64
One way to prevent people from accessing transmissions on the Internet is to encrypt them: manipulate the information and make it unreadable so that it will, for the duration of the transmission, be unintelligible. Only once it reaches its destination will it be unencrypted. Until twenty-five years ago, the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. had a monopoly on encryption techniques, a specialization they kept highly secret. In 1976, a seminal article came out, entitled “New Directions in Cryptography,” written by two Stanford students, Diffie and Hellman; it changed the whole landscape. Cryptography was in reality a very basic thing on the NSA’s secret systems; because of their monopoly, the channel was very secure, which made complicated encryptions unnecessary. This limitation, which derived from the perfection of the system, had slowed down the development of cryptography. The Internet, on the other hand, the least secure channel ever, has generated an extremely high level of perfection in the arena of cryptography.
P. R. ZIMMERMANN
65
Today, on the strip of land in the south of Paris where Guy Debord and his coreligionist Situationists put his Theory of the Dérive into practice in 1960, there is a large number of portacabins, scattered here and there apparently at random, and people living there. The buildings that were under construction in the 1960s are nowhere to be seen. All that remains are these sheet-metal living spaces, virtually untouched, in which the workmen used to get changed or eat their sandwiches; a hundred or so people live in them now. Peter is an artist from San Francisco who was drawn to Europe some years back because of an interest in Land Art. These hybrid territories, he says to Françoise as he hands over the can of ravioli, pointing at the grouping of portacabins, are authentic works of art, created by the bringing together of disparate elements. Françoise takes the can opener, using it so deftly, in a matter of seconds, that it’s as though she was born with the implement attached to her body, and empties the contents into a small pan. Peter focuses on the parabolic movement of her chest, and on her bare feet. They sit in the shade, looking at the door to one of the portacabins, which stands ajar. A sharp strip of light cuts into it, warming the metal, bringing about a diaphanous shimmer, as though the light itself were being cooked on contact. Did you know, Peter says, that there was a North American artist in the ‘60s who called a highway that was under construction a work of art? Françoise shakes her head. Your feet are big and beautiful, continues Peter, like this place, like that highway, also under construction. Her feet are also in a bad state—a life of poverty is beginning to take its toll. They turn off the flame, pass the pan and the spoon back and forth. This ravioli, says Peter, this particular brand, when it’s just past its sell-by date like this, it tastes rather gamy, don’t you think? I find it exquisite! he says. Françoise carries on examining her feet.
66
Billy the Kid now sees, very clearly, that the brown motionless shoe out in the middle of the asphalt must, by necessity, not be a good thing. An image published on the New York Times website flickers on his PC screen. It would appear to be very famous, but he isn’t familiar with it because at the age of 12 there’s no such thing as fame, or if there is it’s something else entirely. It is of a man, also motionless and standing on asphalt, in the middle of a deserted road in Hiroshima. He clasps an open umbrella and stares at the nuclear mushroom in the distance.
