
One day as we were both working on the computers in the collage library,
she printed off a couple of copies of and handed one to me. I immediately
drafted her a similar autobiographical statement which I shall refer to
later.
9:Authour unknown, this information was taken from the internet and
claims to be an exerpt from Vol 6, no. 4, "Power and Resonance",
The Journal of the International Tesla Society. The name of the file is
Nikola Tesla: Humanitarian Genius. Although I found this information wildly
far fetched at first reading, I have come across other versions of this,
though elephants are not mentioned.
10:Louis Michaelson, in Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology.p280
11:ibid.,p54
12:Allen Eyles (1985) The World of Oz p34
13:Dale Spender (1983) Women of Ideas: and what men have done to them.
p. 316-7
14:ibid.,p.52
15:Matilda Joslyn Gage (1881) Preceding Causes
From Mari Jo and Paul Buhle (1978) The concise History of Woman's Suffrage
p. 53-4
16:ibib.,p54
17:ibid.,p.53
18:Turkle and Papert (1990),
19:Perry and Greber 'introduction to Computers' Signs 1990
20:Constance Penley and Andrew Ross et al (1991) Technoculture p.17
21:ibid. p6