Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  “I got interested in steam in the mid-eighties, after working with pneumatics,” he notes. “I was living in a studio that was formerly the Los Angeles boilerworks when I began conducting experiments where I would raise boilers to a fever pitch and then hide behind plate steel. Everyone told me that it was incredibly dangerous, that it couldn’t be done. There are very few people who make boilers anymore; steam power is almost a lost art.

  “Ironically, we still generate most of our energy with steam, with the exception of hydroelectric and solar power. It’s a beautiful paradox that we use nuclear technology to generate steam in order to make electricity; it’s like putting a fiberglass handle on a stone adze!”

  There is glorious irony, as well, in the fact that his Victorian vehicles exist in Los Angeles, whose futuristic freeway grid, omnipresent smog, near-permanent gridlock, and toxically beautiful sunsets testify to modernity’s all-consuming obsession with the automobile. Phantasmagoric contraptions, gliding elegantly on outsized wheels, Goldstone’s steam cars seem to have taken a wrong turn down a cobbled street in gaslit London and emerged, somehow, at the end of the twentieth century. “L.A. has made me the artist I am,” the artist nods. “Underlying all my work is the issue of mobility; everything stems from that, the conversion of energy into motion.”

  For Goldstone, steam power is a potent symbol of self-determination in an overdetermined technoculture. “When I build a steam engine, I’m not discussing steam, I’m discussing computers,” he says. “Steam power, which introduced industrialization, is the last technology we had our hands on. I assembled my steam car with nuts and bolts and bits of steel that I found. To operate it, I light a fire beneath a closed vessel of water, open a plumbing valve, and it starts, producing ten horsepower as regularly as the sun comes up in the morning. Once, I was driving it in a performance and one of the pistons popped out of the cylinder and the push rod bent like a noodle. Now, if a chip melts in your computer, the show is over.”

  A triumphant gleam lights his eye. “I disconnected the rod, bent it over my knee to straighten it, put it back in, and the car ran again,” says Goldstone, with unalloyed satisfaction. “That’s the power you have to keep things moving, when you’ve built them yourself.”

  The Magic Kingdom and the Pyrotechnic Insanitarium36

  Performing robots and articulate idols, as I noted in the introduction to this chapter, have traditionally been footmen of power and mouthpieces for authority. In ancient Egypt, the holy statue in Ammon had the power to make kings: At the appointed hour, the males in the royal family lined up before it, and the effigy tapped the next pharaoh with an outstretched arm.

  Of course, such statues were not robots in the contemporary sense; they were probably jointed dolls, brought to life by steam, fire, or concealed operators-priests, perhaps-who pulled strings, worked levers, and spoke through hidden tubes that made mortal voices sound like divine thunder (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!). Even so, they served the same societal purpose more discreetly fulfilled by their wheelwork-driven and computer-animated descendants: the affirmation of the status quo.

  Eighteenth-century automata curried favor with the crowned heads of their day: Jaquet-Droz’s Draftsman was programmed to sketch France’s King Louis XV and his ill-fated heirs, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Moreover, as Michel Foucault points out, they taught lessons about the management of subjects. “The celebrated automata [of the eighteenth century] were not only a way of illustrating an organism,” writes Foucault, “they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power: Frederick [the Great], the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments and long exercises, was obsessed with them.”37

  Vaucanson’s automata had a profound influence on the French mechanist Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who ventured beyond Cartesian dualism to argue in L’Homme Machine (“Man a Machine,” 1748) that all life could be explained in purely materialistic terms. In conceiving of humans as clockwork contrivances whose inner workings-including their so-called spiritual and psychological dimensions-could be made to reveal themselves through a rigorous application of the scientific method, de la Mettrie paved the way for a philosophy of governance that assumed the citizenry to be utterly knowable, in an absolute sense.

