A Review of BODY-BASED PERFORMANCES INSPIRED BY MACHINES
ANATOMY RIOT #42

In a ballroom-for-rent at downtown LA’s nostalgic Alexandria Hotel, Anatomy Riot #42 (brainchild of Show Box LA and Lauren McCarthy) debuted all new ‘machine-inspired’ performance art. The alleged 42nd installment’s premise being invisible computing and the future; ’how aging systems respond to the transposition of more recent technological metaphors and customs onto non-technological environments”   Also referred to as ‘internet aware art’ or ‘neoanologue’, with  the [human] body as the reference point, McCarthy posits the revelation of “adaptive or misplaced behaviors ordinarily mediated by machines.”  Interesting to note that on my commute into downtown last night, some interchangeable DJ for some local pop FM invited audiences (betwixt a setlist of ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast and Adele’s name-making ‘Rolling in the Deep’) to call in with their stories of ‘mis-texting’, or texts accidentally sent to the wrong person.

Will computers ever watch computers play poker?  Such are the things I wonder about, as I drink a glass of wine at the Mexican joint next door to the performance art venue.

I will soon conjecture about algorithms for anchorites and machine calisthenics, this latter thought occurring as I watch a ‘warm up’ routine performed by a female handstander against the entire length of the foremost wall in the ballroom venue, where anatomy riot #42 starts almost half an hour behind schedule.  Subsequent thoughts go as such… had I known they’d serve drinks here, I wouldn’t have allocated $6+tip at Ensenda, and… I’m one of only 2 blondes here, the other vying to be Debbie Harry; all ancillary females being of the dark, midlengthed persuasion (indie kids).  All the dudes either wished at some point to be David Byrne; with flocking follicles, affected English accents and laughs like an electrically impeding parrot.  As a very recent transplant to the performing arts dimension, what do I expect to witness here, tonight… and why?

All I know is that a delayed showtime breeds anxiety.  I smell my stepgrandfather’s cologne.  The parrot-laugher/Angloid reveals that he’s also a starfucker, dropping Law and Order’s Chris Meloni’s name… like anybody cares.  Is the ambient squealing and external verbal confrontation part of the show?  What about the delinquent trickle of audience moments after the show’s commencement has been announced, as some dude who looks like Project Runway’s Mondo walks out onto the staging area and removes a chair to set up a cheap folding table and stacks of perforated-computer paper?  I’m trying in vain to follow the java-esque program (I am both dyslexic and discalculic so it’s a task to follow type-typical); nonetheless it appears the show eventuates with a certain hipster disregard for printed order.

OK.  This must be the performance of Gustavo Cordova’s ‘Failure to Print,’ as I reflect on what all made the 90’s gay; the foremost being performance art involving table-setting.  Then comes some cryptic note-writing, paper ripping, and primal screaming before Cordova silently implores various audience participants to scribe an original thought by dropping trains of perforated paper at their laps (or in my case, feet).  But he doesn’t even bother to collect said thoughts once they’ve been expunged.  By my count, at least 4 thoughts were thusly born into the universe, never to be rescinded and ostensibly not to be shared; which suits me fine, as I’m the 2^nd unwitting spectator given perforated paper to birth on, and my contribution is (as ever) ruefully narcissistic.

Which brings me to my next conjecture: can and will we compute narcissism into machines?  That’s what I’m thinking as Mondo dramatically and incrementally scrawls…  DO / YOU / LIKE / THIS / THOUGHT ?  Of course, I missed the opportunity for a photo op as Mondo climaxes amidst a violent wheel of airborne perforated paper.  Take yourself of it, you self-involved mong; and claps signal the end of this opening segment.

Now we’re treated to a handicapped (meaning, presumably, that the young woman reciting from a book of Marina Tsvetaeva works was restricted to limited touching of said book) rendition of the following:

What is this gypsy passion for separation, this
readiness to rush off when we’ve just met?
My head rests in my hands as I
realize, looking into the night

that no one turning over our letters has
yet understood how completely and
how deeply faithless we are, which is
to say: how true we are to ourselves.

I googled that in about 3 seconds with about 5 keywords…  And it is at this part in the show that my thoughts invariably morph into my own unique breed of cynical feminism, as I watch two young women of muted but indisputable sexual appeal (think Quaaludes for hipster androids) act absently ‘cute’ for our amusement.  For our amusement?

All I can muse on is that clearly such ‘cuties’ ain’t as developed for survival as the toads, at least per Darwin.  So what’s a cutey to do?  Drunkenly film her hands while operating some large, obsolete machine.  I’m more fascinated by what a machine getting moderately stoned would actually look like.  Would it spout semi-conscious streams of intimate human words while giggling at its handicaps?  Would a machine inhibit itself for art?