67
Billy the Kid now sees, very clearly, that the brown motionless shoe out in the middle of the asphalt must, by necessity, not be a good thing. An image published on the New York Times website flickers on his PC screen. It would appear to be very famous, but he isn’t familiar with it because at the age of 12 there’s no such thing as fame, or if there is it’s something else entirely. It is of a man, also motionless and standing on asphalt, in the middle of a deserted road in Hiroshima. He clasps an open umbrella and stares at the nuclear mushroom in the distance. That’s where the story of the photograph ends, and the exercise consists of asking oneself what the man hoped to protect himself from with that umbrella, what fate he thought he might rebut, and what then became of his life. There are three possible solutions to the enigma. The first is negative in character: in a typically Japanese fit, he becomes angry and sprints straight into the nuclear mass, perishing in the act. The second is neutral in character: his anger threshold is reached, and this reversal prompts him to develop an understanding for the enemy, their motives, their children, the families they are fighting to defend, and in a moment of excessive compassion, he joins the other side, which means he avoids death, and sees out the rest of his days very happily working at a fruit and veg warehouse in a midsized town somewhere in the U.S., until eventually dying of cancer. The third is positive in character: the plastic nature of the vision fascinates him, it takes on qualities of the sublime, of a mystical archetype, and he takes several photographs using the Instamatic that, like all good Japanese, he carries in his pocket, and he opens the umbrella as a way of emulating the shape of the mushroom, and then asks someone else to photograph him, initiating the chain of the legend of this photo (in this version it makes no difference whether he lives or dies). There’s also a fourth, but it’s larger than the Western Hemisphere, and perhaps the Eastern one, too: the Japanese man never existed, and neither did his solitude or his umbrella, just as the bomb, Hiroshima, the United States of America, insects, trees, and the woman’s breasts did not exist, because all that we can see, including the human race, is an immense hologram conceived by some outside observer, a reflection on the flat screen of some kind of cosmic PC. In this illusory world, the Japanese man could well have thought that the nuclear mushroom was the Tree of Life, and the rubble and radiation clinging to it were akin to baubles on a Christmas tree. Or something.
68
The magazine Artforum, in its December 1966 issue, ran a piece on the journey/experience of Tony Smith. He found a freeway that was under construction on the outskirts of New York and, taking advantage of lack of activity at night, drove along it. This action, which in its day was controversial and unclassifiable, is considered the origin of Land Art, and Smith the grandfather of American minimalist art. On that ribbon of black asphalt, as yet unmarked, a blend of nature and civilization that passed through marginal places, Smith underwent, according to him, something akin to an ecstasy, an almost ineffable situation, one he would later define as “the end of art.” “It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art has never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there was a reality there which had not had any expression in art.’”
PHYLLIS TUCHMAN
69
Southeast China has just seen the arrival of India’s comic du jour. Rather than a translation of the North American Spider-Man to Hindi or Chinese, it consists of a strict trans-creation of the character. From the waist up his outfit is the same, tight-fitting and marked with the spider print, and the classic mask covers the face, but waist-down, instead of the blue and red tights he has a dhoti, the typical flowing chiffon Hindu trousers, and on his feet he wears the leather slippers with the upturned toes. They haven’t given him Oriental features, but he is darker-skinned than Peter Parker, and his adventures take place in Old Bombay, and rather than Green Goblin he’s faced by an adversary named Rakshasa, a demon from Indian mythology with the body of a man and the head of a monster. The Chinese love this kind of fusion, but that’s because they can compare against the original American products—products they can buy at the shops in Little America. One might say that the least important thing to the Chinese are the stories in
themselves; their imaginations are drawn more consistently to enumerating the differences in a certain cartoon, the American and its Oriental bastard. Any Chinese craze always has the propensity to become dangerous, and now this mania is gaining ground on the surf craze; that was only for older people, whereas this one appeals to all ages, all sectors of society. It was the only way young Kao Cheng, a slum-dweller from the city of Punh, could come into contact with Ling-O, the daughter of a civil servant: they found one another at the same bookseller street stall, each immersed in a game of spot the difference. I found 43. Well, I found 377. And so on. But because the artistic direction and the script were in the hands of the Indian architect Jeevan J. Kang, there’s a deeper difference between the two versions of the superhero, a difference we might term “structural,” one that elevates him to new heights of rationalist turmoil. Indeed, in an attempt to retain the chimerical American je ne sais quoi, Jeevan has loaded not only the inks but also the story lines: rather than illustrated plots, they come to resemble theorems based on syllogistic concatenations so tightly plotted that, even when the story relaxes its grip for a moment and moves beyond the proliferation of fantasy, it’s quite clear that the narrating machine has broken down definitively, as when a motor emits its final sigh and enters the world of dream, yes, but never-ending dream. The Argentinian Jorge Rodolfo Fernández, in his Budget Suites of America room, is reading the following passage by Ernesto Sábato—out loud, over and over: “Borges sets out his stories as though they were theorems, for example in ‘Death and the Compass,’ in which the detective Erik Lönnrot isn’t a creature made of flesh and bone, but a symbolic puppet who blindly obeys—or clearsightedly obeys, it’s the same thing—a mathematical law: he offers no resistance, just as the hypotenuse cannot resist Pythagoras’ theorem; its beauty resides in its very inability to resist.”
