ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE:
Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation

a Manifesto of the OmniCircus

VI. DESIGN LANGUAGE THEORY

How was it that tribal cultures existing in conditions of varying privation afforded themselves the 'luxury' of artistic expression? Neither the mechanical materialistic theory of culture as a passive reflection of existing social/economic forms, nor the personal expression notion of the supposed compulsion of unique individuals to "express themselves", explains this adequately. There must be a material need which only art can satisfy for it to be such an essential activity.

A clue towards solving the mystery occurs when one notices the similarity of certain 20th century "abstract" sculptures by Gabo, Moore and Buckminster Fuller and his collaborators, with the revolutionary architecture of Saarinen, Goff, Le Corbusier and others. For the first time, sculpture expressed itself in three-dimensional, curvilinear, "abstract" shapes, developing an incredibly complex form-language capable of expressing a new vision of human emotion. Almost simultaneously, architects began using this same form-language to make a new kind of complex, sculptural architecture.

From the EIFFEL TOWER onwards, the new architectural forms represent the first (unconscious) attempt in over 6,000 years of building to supersede the rectangle as the basic unit of most architectonic solutions, made possible of course by the new technologies of construction which are capable of far more varieties of shape.

If this theory were to hold a general historical-evolutionary principle, art would have to have provided the same laboratory service for architecture during the last comparable period of history - the birth of the first architectonic language, based on the rectangle and simple plane geometry. Since the birth of private property, in the urban environments the land has mainly been divided into rectangles for purposes of ownership, and for that reason, and because early construction techniques allowed only simple shapes, buildings have been mainly rectangular, with a smattering of other simple shapes such a the circle and pyramid. This way of building required a new way of thought, a design language, to be developed in the laboratory of abstract art - to train the human race to think in terms of plane geometry. It is almost impossible for us now to understand what a sea-change this was in human consciousness. For one thing, in the previous epoch, lasting possibly 2 million years, human tribal culture could not conceive of the concept of 'ownership' of the land. (When Native Americans sold the island of Manhatten to European "immigrants" for $26, it wasn't an act of stupidity. The Natives thought it was a huge joke. To sell land to them was akin to my selling you a portion of the sky - sure, buddy, you want some sky, I'll sell it to you, how much?) I looked for a two-dimensional, largely rectilinear, decorative and 'abstract' (non-functional) style of artistic expression that might have accompanied the advent of architecture itself during the birth of class society. Was there a previous period where abstract art dominated the world of culture, this time an abstraction of the two-dimensional organization of surface comparable to primitive building technique?

In France's Lascaux Cave, where stunning quantities of Paleolithic cave art were discovered, only a very few humans were painted, and most of them have animal characteristics. But some paintings aren't depicting animal or human images. There are many painted rectangle, grids, and diagonal geometric designs! There are many more examples of Paleolithic art all over the world engaging in geometric abstraction, and this effort continues well into the agrarian and slave-holding periods until architecture is firmly developed, then it begins to diminish. Every one of the world's cultures, during its first phase of architectonic thought development, had a period of what anthropologists sometimes call the "Geometric Style", where artists drew, painted and wove rectangles, circles, squares, triangles and other linear compositions on pots, blankets and other objects. This culminated in developed rectangular and other simple geometric structure building, coinciding further with the new need in practical society to develop a language and technology for building. During the age when private property evolved and the land was divided into rectangles and rectangular structures were erected on the land, artists developed this first "abstract" geometric form-language in the laboratory of their art. Not as "personal expression", not as ideology reflecting the politics of the ruling or oppressed class. This art was a means for developing an abstract technical/social language of architectural shape that could code and decode information about form, facilitating the material progress of humanity. Art therefore plays a primal pragmatic role, underneath all of its spiritualism, without artists ever having to be conscious of the implication of what they are doing.

It is also clear that there is a fundamental practical purpose underlying the selection of the main subject matters of Paleolithic art, which were the beasts of the hunt, and carved images of female fertility. Obviously food and reproduction are elemental to survival, and objects and paintings were created to be used in rituals that encouraged success in these arenas. But the animals painted on cave walls could not only be used to encourage good hunting by means of ritual and magic, but also for recognition and even target practice. And fertility sculptures, such as the beautiful VENUS of WILLENDORF, were much harder to carve than arrowheads and early tools, thus giving an impulse to another non-spritual but necessary pre-requisite for stone-age survival - virtuosity in carving stone.

From the earliest time, subject matter in art has addressed immediate survival issues, whether food, fertility, or in more recent times, portraits of the patrons who pay the bills, or of their ideology... but what of the means of expression of these concerns, the very 'languages' of art? Are these various 'codes' not even more primal, integral, and important than any particular 'subject matter', no matter how critical? There can be no poem without first letters, then words... no painting without similar visual alphabets, words, and even syntax... where do these languages come from?

