EL wire (electroluminescent wire)

Tonight I ran at and then after dusk, the dark coming down fast and complete like the largest velvet curtain on a stage.

I wanted my terrier Cliff (or Cliftopher, as Bailey sometimes calls him) to see me and run to me in the dark and not get eaten by a coyote (him, but also me) and so I grabbed my purple EL wire (electroluminescent wire) and stuck one end in my pocket and wrapped it around my neck in coils (somehow I imagined the electrical version of those African necklaces that stack under the chin) and put the light on solid (not blink not strobe) and ran.

My relationship with cars and pedestrians was different; cars never didn't see me I believe, and ditto for those walking their dogs in the dark (and thus not scaring said dog walkers by rushing onto/by them in the dark while running). And when I looked sideways I saw the briefest reflection of my own light in my glasses, and also the tiny aura of light being cast by the torso-length strip of EL.

Of course Burning Man is some few days away, and suddenly I thought of that 40,000 metropolis which is not but which shall soon be, and the sheer amount of light people rock at dark (for very very good and utilitarian, as well as costume, reasons). Somehow if i can see you, and better yet, if I can see you and your color and wiring shapes suggest that you are not a threat and possibly an entertainment, this is more friendly making than if we are in dark places sliding by each other with that fear that clings to the unseen and unknown.

Lighting is one of those categories that is both utterly mundane (what style of light fixture should we get? you never want nice things! these steam punk lights are just what we need for the anteroom and the parlor!) and utterly, well, utterly nonmundane (imagine the changes in human beings when they could see after the sun went down, see in their homes and then on their streets; imagine the worship of light a la the Franciscans, the Impressionists, the great photographers). I imagined for a moment people filling in a third position at night; not known, and not invisible/threatening/unknown, and then...unknown but lit.

Of course using EL at night says a) you may be a burner, to those who know burners, and b) you are not operating by the usual rules of life after dark. Also, c) you may be in the circus, or a circus, and therefore something entertaining may happen. What else does it signify and what would it look like if people began to link up by lighting themselves? What would tribal lighting look like?

Finally, I had a vision of what my Burner jacket for this year should look like: EL wire on the back, in the shape of

@

I'm currently doing small amounts of research on what it might mean to wear a sign that indicates where so many things are at. And I'm curious to see what people might make of this mundane symbol when it is lit at night, hovering five feet off of the desert floor and moving.

So, the mundane cyborg of light, circulating in a simple technological loop but a more complex and complicated cultural loop.

Oh. And in case you needed to know, here are some of the names by which the @ goes:

apenstaartje - Dutch for "monkey's tail"

snabel - Danish for "elephant's trunk"

kissanhnta - Finnish for "cat's tail"

klammeraffe - German for "hanging monkey"

papaki - Greek for "little duck"

kukac - Hungarian for "worm"

dalphaengi - Korean for "snail"

grisehale - Norwegian for "pig's tail"

sobachka - Russian for "little dog"

The Wiki article has a huge list of such names, and points out that:

"On the final episode of the second series of BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, recorded in London on 19 May, 2009 and broadcast on 8 June, 2009, author Philip Pullman added the category of "things that were invented for one purpose, but are used for another" to the museum's collection. As an example, Pullman referred to @."

But what I was most intrigued by was the notion that this @ symbol, included on the 1885 American Underwood typewriter keyboard, had such an exciting second career as an email God (beginning in 1971, with programmer Ray Tomlinson as the man behind the symbol). The Wiki article argues that the @ is often perceived in other languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.

So I think writing the @ in EL is the way to begin conversations about cyborgs, the Internet, the modern, technology, and the nature of writing with light.

Altered Carbon and cyborg/s (as) literature

Richard Morgan's book Altered Carbon (2002) is the first book of a trilogy located on Earth (and elsewhere) in the 25th Century. Chris (Gray recommended it as a terrific sci fi book that includes a lot of cyborg references, so I'm about 175 pages into it. Here are a few observations, and a concluding reference to how I'm hoping to use novels as part of my work on cyborgs.