70
Behind the grouping of portacabins, a few hundred feet from Peter’s and perhaps 400 feet from Françoise’s, there are some 4- or 5-story buildings whose façades have been taken over by architecture students from the Paris 7 school. Peter observes the day-by-day progressions of these students’ final projects. They’re also making portacabins, like the ones in the encampment, but using new, brightly colored sheet metal and propping them on small platforms they’ve built jutting out of the façades. They look embedded, says Louis, an ex-alcoholic of the southern Paris portacabins. Or like they’re floating, says Françoise, while gazing at her imperfect feet. To Peter, a hybridization of such magnitude and daring is fascinating; he says nothing as he gazes at this hive of protruding cubes, which reconfigure the apartment blocks like Tetris. No gallery or Louvre comes even close to this, the director of the project says to a neighbor. What we’ve got here is genetically modified urbanism. The students propose the action as one that synthesizes the creative risk of proposing new forms of urban habitation with the creation of tangential spaces, resulting in the emergence of another dimension, perforating the vertical map; they also seek to criticize the reductio ad absurdum impossibility of buying a home in Paris today. Louis has taken up drinking again: he blames the spectacle. He started again the other night, standing in front of the campfire, around which an improvised agora spontaneously occurs, and has done for years, among the members of the hundred or so portacabins. Since the students are on site, and sometimes work late, they also get invited to join the gathering, for a drink, for something to eat. They talk a lot, breaking down the project for the portacabin veterans, who are at once attentive and incredulous. Bowls of soup are passed around, along with cheap box wine, through the night. An older man named Terry says, They’re so pretty now, the houses, with all this hanging off them. They look like presents. And someone else says something else, something even more impudent, and so on. What’s your view, Peter? says Françoise. Don’t have one, he says, looking into the flames, their antiquated verticality. But what he is actually thinking is how different the homes were 46 years ago, and how, nonetheless, his portacabin, 46 years old though it is, is hardly any different from the ones these kids are working with today.
71
Each of us is immersed in a sea of radio-frequency waves. The invisible electromagnetic energy comes from many sources: broadcast towers, cellular-phone networks and police radio transmissions, among others. Although this radiation may be harmless to our bodies, it can severely inhibit our ability to receive and transmit information. Excess radio energy is a kind of pollution, because it can disrupt useful communications. As the intensity of radio-frequency interference in our environment grows, we have to raise the volume of radio signals so that they can be heard over the electromagnetic background noise … One solution to this problem lies in a new class of radio antennas that could dramatically reduce man-made interference. Instead of wastefully broadcasting personal communications—such as cell-phone calls—in all directions, these innovative antennas track the positions of mobile users and deliver radio signals directly to them … In effect, the antennas create a virtual wire extending to each technologized human being.
MARTIN COOPER
72
The following day, Peter threw his art books in the fire, and the day after that, he left.
