ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE:
Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation

a Manifesto of the OmniCircus

XVII. THE DIVIDED SPACE

For 6,000 years, the rectangle has been the fundamental shape of architectural constructions in class societies, (just as the elitist portrait has been the harmonic canon of art). Therefore, it has an associative importance in design and art far beyond that of any other form. It brings with it a connotation of class society, of privilege, through the historical factors just described. The extreme example of the divided space in architecture is, of course, the prison, but all our cityscapes rise like monolithic graveyards, buildings separated by inches, abstractions of oppression and immense corporate over-privilege instead of architectonic spaces created to satisfy social needs.

Our epoch, that of advanced industrial organization, has a technical capacity to supersede the divided space, a social capacity to supersede the prison, a political capacity to supersede private property, an intellectual capacity to supersede the unconnected, alienated human relations of class-divided society. Therefore, this form, the rectangle, becomes the unconscious symbol for these forces due to the weight of 6,000 years of history and the special emphasis our epoch has put on it through the fortress-like architecture of the modern city. Thus we find the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" as the symbol for the beginnings of culture, counterpoised to the glorious curvilinear light show at the end, symbolizing the new humanity. Thus we find in the paintings of Mondrian and the sculpture of Sol Lewitt, a schematic for the cultural defense, decoration and idealization of our corporate skyscrapers.

All forms, sounds, etc. in art and design carry with them a definite set of socially defined connotations. The language of design in a progressive society could be based on the sculptural-mathematic language of analytic geometry, a three-dimensional language that contains the set of all possible shapes. And again, there is a dual reason for this: technical and social. Technically, a sculptural language that is free from stricture can be free to follow the stress lines (like bones) or flow into shapes inherent to tensile technology or other structural advances that arise in the course of the evolution of our means of production. Socially, a sculptural language allows one to design the space for the human functions that accrue without entertaining arbitrary and invisible barriers such as property lines. When architecture is socialized, it can become sculptural.

"There's no more mathematics in my work than there is anatomy in a sculpture by Michelangelo." -Naum Gabo

The greatest threat to the potential dawning of a rational and humanistic world is the pervasiveness of deadly and fanatical religion. Ours is the age of the end parenthesis of slavery, and the beginning of a culture based on the integration of technology with humanistic values! It is no longer possible both to survive and exploit...the age of blind faith is past. The stakes are too high, and the apocalypse is too well nigh upon us. We must hold our heads high, forego worship of imaginary gods and brutal men, and make our collective human genius and creativity the only thing worth worshiping! Forward, to the robotic worker!