Are you thinking about coming back to Brotherhood and evolving it in some direction?
I would like to have at least the legacy reconstructed that it exists and of course to try to update it, you bring so many new aspects that it becomes probably virtually impossible to reconstruct it in original way and I am not interested in that because I am moving laboratory thru time, but I'm still tempted to put it back into existence. Because now it's only in existence three renewable or reconstructed pieces. But the idea, the network written by Russ Gritzo that you saw, he was eventually always asking me what kind of information are you interested in networking. So eventually I suggested this idea that there is a protagonist, messenger, that brings certain message into every state of the operation to all the machines. And then he said, O.K., then we need actors, and I said, yes, I need an actor that gets the information there and disappears. So that's what he built, it was like a virus who travelled to find its own home, got rid of the information - it was usually small, few
parameters, probably five, six or maybe eight - and then it was supposed to die. And it just virtually did that. And it was the local program and some of it of course in the long run didn't die by accident and started to fill the network so we had to find the way to kill it, every couple of days we had to kill them,
shut it off and restart it in the morning, but this was the principle of integration of all machinery.
But the other day we said with Bruce, hey, let's run it wild, designate the change in the others and see what the other machines would do with the same information. So we run this circus when they suddenly started to behave completely different, they get the different parameters, and they had to obey because as long as they had the same address and the same actors would be active in them, like the virus would be able to live, it deposited the information it had into the registers that had to act on it, so this was interesting experience but we didn't have time there because we couldn't run this alternate programing because the place of course was an exhibit.
So you wanted to create autonomous machines that would behave autonomously and take some information from the net and you would change parameters once in a while?
We had to develop a cycle of each machine and mostly they started in idle state, but if someone made an action, it produced the virus, the actor, which went to the network and found the right place for it. That means this idea of interactivity was usually physical intervention. Like we had a drum pad which
was controlling laser disk in locational jump and so it changed the program or function of the machine. So there were parameters that were U-matically controlled, three or four of them, some of them had stepper motors so they had linear functions and anyway when you look at charting, and some of them were audio, so all these codes were mediated thru initiative or the audience. Of course there is not much benefit of the visitor of participation, because they get involved in playing and trying what's gonna happen, there were children working with Maiden, torturing it death because it was behaving, moving, but it had great benefit to what I call voyeur, someone who stood outside and watched these people playing with it. And that for me had this psychological meaning and that's in fact why I built these machines because I wanted to see. Because I was always witness to things and all my
life I would look at life as a theatre, as I'm looking and talking to you now. It had nothing to do with me, this is now a memory of some impulse and I didn't want to show and do it just because it should be done. It was just that I wanted to see what it does when I do it and what's the experience that I would extract from it, and that experience is the benefit that you have from it.
It's a strange perverse way of looking at art, you know. But that laboratory what Im talking about, permanent laboratory of my life, was about not really doing it but making it enough rich to extract the experience I wanted to know. So this was very good for...there would be some volunteers, this Japanese
man who tried to live in the embrace of the Maiden and there was this lady he brought with that played flute to the Maiden. And Japanese are people that can understand something like that the machine has a psycho, psychology, they build robots that suppose to serve you and you are supposed to like them and you can have sex with robot and all these things are very Japanese. But this man was in jeopardy because the device wasn't gentle, it wasn't a maiden, it was crude, there's actually a lot of energy in
those pistons of compressed air, it couldn't have broken his leg or hand but he bragged it, and I watched these two people doing this and I said, wait a minute, this is the paradigm, this is the end of my interest, because this is a dangerous thing. But then of course this was all about the war, and one piece even had the episode, it was called Friendly Fire when Americans, this was the first Gulf war, target their own people. They killed two guys that walk away from the burning tank the and they shot them from the helicopter and this is the whole episode in that piece. Most people don't decode it because of course it's a coded thing and it's context is so absurd to put it into this kind of installation. But at least it's there and people subconsciously feel that this is what it is, and then me it's enough because I understand the other aspects. So anyway, I weight these things differently then I probably should or the gallery would function. And it was just interesting why people let me bring it again somewhere else, what is the key, because these two pieces at least were at least exhibited many times, Automata and Friendly Fire, they'd been exhibited many many times and so forth. So it means that it became in a way part of the art world activity, but on whole different level which I like. That's what I always wanted to be, to have a certain territory for myself that I don't have to share much. It's probably some kind of arrogance that I must admit. But then you cannot dazzle the world because that's not that kind of activity that's really a spectacle. Except for people that understand it like...there was this group, Italians, people that build machines and interactive exhibits. And they came and looked it and they came to me and said, O.K., you are the master. And I looked at them and I liked the guys what they did before and after and so you have this kind of personal relationship to what you do. But all the codification there I exercised to the degree that I understood and could possibly rationalize and I had people that could write it into the reality or into the functionality of the apparatus, but it was rather like an industrial...it was architectural, what I call it actually that these are media constructions, and many people refer to it as architectural functions with a lot of codifications of media. And I used at that time video either as closed circuit testimony of the inner functioning or in a way as symbolic language that signs, like in that war and I included certain movies from the first war and the desert but that's all incidental to the whole construction and expression of the whole character.