  To Foucault, this mechanism of social control–which he calls panopticism-is “constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body.”38 It is at work in the technique of “scientific management” known as Taylorism, after Frederick W. Taylor, whose time-motion studies in the early part of this century had as their goal “the radical separation of thinking from doing” in the American worker-turning the laborer, in effect, into a robot.39 An article in a 1932 issue of the Tri-City Labor Review offers a glimpse inside one of Henry Ford’s assembling plants:

  Every employee seemed to be restricted to a well-defined jerk, twist, spasm or quiver resulting in a flivver. I never thought it possible that human beings could be reduced to such automats.40

  It is worth noting, at this juncture, that robota and robotnik, the Czech roots of Capek’s coinage “robot,” mean “forced labor” and “serf,” respectively.

  Industrialists came gradually to realize, however, that “human engineering” in the workplace was not enough, that their purview must be extended beyond the factory, into the cultural arena. Only a value system consonant with a consumer economy-one in which goods were not merely used, but used up, rendered obsolete by stylistic change-would ensure the smooth functioning of a heterogeneous workforce geared toward mass production. Corporate capitalists used advertising, its impact heightened by newly arrived technologies of reproduction and replication such as photography and chromolithography, to promote an ideology of consumption. In what advertising executive Ernest Elmo Calkins called “consumer engineering,” mass-marketed images of the good life, endlessly repeated in mail-order catalogs, magazine advertisements, department store displays, billboards, and Hollywood melodramas were proffered as a seductive substitute for meaningful social change.41 Dedicated to the proposition that all consumers are created identical, advertising, according to Stuart Ewen, developed “as a tool of social order whose self-espoused purpose was the ‘nullification’ of the ‘customs of ages; [to] . . . break down the barriers of individual habits.’”42 The social critic Walter Benjamin put it poetically in his aphorism, “MASS REPRODUCTION IS AIDED ESPECIALLY BY THE REPRODUCTION OF MASSES.”

  That process is ongoing: even as their bolt-tightening, spot-welding counterparts have toiled on assembly lines, mass-producing consumables, entertainment robots have been employed as tin pitchmen, reproducing consumers. Visitors to Las Vegas’s Forum Shops, a theme park mall in gladiatorial drag, see the faux Roman statues around the central fountain stir and speak every hour on the hour: “Come one, come all, come forth from the mall,” enjoins a beefy Bacchus, lifting a monstrous goblet of wine, at which point his fellow cloud-dwellers-Plutus, Apollo, and Venus-come to life and join in the revelry. With any luck, more than a few of the tourists who come to videotape the robots’ antics will end up at the blackjack tables in nearby Caesars Palace. The robots installed by Advanced Animation in saloons at the Detroit Metro and Minneapolis-St. Paul International airports serve a similar purpose. Modeled after Cliff and Norm, the barflies in the sitcom Cheers, the caricatured pairs sit side by side on barstools, trading wisecracks, pretending to swill their beer, and attracting customers.

  Some robots literally sing the praises of commodity futures. In Michael Moore’s bitterly funny documentary, Roger and Me, Flint, Michigan-a company town devastated by the closing of the General Motors plant that was its economic lifeblood–squanders its dwindling financial resources on a monumentally wrongheaded tourist attraction, Auto World. In a crowning irony, the GM exhibit starred one of the unemployed undead (an auto worker who is, ironically, a robot beneath the synthetic skin) sing
ing “Me and My Buddy,” an ode to the industrial robot that rendered him obsolete.

  Other robots appear in mechanical dramas that provide officially sanctioned outlets for antisocial or anticorporate sentiment, diverting such feelings away from any possible political expression, into coliseum carnage. Robosaurus, a forty-foot-tall, fire-breathing Mechagodzilla, is a hit at monster truck rallies: unfolding from its tractor-trailer traveling position, it grabs junk cars in its claws, barbecues them with its fiery breath, then chomps them flat and tosses them aside. In the eyes of Mark Hays, one of the machine’s owners, Robosaurus is “the first real superhero”; it presents “the boring technology that is used in everyday devices in a creative way that stimulates interest in science and technology. . . . This is the first time children have had this level of validation of what they see on TV.”