1. First of all, the premise of transferrable memories/identities is central to the book. The core of a person resides in their "cortical stack," and this can survive "death" of the current body (or "sleeve"). When someone dies, their stack is stored; in addition, when someone breaks the law, "prison" means more or less being out of sleeve circulation. So you can be stored for say 180 years. The book's first chapter (after a violent, death filled prologue), begins with the line "Coming back from the dead can be rough." I had to work to allow the book its initial tone, and not see instead the Austin Powers scene where he comes out of frozen storage with his giant mane of fake chest hair and goofy re-entry jokes ("I have no Inner Monologue!!"). But the novel does a good job of offering up both a realistic vision of humans inhabiting different bodies/selves, and a metaphor for how current technologies already seem to allow this morphing, shifting sense of self/selves.

2. I'm particularly aware of any hybrids that appear in novels about cyborgs, and one main hybrid here is that of the noir detective novel with the futuristic sci fi novel. Of course this is old hat since William Gibson, but what I'm fascinated by isn't the hybrid so much as how it inflects the view of technologies, and the various uses to which they are put. So when we ourselves begin to inhabit the main character and follow his thinking and experiences (rather as a sleeve, of course), we see through the eyes of the noir detective/man of thought as well as action. We are cynical about many of the uses of technology, and rightfully so; we assume that people are lying to us, or have their own agendas that are never fully clear, and that is also true of organizations: the United Nations Protectorate, the web of influence enjoyed by the wealthy, the police, the military, and the shadowy paramilitary group called the Envoy (the main character is/was a member).

It almost seems that the noir atmosphere and skin/sleeve is useful for looking at technology skeptically and with a eye to abuses and manipulation. The book's jacket blurbs "While divisions in race, religion and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself." This noir frame allows these divisions to show the different ways technology works; also, just as with the original noir narratives, the protagonist (and by extension the reader following the protagonist) doesn't have a choice about following out the trail of injustice, horror, and all too human perversions that technology both promotes and alters in its own image. Torture can be virtual; sales blurbs can be broadcast directly into one's brain; and this allows the narrative to counter some of the other possible stories about futuristic technology: that it will somehow trump human drives for power, that it will be mostly positive, that it will reflect some dream of Progress.

This can also be a bit suffocating. There is this cynical and massively unjust world, and the reader of technology can only do her best to make her way through the mostly unjust uses of technologies, avoiding the mass media that is Bread and Circuses, and try to maintain something like a personal code of ethics.

3. One last observation: drugs. As in Gibson and many others novels by cyberpunks and the sci fi storytellers that followed, drugs are more integrated into daily life, but especially in the lives of those on the edges of society: not just the underclass, but hackers, private investigators/ex military tough guys (like Case in Neuromancer), assassins, prostitutes, etc.

In Altered Carbon, there are many references to neurachem, which appears to be a hybrid systems of drugs over which one has some control (so that the hero [cranks] "up the neurachem" in order to hear or react with superhuman or more than human ability. The training of say a Navy Seal, but merged with neural chemicals that augment this training; and this is somehow both stored in the cortical stack/core of a person and also does or does not appear in the sleeve.

This is a trope that appears over and over: the future hero is part ninja, but some of that ninja response is chemical. And this also transcends military or macho uses; in Altered Carbon, when the wife of the ultra rich meth (for Methuselah, i.e., a very wealthy person who has occupied many many sleeves, perhaps 250 years old) seduces the noir hero, her body has been altered to emit something called Merge Nine, an "empathin" which allows one to feel what the other body is feeling. So sex is a feedback look in which one's own arousal merges with and is multiplied by the arousal of the other. The description of this set of more or less cliched sex acts (pages 93-97) imagines that actual drugs can allow a literal empathy:

Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve's brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew, as well, that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Often the sex in cyborg novels is either dehumanized or mechanical; here, the description over several pages hovers between a paen to augmented sex and a sense that one must pay, in various ways, for using technologies to recreate empathy where it hasn't been (organically?) grown or developed.

4. Finally, reading this novel against several other cyborg novels such as George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, Bruce Sterling's books Schismatrix and Distraction, and Gibson's Neuromancer, I find that I'm looking for categories and tropes that emerge. One key one: attempts to imagine a world in which technologies that would horrify or bewilder us are considered mundane.