73
As for Samantha’s greetings to the pedestrians, truck drivers, and other travelers when they passed by the Honey Route as she was doing her nails on the porch at midafternoon, that hour when clients were yet to show up and the dancing girls were not yet smattered with saliva, it should be said that all she wanted was to wish them a nice trip, confirming for herself the existence of a world beyond her nails, beyond the porch—and that really was all. That’s why when a Ford Scorpio screeched to a halt and the man got out, took Samantha by the hand, and said how beautiful she was, she blushed and nearly shed a tear onto the red nail varnish, which, also due to the strong emotion she experienced, had gone all over the floor. Taking a seat next to her and ordering a drink, he told her his name was Pat, Pat Garrett, and it wasn’t long before the pair were kissing, and just as quickly they made their way to bed. Samantha had never taken a man back at that hour. Then suddenly, like another life, Pat had a hobby: He collected found photographs. Anything as long as they were found and featured a human figure; he went around with a full suitcase. When they were lying in bed together, as he gazed up at the wall he told her how he’d worked in a bank in L.A. before unexpectedly coming into an inheritance, at which point he’d quit. His penchant for the photos came from his time at the bank, from seeing so many people; he always found himself imagining what their faces would be like, and their bodies, in a context beyond the teller window—itself somewhat akin to the frame of a photograph. But after receiving the inheritance money, his other penchant, gambling, had seen him lose almost the entire sum. Now he was headed east, to New York, in search of more photos. Here in the West, he said, it’s all about landscapes, but there it’s the portrait. He opened the suitcase and began handing her photos, which she looked at one by one, absentmindedly but at the same time straining to understand. At one point he said to her, as he pointed to a photo of a group of schoolchildren, See this girl here? She’s so pretty it could be you! Samantha then became confused, imagining for a moment all these emulsified lives she was handling—but in her confusion, for that moment she also believed herself to be part of an enormous family, beyond the girls she worked with at the brothel, beyond the men of the road. She collapsed on Pat’s chest and held him tight. I’m gonna take you to New York, he said to her. He stayed on for a long time after that, her preparing his food, neither of them leaving the room. The night Pat left, the sound of the Ford engine woke her. She didn’t get out of bed, but she lay awake from then until dawn, and when morning came, having discarded the possibility of him going to Carson City for tobacco, she sat on the porch to do her nails again, putting the whole thing behind her, and said hi to a young guy walking in the direction of U.S. Route 50 with an army rucksack on his back, calling out: If you see a guy on his own in a red Ford Scorpio,
and he’s going to New York, you tell him to get back here! He doesn’t even turn to look at her. And now there will be two suitcases full of photos, deposited in two different locations in the desert. Faces, families, potential couples, all now only theoretical, portraits in a pair of suitcases that no one will ever find.
74
Young Sokolov’s experiments with field recordings, and his unquenchable obsession with processing them into something symphonic, have at this point led him to record the inner depths of buildings, which, as he has found, contain a constant channel of certain ramified sounds only audible with equipment designed specifically for the purpose. After careful studies to identify the parts of the city with the right kind of buildings, he’ll ask to borrow a room for a couple of days, and then go in and set up. He’s over his interest in the soundscapes of Chicago’s streets, the passing cars, the graffiti cans spraying, all that. His grandmother’s view is that this building obsession comes from the accident when the 10-year-old him was buried in the basement of his building in Poland, when his parents died, but he knows that can’t be right, he knows it gestated with him in the womb: the time when the sense of sound is the most developed. His next objective is the World Trade Center, New York. BP, whose offices are on floor 77, has given him permission to set up his sound laboratory. His hope is to gather all the sounds that, on a floor that is totally proofed against the world outside, are never heard: a bird skimming by the window, a passing helicopter, the whistling of a window washer or of the wind, as well as the imperceptible sounds of the pipework, the structure itself as it vibrates, the shaking of the antennae, the cisterns of the hundred surrounding offices, the parasitic buzz of the electricity cables, the sound of the wheels of the cars in the basement, the ching of the tills in the shops on the lower floors, et cetera. He sets up outdoor heron mics, membrane mics that he attaches to the window and slides underneath the carpet, waterproof mics on the drainage pipes and inside the plugs, and, like the capillary action of coffee rising upward through the dipped sugar cube, or as the sap of a tree that ascends from roots to leaves due to a force that can only be explained with recourse to vectorial archetypes, all of the building’s hidden sounds are also drawn up into his headphones: hearing the palpitations of the inert, he has an intimate experience of this building, giving the room back the sounds that belong to it. As for the origin of his obsession with the sounds of buildings, he’s come to accept that maybe his grandmother is right, because today he seems to have discerned, amid the tangle of sounds emitted by the World Trade Center, the voices of his parents.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 7