  Robosaurus is an extreme variation on a theme developed more conventionally in “big-wheeler” shows and “rocket-car” races, where, according to artist/essayist Mike Kelley, “pickup trucks fitted with massive . . . tires run over and crush rows of cars. . . . In an event called a ‘meltdown,’ a junked car or bus is placed in the exhaust flames [of the rocket car].”43 In an essay on SRL, Kelley draws comparisons between avant-garde machine theater and “lower-class spectacles” centered around the theatrical destruction of that totemic American technology, the automobile. “In contrast to culture-affirming, nationalistic, middle-class spectacles like holiday parades [and] football half time shows . . . there are those other events that mirror the joys of conspicuous accumulation with those of mass destruction,” observes Kelley.44

  Pauline adds, “The notion that the American public needs its pablum is really the basis of entertainment in this country. Robosaurus is Tyrannosaurus rex on wheels that picks up cars and eats them. Very lame. Monster truck shows are just a waste of time because all that intensity is separated from a much more interesting destiny. Everything’s straight and narrow, there’s no weird connotations, they don’t challenge any assumptions about the culture.

  “The interesting thing about demo derbies and drag races, at least in the beginning, in the fifties, was that you had people who worked in the industry-mechanics or factory workers-and after five o’clock they tried to turn their skills in a more rebellious direction. Those events represented, arguably, a healthy rebellion against what society had taught these people to be; in the fifties, the car was a subversive tool if it was turned in the right direction. But the monster truck thing, these days, has been stripped of all those associations. In fact, it’s connected with far right philosophies, especially the new monster truck stuff, where they play The Star-Spangled Banner’ and they have these big robots that they characterize as protectors of justice: Vorian, a dragster that turns into a robot that spews flame, is a cop, out there to kill bad people; it’s real propaganda.”

  No discussion of the intertwined nature of capital, consumption, and performing machines would be complete without a visit to the Magic Kingdom. Drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, Disneyland puts a grinning, mouse-eared face on a mythic America that is equal parts Goldwater conservatism, Norman Rockwellian nostalgia for turn-of-the-century idylls, and Ray Bradburyesque faith in technological progress. What is most significant about Disneyland, for our purposes, is that it revolves around robot dramas, many of which are thinly veiled corporate image advertisements: “Star Tours, Presented by M&M’s Chocolate Candies,” “It’s a Small World, Presented by Mattel Toys”–the drumbeat of name recognition is relentless. Moreover, both of these rides are cleverly designed so that the only exit is through souvenir emporia-the “Star Trader” shop, selling Lucasfilm merchandise, and the “‘It’s a Small World’ Toy Shop, Presented by Mattel Toys,” respectively.

  Beyond their obvious function as sales pitches and public relations strategies, such attractions are part of a larger whole-the Disney theme parks, themselves a commercial for what Scott Bukatman has called a “future . . . dominated by a benign corporate sponsorship providing effective population control, abundant consumer goods, and the guarantee of technological infallibility.”45 In “the World of Motion, Presented by General Motors” in Walt Disney World’s EPCOT (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) Center in Orlando, Florida, every American’s God-given right to choose a car of his own over the drear, suspiciously socialist alternative of public transportation is wrapped in stars and stripes: “When it comes to transportation, it’s fun to be free,” proclaims the accompanying jingle. After a ride consisting of a series of Audio-Animatronic tableaux purporting to be a history of transportation, visitors witness “The Bird and the Robot,” a performance starring a robot toucan and a Unimate Puma 500 robotic arm, the sort often employed in automobile assembly plants. The seven-minute performance strives to disabuse spectators of what Isaac Asimov called “the Frankenstein Complex” harbored by humans who “[insist] on considering the poor machines to be deadly dangerous creatures”; the narrative assures listeners that industrial robots are their benevolent mechanical helpmates, that they should welcome the automation of dirty, dangerous factory jobs.46 When “The Bird and the Robot” ends, the audience is herded into a showroom full of GM cars and sales representatives.

