The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzik considers the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The "fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration", because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility for their obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressing them turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse.
Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic. They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it, he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
"I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. ''Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
"Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys, whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous. She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror and disdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: ''Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow and she loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: ''Fucking art critics!''
PART 4
Cut and Paste: Artists in Cyberia
Chapter 13
The Evolution of a Cyborg
Cyberia expresses itself as art and literature. Because Cyberia is still evolving, it is impossible to pin down a single cyberian aesthetic. The art of Cyberia is a work in progress, where the forefathers of each genre coexist and even collaborate with the most recent arrivals. The conflicts over which art and lifestyles are ''truly'' cyberian are less a symptom of divisiveness than they are an indication of the fact that this aesthetic is still in the process of unfolding. The artistic and religious debates between the TOPYs and the house kids like Jody Radzik arise because the different evolutionary levels of Cyberia all exist simultaneously.
While current state-of-the-art cyberians like Radzik or Mark Heley claim they have no agenda and believe they are acting against no one, their belief system was developed out of the ideas of people who did. Just as E-generation free-form love raves can be traced back to the radical ''be-ins'' of the confrontational sixties, house music and designer beings can be traced back to the arts and artists of a more admittedly countercultural movement.
As we attempt to determine exactly what it means to be a cyberian, and who is succeeding at it best, let's briefly trace the development of the cyberian aesthetic and ethic in music, literature, and the arts.
Anti-Muzak
Cyberians most often credit Brian Eno with fathering the cyber music genre. His invention of the arty Ambient Music paved the way for Macintosh musicians by taking emphasis off of structure and placing it on texture. These aren't songs with beginnings and endings, but extended moments – almost static experiences. Internally, Eno's music isn't a set of particular sounds one listens to but a space in which one breathes. Unlike traditional rock music, which can be considered male or active in the way it penetrates the listener, Eno's Ambient Music envelops the listener in an atmosphere of sound. Inspired by Muzak, Eno's recordings use similar techniques to produce the opposite effects. In September 1978, Eno wrote the liner notes to his first Ambient record:
"Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.''
Eno quickly gained popularity on headier college campuses and even inspired famous precyberian Ambient tripping parties at Princeton University, where each room of a house called the Fourth World Center would be set up with a different decor and Eno record. His was the ideal music for fledgling collegiate cyberians in their first attempts to synthesize new intellectual discoveries like the fractal and chaos mathematics with the equally disorienting psychedelic perspective. This uncertainty is precisely the territory of Eno's creativity.
"One of the motives for being an artist,'' he relates from personal experience, "is to recreate a condition where you're actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing.'' The image of artist-as-surfer was born, soon to be iterated throughout popular culture.
Eno speaks of "riding the dynamics of the system'' rather than attempting to control things with rules and principles – good advice for those who would dare venture into the dangerous surf of future waters, but even more significant for his use of new mathematics terminology as a way of describing the artistic endeavor. His musical compositions follow what he calls a "holographic'' paradigm, where the whole remains unchanged but texture moves about as individual timbres and resonances are altered. To some, the music appears as cold, neutral, and boring as a Siber-Cyberia. To others, it is a rich world of sound, bursting with boundless creativity and imagination, uninhibited by the arbitrary demands of drama, structure, and audience expectation. Eno epitomizes the art student turned musician, and, true to form, he refuses to shape his compositions around the skeletal structure of standard songwriting.
His recording techniques become as much his guides as his tools, and he ''surfs'' his pieces toward completion, cutting, pasting, dubbing, and overdubbing. His collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, best demonstrates his use of these techniques and was the inspiration for the industrial, house, and even rap and hip-hop recording artists who followed. Like the house song "Your Son is Dead,'' these compositions form an anthropological scrapbook, sampling voices and sounds from real life. The record jacket lists the sound bytes used in each song, which include a radio-show host, a Lebanese mountain singer, Algerian Muslims, and even an unidentified New York City exorcist. Each voice is layered over different percussive and instrumental tracks, sometimes modern sounds over tribal beats, or vice versa. The effect is a startling compression of time and culture, where the dance beat of the music is the only regulated element in a barrage of bird, animal, industrial, television, radio, random, musical, and human noises. The industrial noises were soon to become an entire genre of their own.