All of the material, practical activities of our social life involve the coding and encoding of information in a vast multitude of agreed upon languages. There are languages of the things that we make, not just the things we say. Indeed the spoken language itself is a social construction much like anything materially built.

Words and concepts originate in material things and material life. The origin of many alphabets and written languages involved pictures of things, becoming eventually idiogrammatic symbols of the concept of the thing, then finally the more abstract "alphabet". But no language, whether spoken, written or built can be developed whole cloth and implemented instantaneously. A long, organic process is involved, necessitating an environment where failure isn't catastrophic - a laboratory environment. Doctors implement new cures only after an elaborate process of trial and error in a setting where it's (relatively) safe to fail. Everything we make is designed first by the human mind/body. Multitudes of experiments, unconscious processes, feedback networks and other improvisations go into the making of the greatest of all human creations - the languages we use to communicate and create our social landscape. These processes are too complex and profound to risk a premature attempt at implementation in the mass culture. So human beings do 'art' as a laboratory for the development of design languages, defining design languages as the codification of modes of social behavior. For every category of practical social activity related to the social landscape and concrete transformation of the world, in other words, for all social activity, there is an art form that acts as the ritualized laboratory for developing the codes or languages we need for carrying on this practice.

When our struggles with nature and each other call upon us to engage in new activities that in turn demand that we create new languages to communicate, then an artistic laboratory is spontaneously and unconsciously created to provide a safe place where specifics of this code can develop. These processes are basically emotion-driven, involving as they do the complex and myriad interpolations of new forms of so-called beauty, because the conscious mind is too predictable and too passive a mirror of the existing order for it to be the source for the needed new codes. That is why the 'personal expression' theory is so easy to accept - the last stage in artistic creation is personal and subjective, and just as birds don't need Ornithology or Aeronautics in order to reproduce, evolve and fly, artists don't need knowledge of social evolution to feel and intuit new means of expression. Esperanto didn't work because language must develop in usage. In addition, the stress that produces new languages doesn't allow for an accurate assessment of their effectiveness, so we need an artificial environment - the ritualistic world of art - to bring them to fruition.

Just as drawings of "abstract" geometric designs preceded the development of a two-dimensional architectural form language, and sculptures of curvilinear abstraction predated the three-dimensional architectonic language, likewise the spoken language itself was preceded by a primeval epoch of vocal utterances that eventually became what we would call "poetry" and vocal music. They expressed the rhythmic functions of early humanity, hunting, struggling and playing, eventually coalescing into the first abstract design language.

In that incredible time after our early ancestors first picked up stones and carried them around only semi-conscious of their potential, during the time they struggled to conceptualize them as tools or as weapons, but before they became tools or weapons, what were these stones if not sculptures? In the shadow world between animal instinct and human consciousness is the realm of art. When these stones were appropriated for human labor they went from being stones to being sculptures. When they were deliberately used to kill or build they become tools. Later, when humanity recognized them consciously as tools, it used art again to abstract these tools into words, so we could convey information about them to others and to the future.

We are the tool-using animal.
We make ourselves by making our social environment.

Languages for the spoken and written word.
Languages of the architectonic space.
Languages of science and material production.
Languages of war and conquest.
Languages of work relations.
Languages of human emotion, behavior and personality.

Languages are the greatest and most complex tools. Their development is independent of the conscious participation of individuals. They arise in the shadow land of primordial struggles.

Even as languages develop they must have concrete expression, but a language cannot be developed wholly in practical use. Content constantly changes, but languages do not. If each new use creates a new alphabet, new words or syntax, there isn't time for its dissemination. How are languages created? They do not spring forth fully formed, as Athena from the head of Zeus!

Art is a ritualized laboratory - through ritual, artists intuitively approximate the purpose to which the new forms will eventually be put, and they actualize this purpose in a primal, embryonic, dimly understood (ritualized) way.

It is impossible to define art in a super-historical fashion; it must be seen in the context of the time and place that creates it. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that art always has this role in the development of new languages. As a rule however, the ideological content of a work of art (the specific messages which are communicated by the language-codes) is its most obvious aspect, and indeed, often the most important. (This fact provides the grain of truth in the art = ideology theory). It is only in times of great social upheaval - revolutionary times - when new languages are being created, that art is pressed into service as an unconscious, collective foundry for new languages.

During revolutionary epochs:

Sculpture is the laboratory of the built environment...architecture.
Poetry is the laboratory of the spoken and written word.
Dance is the laboratory of work relations.
Music and art are the laboratory of the aural and visual designscape.
Theater is the laboratory for new modes of emotion and behavior, which are then codified into law.

Languages are conceived in the embryo of art, born into myth, reared in the dim underworld of emotion, matured in the realm of socially compelled behavior, and then coded in the senility of law, entertainment and mass culture, at which time they are usually obsolete. Let us honor revolutionary artists!

VII. A METHOD OF ANALYSIS