  No mention is made of the fact that automation displaces or at the very least “de-skills” humans, reducing human laborers who work side by side with machine assemblers in computer-controlled manufacturing plants to button-pushers or parts-stackers. Nor do we hear of the “technostress” that sometimes follows in the wake of automation. A 1986 series in a Japanese newspaper on “The Isolation Syndrome of Automation” told of workers in a state-of-the-art factory that used “automated . . . tools and robotized machining centers.” According to the author, several employees

  began to complain that they “felt like robots” as they operated and programmed the automated machinery during the day; one local parent complained that all his son did all day long was push a button.47

  Inhumane as it is, the fate of the button-pusher-being bored to death-is certainly preferable to that of Bob Williams, an overseer who was killed when a twenty-five-hundred-pound robot slammed into him in Ford’s Michigan Casting Center auto plant. Robot manufacturers’ now-familiar argument that “unattended systems” have the potential to save lives must be weighed against the memories of workers killed by factory robots in industrialized nations. An Omni article about Williams’s death chronicles the action brought by his survivors against Litton Industries, the company that manufactured Ford’s automated system.

  What became apparent as [the attorney for Williams’s family] went over the . . . case was that there was nothing venal involved. But there was a form of mechanistic indifference, a neglect of the soul in favor of the passion for a perfect machine. The god was productivity. Humans were meant to serve it.48

  Finally, the encomiums to automation of “The Bird and the Robot” neglect to inform the audience that reskilled workers who find positions in data entry will not necessarily be free of occupational hazards: “terminal illnesses” such as eyestrain, back problems, repetitive strain injury, and possibly even cancer and miscarriage resulting from the electromagnetic fields generated by VDTs are well-known by-products of the silicon sweatshop.

  Then, too, the ease with which computers facilitate panoptical surveillance and information-age Taylorism sounds a sour note in GM’s theme song. “[T]he use of keystroke software to monitor and pace office workers has become a routine part of job performance evaluation programs,” reports Andrew Ross. “Some 70 percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or other forms of quantitative monitoring of their workers.”49 The Dream Machine, a social history of the computer based on the PBS series The Machine That Changed the World, considers

  the case of TWA ticketing agents who work on keyboards while answering phone calls. This gruelling work is made even worse because the company monitors the productivity of workers by recording their number of keystrokes, the time they spend on the phone,
when they leave their desks for lunch or to go to the toilet. Such practices, an electronic version of those used in Dickensian sweatshops, are widespread.50

  A TWA agent interviewed in the last episode of the five-part series provides a chilling update of the Tri-City Labor Review’s portrait of assembly line “automats” when she claims that the demands of her job, which require that employees perform like “robots,” cause human workers to “break down.”

  The semiotician Umberto Eco, who has called Disneyland “an immense robot, the final realization of the dreams of the eighteenth-century mechanics who gave life to the [Scribe],” has also noted that it is “a place of total passivity” whose “visitors must agree to behave like its robots.”51 There is less metaphor here than might be imagined. The only role available to Disney “guests” is that of the consumer-of junk food, knickknacks, and most of all, images: Kodak “Picture Spots” are everywhere and seemingly everyone has a camera. Furthermore, Disney’s ubiquitous security and unremitting surveillance ensure that most visitors use designated walkways, observe the ban on flash photography in rides, and keep their hands inside the moving vehicles at all times. One of the more curious side effects of this unthinking obedience is the tendency to applaud the actors in Disneyland’s robot dramas-actors who are, after all, nothing more than polyester-and-fiberglass skeletons stuffed full of pneumatic and hydraulic systems, sealed in Duraflex skin, and controlled by computers. On the other hand, such behavior makes a strange sort of sense: The image of happy shoppers mechanically applauding technology freezes the essence of the Disney theme parks in a single snapshot.