Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)
Mitch Goodwin · M/C Journal · 2018
Fig. 1: Smith Street Sprawl (circa 1995), Mitch Goodwin, 2018The nineties were more of a feeling than a knowing and Gen X felt the kinetic edges of cyberculture most keenly. The millennium was in approach as the planet groaned and the network readied itself for a reboot. We were becoming the 21st century whether we liked it or not.Yep, I was there in the nineties, with a rag-tag bunch of University peers supposedly studying Brecht and Chekov, writing like Camus and Garner and thinking like Lacan and Kristeva. Instinctively, we were suspicious of them all. We were instead seduced by the boldness of network culture, by the back-and-forth of data flows, the trade in fixes and patches and version ware. I didn’t understand much of it, I was enthralled by the rawness of the circuitry and the promise of the mysteries within. The immediacy of networked gaming was the big show. Hunkered down in a sandy Gold Coast flat, a place of humidity and testosterone, of put-downs and pop-cultural riffing we confronted hordes of the undead and the unreal in Doom (1993), Red Alert (1995), Quake (1996) and Duke Nukem (1996).Peer-to-peer file sharing was also a mind-blowing development. This assemblage of historical artefacts via ISP by amateur archivists was clearly the future. We downloaded the Chemical Brothers, Spiderbait, Devo and the Rolling Stones on Limewire, burning and binning countless CD compilations for every mood and occasion. Technology merged with mobility and social fixes. Punching the spongy buttons on my first mobile phone – a Phillips Diga (circa 1997) – between the tap-tap of brass cones on glass ashtrays and whatever heady concoction the weekend demanded. They were fucking great times. They were also the end times.There was a very real sense that the analogue was crashing into the digital and it was happening at speed. “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts” but this felt different: the charts were in bits and the barometer of success was all messed up. Perhaps a new consciousness was indeed in the offing. Paradigms were shifting, we were told. This would become evident as the decade unfolded – in the Baltic states, in Seattle, and in LA while the genocides in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda were indifferent to history, reminding us how some human stains remained the same.Sensory slippages were occurring across time between beats and within shifting frames of reference. Textually meaning was all-a-jitter, diluting the binary narrative of the Cold War and challenging tribalism with a new global imaginaire. As narrative genres began to meld and hybridise, ambiguity and multiplicity were the neat new tricks on the block, stuff was getting meta: David Carson, Bret Easton Elis, Tony Kushner, Bjork, Beck, Bowie (again) – they were all at it. History was being trashed and re-hashed right before our eyes.This is your life, right here, right now. It’s real time – you hear me, real time!— Lornette "Mace" Mason (Angela Bassett), Strange Days, 1995Machines of vision, manipulation and calculation are central to this shift. Key enabling technologies for the production of media were released in the early nineties supercharging the means of production via a push towards standardisation, interoperability and multitasking. The MPEG-1 video codec and the infamous MP3 audio codec (1993) along with the SVGA video display standard (1990) and Creative Labs audio cards (1991) brought coherence to the handling and exchange of audio and video files for the creators and consumers of media. The advent of the Intel Pentium Processor (1993) enabled more complex digital media processing, while the Zip Drive made creative media portable (1995). Software was also maturing, Photoshop (1990), the Multimedia Extensions update for Windows 3.0 (1991), and the Linux kernel (1991) were all important first steps taken in the 1990s. This confluence of innovation in software and hardware helped to make advanced computing tasks affordable and accessible for artists, effectively creating an eco-system of connectivity and production. The Internet’s first Big Bang occurred in 1993 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with the release of the Mosaic web browser which not only provided a link between the off-line and online worlds, it provided a venue for the distribution and consumption of digital culture.As the decade unfolded, CPU speeds simplified the capture, design and manipulation of the analogue world. The art of sampling had served out its apprenticeship on canvass, on tape decks, on VHS recorders, at block parties, in scrapbooks and in poetry. What had begun with the work of pioneers such as Tom Moulton and Grandmaster Flash was being supercharged by the media interventions of Negativeland, David Carson and the Emergency Broadcast Network. The cut & paste routines of desktop publishing and digital compositing, the construction of audio loops, the remixing of video and the synthesising of digital effects were all