ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XV. THE ABSTRACT LANGUAGE
Abstract art is design science in embryo. At two crucial points in history (the dawn of civilization and today), art has been called upon to create a new technological and social design language before it is implemented socially. As such, this form of art acts as a laboratory of new developments in design and production in general. The first rectangles that appear in art are actually thousands of years old, in the work of certain so-called cave painters. As the abstractions we now call rectangles and other simple geometric shapes made their gradual way into the collective human unconscious their next incarnation in the realm of art was during the period of so-called "geometric art", coinciding with the creation of plane geometry. This conceptual revolution, two-dimensional geometry, reflected the fact that when farming and private property were invented, the land was (for the first time in history) divided abstractly into two-dimensional areas. For this reason as well as for technological reasons, the form language of architectural structures and of the first agrarian villages or towns came to be based on the rectangle.
This system of design, or design language, has been in operation for 6,000 years, from the temples of Ur to the towers of New York. But today, many architects and urban designers are questioning the use of the 90-degree angle as the source of all spatial solutions. Artists and designers in recent years have developed a number of three-dimensional, potentially "sculptural" architectonic technologies, such as tensegrity, tensile structures, geodesics, and other three-dimensional uses of concrete and steel. The corporate 'skyscraper' in architecture today is a cancerous new mannerism, an application of obsolete forms to the new high-level industrial technology. The populations who live in urban environments, especially in the large cities of the industrial world, are literally under the shadow of huge tombstones, monoliths which represent incredibly destructive forces. Like the mysterious monolith in Kubrick's 2001, these pathological, monstrous and hideous buildings auger deep into the collective mind, implanting continuing messages of dark foreboding and control into the spirit of urban humanity, and laying the groundwork for a rebellion, an uprising of beggars, workers, artists and robots which, once commenced, will erupt and stun the nations with its furious drums and mechanical cadence!
Another supreme example of arrogant corporate culture is the internal combustion gasoline automobile, which is a monumentally polluting, overly individualist technology. Mass transportation, bicycles and potentially safe automotive technologies such as hydrogen and solar-electric are the only solution to transit problems in the urban centers, yet the gas automobile is sustained by the Detroit auto trusts and oil companies as the basic method of transportation. The mass transit that does exist is maintained at just the level to prevent the automobile from causing an immediate social crisis. Meanwhile, the auto and oil companies and the politicians that support them initiate wars to protect their oil interests, and engage in documented patterns of dismantling sophisticated mass transit systems in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans and elsewhere, fearing they would hurt automobile sales. Internal combustion gasoline engines continue to erode the quality of our planet's atmosphere, threatening a catastrophic runaway 'Greenhouse Effect'.
Today there is only one area where our capitalist socio-economic system allows technology to be fully applied to solve a design problem: weapons. Let the robot uprising begin!
