But Sarah is a cyborg, and finally answers his question with a long discourse about virtual space. Our current forms of communication – verbal and physical – are obsolete, she explains. Someday she will be able to project, through thought, a holographic image into the air, into which someone will project his own holographic mental image.
"Then we would literally see what the other means,'' she borrows from Terence McKenna, "and see what we both mean together.'' It would be the ultimate in intimacy, she tells him, touching his arm gently, because they would become linked into one being.
The reporter has had enough. ''But wouldn't it be much easier to just fuck?''
Six months later, having moved to the next evolutionary level, Sarah recalls what she was going through in the Infinite Personality period. ''I remember I would reach into my mind and ... ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. It was the way I had of expressing what I was experiencing at that time. Sometimes I'm a very, very, very high conduit. It was like a huge information download.''
For Sarah, the relationship of DNA, computers, psychedelics, and music is not conceptual but organic. According to Drew, her Infinite Personality Complex served as a ''highly dense information loop.'' But, like her work, her own DNA was mutating – evolving into a denser informational structure. As an artist, she became capable of downloading the time-wave-zero fractal through her own resonating DNA, and then translating it into music. Meanwhile, she was also becoming a human, biological manifestation of the downloading process, evolving – like her society – by becoming more intimately linked to technology.
"I was becoming what you can call a cyborg. It was time for me to make that synthesis. In this kind of work, you are the becoming – not an artist separate from the medium. Then you can even be in multiple places at once. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!''
Artist as art object goes way back, but not artist as cyborg or information loop time traveller. The other particular advantage of becoming a cyborg is, of course, that it enables the artist to interact fully with her computer and other high-tech recording equipment. Sarah's current house project is an adaptation of the Bacchae, for which she's using an EMU synthesizer/sampler. She makes a moan or a whisper into a microphone that the EMU records digitally. Then she replays, overdubs, and manipulates the sounds with computers. Finally, she ends up with a house recording that, again, recreates a timeless, skinless sexual experience through computers.
"It starts out with soft, light sounds and whisperings, then moves into a sort of ecstasy. As it starts to build, the breathing becomes the rhythms, and the rhythms become the breathing. It's the sound of ecstasy happening. And I have a male, Dionysian figure, going into orgasm as he's being torn apart. And it ends up in a climax. All in five minutes.''
In addition, using the 3-D ''holographic'' sound techniques developed for virtual reality systems, Sarah creates a three-dimensional acoustic sound space where the audience can experience sounds as real, physical presences. The whispers seem to come from all sides. This is not just a "sens-u-round'' effect but a genuine cyberian effort in structure, style, and meaning. ''I'm talking about a holographic sense of presence and movement,'' she insists. "We can take people through time that way by creating a space with sound. It'll move people back in time.''
By creating a space with sound, Sarah makes a time machine in which she can transport her audience – not by bringing them into a different space but by changing the space that they're already in. The implication of her music is that time does not really exist, since it can be compressed into a single moment. The moment itself, of course, is Dionysian; orgiastic bliss is the only inroad to timelessness. Because Sarah creates her sound space out of her own voice and cyborg presence, she feels her music is a way of taking her audience into herself. Her ultimate sexual statement is to make love to her entire audience and create in them the bliss response.
Despite her flirtatious manner and flippancy about orgasm, Sarah takes human sexuality quite seriously. As several recording engineers carry equipment into Sarah's basement studio to mix the final tracks for her Bacchae record, she makes a startling admission: she'll probably perform with ''low energy'' today because she had an abortion yesterday. For lack of anything better to say, one of the engineers asks her how it was.
"I took acid before I went in,'' she says, "because I really wanted to experience it. It was a purge.''
To average ears, this sounds like intense, artsy beatnik nonsense, but Sarah's unflinching commitment to experiencing and understanding her passage through time has earned her recognition as one of the most fully realized participants in Cyberia. Everyone in the scene who knows Sarah – and almost everybody does – is a little frightened of her, but also just a wee bit in awe.
She is most definitely for real, and however bizarre she gets, everything she says and does is in earnest. Even her affectations – weird sounds, strange hats, pseudointellectual accent, and name dropping – are done innocently, almost like a child trying on costumes to test the reality of each. Sarah's life is absolutely a work in progress, and her pieces are indistinguishable from her self.
"To have an abortion on acid,'' muses R.U. Sirius the day afterward. "It hasn't seemed to affect her too much. It was intense, and she cried, but one of the things I like about her is she can have these incredibly intense experiences, and she expects them.''
The discontinuity training is complete. Cyberian music has evolved into a cyborg.
Chapter 14
Hypertextual Forays
The writers of Cyberia underwent a similar evolution. The literary culture of Cyberia began as a dark, negative worldview but later developed into a multimedia celebration of timelessness and designer reality. Today, the literature of Cyberia – like its music – has become personified by cyberians themselves, who adopt into their own lives the ethos of a fictional designer reality.
The Interzone
"Beat'' hero William Burroughs didn't start the cyberpunk movement in literature, but he foresaw it, most notably in his novel Naked Lunch (1959). Although written long before video games or the personal computer existed, Burroughs's works utilize a precybernetic hallucinatory dimension called the Interzone, where machines mutate into creatures, and people can be controlled telepathically by "senders'' who communicate messages via psychedelics introduced into the victims' bloodstreams.
Burroughs's description of the psychic interface prophesizes a virtual reality nightmare: Senders gain ''control of physical movements, mental processes, emotional responses, and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectrical signals injected into the nervous system of the subject. ... The biocontrol apparatus [is] the prototype of one-way telepathic control.'' Once indoctrinated, the drug user becomes an unwilling agent for one of the Interzone's two main rivaling powers. The battle is fought entirely in the hallucinatory dimension, and involves "jacking in'' (as William Gibson will later call it) through intelligent mutated typewriters.
Burroughs's famed ''prismatic'' style of writing – almost a literary equivalent of Brian Eno's Ambient Music – reads more like jazz than the narrative works of his contemporaries. Each word or turn of phrase can lead the reader down an entirely new avenue of thought or plot, imitating the experience of an interdimensional hypertext adventure. But as the pioneer of nonmimetic hallucinatory and even pornographic literature, Burroughs suffered condemnation from the courts and, worse, occasional addiction to the chemicals that offered him access to the far reaches of his consciousness. Unlike the cyberian authors of today, Burroughs was not free simply to romp in the uncharted regions of hyperspace, but instead – like early psychedelic explorer – as forced to evaluate his experiences against the accepted, "sane'' reality of the very noncyberian world in which he lived. The morphogenetic field, as it were, was not yet fully formed.