critical computer-enabled extensions of the collage and pastiche techniques of traditional art making (Lessig 68). This not only expanded the pallet of what was possible in the assemblage of media fragments but also, through network technology, forged a connection to a diverse archive of historic digital and analogue source material (Manovich 136). In the hands of an emergent tribe of “culture jammers” these new media conditions amplified the dexterity of the art making process while making its operation as a networked object and its meaning as a piece of text more sophisticated and more direct (Dery; Jenkins 219).Indeed, the most adroit practitioners of the decade were students of 1980s image culture – Banksy, Madonna, Cindy Sherman, Quentin Tarnatino, Robert Longo, Don DeLillo – they understood the malleable nature of the cultural artefact within a pre-fragmented media culture while also being cognisant of the persistence of the screen as an accomplice to shifting powers of the gaze. Although television was still king, cyberculture, itself a postmodern turn, demanded a move away from the centralised broadcast – from the linear tape deck and the prime-time scheduling – to a new kind of thinking about media not just as dutiful consumption but as an interaction and a site of potential manipulation. The televisual image, in its myriad of forms, was being leveraged as an object of, and an instrument for, media critique.Fig 2: Portable Gibson, Mitch Goodwin, 2018The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated…— Bernard Shaw, CNN correspondent, Iraq, 16 January 1991With the end of the millennium nigh, America’s powers of seduction were (politically, at least) in the ascendency: the neoliberal agenda was in full swing, Iraq 1.0 was a clinical if ostentatious success and a saxophone playing president waltzed into the White House filling a Cold War vacuum with his re-assuring Arkansas drawl and celebrity schtick. Cultural production in the US during the 1990s would follow a well-established template for the promotion of outward-facing American exceptionalism forged as it was in the peak-Americana of the 1980s. Reagan’s “Ameritocracy” on steroids became Team USA the brand, birthed as it was in a hockey game in 1980 against those pesky Russians at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics – the so called miracle on ice. Brand USA reached its zenith in the 1990s, consolidated by the men’s swim team at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. It of course inevitably evolved, becoming a perverse somewhat unsettling rally cry on the streets of American cities in the aftermath of the successful Navy Seal raid on the compound of Osama Bin Laden in 2011: “U-S-A, U-S-A!” (Fromson)Growing up in the 1980s in Australia, we were hoodwinked by the moralising nature of American sitcom television, believing as we did in the exceptionalism of Alex P. Keaton and the contrarian analysis of Rosanne. We aspired to Hawkeye’s indignant rage and the Fonze’s manufactured cool and we believed Kevin Arnold had nothing but wholesome thoughts for Winnie Cooper.Of course, there was static in the signal, David Lynch’s gothic enclosure Twin Peaks (1990-91) was a very different kind of suburban seduction, while The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98) took a self-depreciating swipe at the industrialisation of entertainment. The creation of comedian Gary Shandling, its prickly reality TV aesthetic, like Lynch’s sense of the uncanny, still resonates today.From the antipodean south we were world-watching through a fine-grained distinctly American filter. As Gen X constituents we recognised this tele-world as a false paradigm. The traditional Cold War battle lines were fast becoming inconsequential and silly – in a Reagan, Rocky, Top Gun, Xenia Onatopp kind of way. America’s opaque hyper-capital DNA was not only being subverted through fictional critique but was also exposing an unsettling inner trauma. Woven into this imaginary of sound and vision, was an ecology of fear and paranoia of the machinations of techno-culture and their intersection with capital – a feeling that preceded the knowing. This was both an internal struggle (Leaving Las Vegas, Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace) and an external one (Do the Right Thing, Rage against the Machine, Bill Hicks). This emergent anxiety rejected the commodification of youth and the stereotypical casting of middle-American rites of passage. While they were not solely American symptoms they did foreshadow a global pathogen of distinctly American origin: post Y2K, post 911, deep into permanent recession, deep into the ‘forever war.’ We saw it in grunge and industrial-electro music, we saw it in the cyberpunk ethos, we saw it in goth culture, we saw it in Nathan Adler and Lester Burnham and we saw it in Matthew Barney. Culture was watching us now, the cameras were reflecting a different shade of America, an America seemingly full of characters looking at televisions. Or were they looking at us? Recall the knowing wink (The Simpsons), the