Media Compression, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1990
INTRODUCTION
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The Media Rituals
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Since 1986 I've been attempting to string humans and media technology into meaningful relationships. Beginning with a multimedia ceremony, "Viscera," conducted at MITs Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1986, and continuing with simpler, community-oriented rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I have used a range of media and "social" technologies. Inspired by the saltier, more rugged modalities of underground music clubs and the "poor theatre" of Polish theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, my interest has always been in appropriate and accessible technologies. My search is for deep functionality, for the vital and often weedlike integration of people, machines and their environment (SeeWigglism).
I have kept my rituals simple for the sake of ruggedness, transparency of coding and to allow room for participation and more complex and strange phenomena to emerge. Thus it is possible to encode these projects in a diagram, but difficult to define the results. A social organism is somehow crawling into formation. It's a raw, messy and unpredictable process, despite the precise lines of communication at work within them. No matter how carefully I prepared the superstructure for a ritual, its meaning tended to spill over its guidelines. On more loquacious days I might describe these as technologies of the spirit, mechanisms for forging graceful relationships between humans and our surrounding bionic environment.
Diagrams of the inner skeleton of these rituals have been provided with musings on their spiritual musculature. These experiments in human-machine relationships can be played with freely and coded into endless permutations. They are the seeds from which my Bionic Codes and Zoacodes emerged.
I like to think of these rituals as a kind of bionic haiku. Their effectiveness stems from their simplicity. Too much stress on cutting edge effects puts the technology front and center rather than the bionic system as a whole. I have seen groups of hacker-roboticists concoct drop-dead gorgeous spectacles, but their genius and insight is ultimately private. The public rarely shares in the code and the deeper, creative passions. The result is often a marvelous special effect masking what is essentially a demonstration of power. Only when the significant coding of a ritual is openly shared, whether it's social or machinic, can a collective ethos emerge. Significantly, only then can the code be transferred to a wider public via the media. The code of a ritual, whether it's the laws of a democratic government or the principles of a web jam, must ultimately be able to transcend its initial operating system to survive.
– Ebon Fisher