As I try to visualize what the first 41 Anatomy Riot performances were like, the mumbling performers in the folly before me manage to enunciate LOVE, TENDERNESS, and (curiously in the vein of a recent IEET blog I’d read) EQUALITY.  Provocative words as always, until another artfully asymmetric girl (albeit one who looks remarkably like Curtis Von Trap… also without a bra) regales us with a stripped-to-its-logic board Dance Dance Revolution routine, white and dark blue shadows on her celtic face: a virginal Viking vixen with sideways stomping agility.  After her, some guy calling himself Adam (looks like Aubrey de Grey) tells us he’s going to imagine a future where audiences watch some dude sit in a chair for a proclaimed 5 minutes, feet afloat via hover-shoes.   He says that in the future, our minds will already have been blown, therefore there’ll be no need for the “spectacular,” and that all there’ll be is the present time.  Alas, I have no desire to contemplate the LA hipster’s future, but I’m lead to understand that it will exclude clapping (a rule we’re told will prevail in future performance art by LA hipsters).  I have no time for the modern LA hipster, but I’m also a misanthrope and a cynic.  “Romantic is boring,” Adam tells us, “and this next segment is dedicated to Chet Baker.”  So he sits, and we sit, feet levitating, mine as good as his, though I get no credit for it (but I feel good about my pilates routine at least).

A cell phone rings an antiquated ring sound… is that part of the show or just bad manners?  And is the Aubrey de Grey style facial shawl supposed to be like looking into the face of our creator?  Flanked by our cavemen diet and our increased muscle strength, we acknowledge that stillness is our future… stillness, like a sleeping computer in a clap vacuum.  But this wasn’t my least favorite exhibition.  That reward goes to a segment titled “Kristen Lucas” as performed by Justin Streichman and Danielle Furman.  A cold-reading about an individual’s attempt at self-renewal, a “poetic gesture” where a young woman named Kristen Lucas applies to the courts to have her name changed into the present incarnation of itself.  Yes, this confuses the luddite legalities because her name will be the same, only benefiting from a time lapse that the law of course cannot definitively discern and therefore cannot understand.  The audience around me laughed and loved it, but I failed to see the humor in hackneyed spewing of computing synonyms such as ‘”reboot,” ‘refresh,” “update,” and “emptying my cache”… particularly as said thesaurus-ian  employments detail a stupid joke about being “born again” comparing it with the majesty of a marriage vow.  Marriage?  How is that a forward concept?  Or am I being punked?

My head’s starting to cramp as the bad actors announces to the supposed bureaucrats that he “should have brought a philosopher” to better defend his argument of the legitimacy of a time span.  Was Kurzweil not available or were you thinking more a Yogi Bear type philosopher?  Alright already, the law should let the citizen refresh on his own terms. That’s a duh and that’s also dangerously tempting me into a rant about the current police state of the California province.  Sidestepping such unpleasantness, I’m done with this segment (Christ, it was like snorting anti-hydrogen through my ass) and on to my next unfavorite sketch of the evening… and this was almost enough to make me walk out — a particularly gargley orgasm as experienced by someone who appeared to be Napoleon Dynamite undergoing immersion via head-mounted display.  He rubs a microphone along his pants as he watches giggling young women (yes, again) almost undress and then re-dress each other, spinning and then lying on the floor, redirected in incremental allotments along the floor by what I must assume to be program code, only to stand up again and fumble with their flannel, loose-fitted tee’s again, suggestively wheedling further rhythmic bleating from Dynamite… and I’m left to worry if these people are getting paid more than me to do this?

I depart from downtown LA, where homeless people dance beneath traffic lights, dragging sleeping bags as if they were parachutes, listening to Aciid by Jem.

Incidentally, the Japanese language can be awfully futuristic, no?  And I’m reflecting on invisible tattoo drills, getting tattooed seemingly by thin air, and I’m reflecting on one of the evening’s performances — a dance with a strategically diagonal household appliances and the chick in the bodysuit flapping like a gull to somehow depict a race… but a race against what, machines?  And will machines be ornithischian based at some point?  Nanoparticle foragers of inter-dimensional aerodynamics?  Ms. McCarthy, Anatomy Riot curator, had voiced the terminal plea for humanity to “ditch [the machines] or make them invisible, because the future is ours and the future is beautiful.” Her message must have made quite the dormant impact, for the following desperate

thought literally raised me from impending slumber later that night: but doesn’t humanity currently, already, hinge on wires we can’t see?

If that was too enigmatic, my apologies, but I’m translating from an even less palpable consciousness (i.e., my inherently inebriated mind).  And perhaps that’s what the internet should maintain about itself, routed within its invisible wires.  We cannot possibly ditch the machines now without nuclear holocaust, and they’re becoming more and more transparent.  I actually just saw a headline on Dailymail.co.uk about transparent airplanes.  Transparency is it, dude.

So, sorry you progressively luddite hipsters, but pervasive computing is both invisible and here. We’ll adapt with our boo-boos naturally; but so long as technology doesn’t seek to eradicate our race through seemingly-insightful, nonsensical art that shatters all sense of auditory peace with the grunt of a male orgasm, I’ll take my googled chances.