Roadside Picnic

Last Wednesday I read Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsy, translated Olena Bormashenko, 2023, Gollancz, London. Here are my thoughts.

In many Medieval manuscripts  all that was considered good (often religious imagery) was positioned in the middle of the page and all that was imaginary  was relegated to the margins. This border created a kind of no go zone and a reminder to viewers of the danger of others.

Not so in Arkady & Boris Strugatsy's 1972 science fiction novel 'Roadside Picnic' where imaginary visitations by unseen aliens were said to have contributed to polluted, dangerous zones within the city. Easy to lay the blame on aliens for the rubbish left and to wonder at their motives for doing so, when humans create all kinds of waste that sullies air, land and water and impacts on all species.  Inside, not outside, these Zones contain various discarded artefacts presumably left by the aliens. They become desirable objects sold on the black market by Stalkers because of their innate qualities or potential use value in the future. 'Everyone makes a buck on the side, while the learned men pompously hold forth'. (p.110)

Typical of anthropocentrism a division is created between the inside and outside of the Zone. A division also between the stalker who courts danger in order to eke out a living and cleaner, safer players in this narrative. It is revealing that the Zone occupies an inside space reflecting a coalescence;  a self searching not only for unique objects but a search for self amongst the detritus.

The zone was described as a 'bitch, a murderess' (p.144) a place 'put there by Satan to tempt us'(145). It was clearly delineated by a fence of thick black brambles. Its infrastructure was intact but overgrown. A filthy, uninhabited region that Redrick the hero of this story crawled through in order to secure his valuable bounty.

Written in 1972 the authors expose an interest in 1960s Russia, which was concerned with invention, experimentation and futurology; exemplified by their space program and the curious, tiny pieces of space junk that fell to earth after the four Sputnik (satellites) disintegrated. I was ten when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. Newspaper articles about him were pasted on my classroom wall and I'm absolutely positive that my interest in science fiction/began at this time.

So,considering all of this I propose a different scenario to Roadside Picnic.

Humans not aliens are responsible for the trash, the dumping of it, its use and the consequences to themselves and others of their actions.

I suppose my short reading assumes the position of eco-feminist since I link the narrative with consumerism and Capitalism and its ongoing affect on the environment and by association, all of the natural world.

Imagine a large corporation funded by the government to experiment with new biological and technological  materials and machines. Their behavioural Science Department decides to create an experiment to observe human behaviour when exposed to and confronted by strange things. Their motive also included secret rubbish dumping with no concern for the environment or government reprisals.

Under the veil of night they scattered unsuccessful experiments over five Zones and accompany their 'visitation' with sudden, bright lights to fuel the idea that an alien presence has occurred. The corporation is solely interested in what the humans will do and whether they devise novel uses of the discarded items.One man's trash is another man's treasure.

So, what do Stalkers and others do? Above all they make several assumptions: that Aliens, like them, have no compunction in leaving unwanted trash around without regards to the impact on human or not so human species. That the artefacts have fallen from space or been brought from space so must be the products of aliens. They enter and steal items, some die, some are maimed, but the primary protagonist Redrick lives. Although they don't understand why objects perform as they do they invent uses for them. They are revealed as opportunistic and intelligent.  I don't know how electricity works but I know to flick a switch and make all my appliances work. The Stalkers enter the Zone to retrieve objects to sell and they invent notions of a superior alien, more technically advanced than themselves who hovers just out of sight but is occasionally seen as a dark figure within the Zone. They believe that these artefacts will create a better future for humanity. Although these discarded items are imbued with uncanny energies and are for all purposes alive they are perceived purely as objects of desire, their use value palpable in the shadowy arena of the Zone.

It was midway down paragraph two on page 83 when Redrick experienced a daylight dream. In his words 'the air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge course spheres, polished pyramids and gigantic, prickly crystals. It was as though he had walked into a  Malevich painting. I began to think that his vision of a geometric language system associated with magic and science, pre-empted the myriad, diverse nature of the refuse in the Zone as well as their mystical values. Take for instance the Golden Sphere that may grant wishes.

From my point of view the best thing about this narrative is the fact that the objects are recycled but even this doesn't stop them from having unwanted affects on the population. Corpses continue to arrive and children are born mutated. Witnesses to the original event at Harmont move away from the Zone but they themselves become vectors of death.

GEMINOID F - slave woman of the future?

(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno: news.cnet.com)

In cyber-culture human beings have become increasingly reliant on machines, and as a result, a question has arisen in science fiction films as well as in research on artificial intelligence and robotics as to whether a machine might be considered worthy of the rights afforded to individuals, rather than exist just simply as the property of its owners. This reflects a concern for non-human others as well as human values. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 35 ‘The Measure Of a Man’ (1989), issues such as free will, agency and slavery are broached in relation to whether or not the android, Lieutenant Commander Data is a sovereign subject. 

In Bicentennial Man (Chris Colombus 1999) and AI: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg 2001) the androids are introduced into a family to serve various domestic needs, and strive to become recognized as human because they have been programmed with the ability to express human feelings and emotions. Although Andrew (Robin Williams) in Bicentennial Man is one of many that have been mass produced, David (Hayley Joel Osment) the android child is unique for he is the first Mecca of his kind and is programmed to bond with his organic mother, Monica (Frances O’Connor). The emphasis on the real (organic) rather than the artificial (android or mecca) is stressed in both films. Paradoxically, the view that emotion is an expression of a human essence is challenged in the film by the fact that both human emotion and android emotion are exhibited by facial expressions, emotive language and behavior in contrast to the dispassionate and expressionless robots familiar to us from earlier science fiction films. Since machines do not have a psychology as such, they are not meant to exhibit anything other than rational detachment in all situations.

Emotions are said to be the product of chemical and neural responses in the body produced from the affects of the external world, the reflection of an internal psyche, as well as learnt behaviour. They are usually inscribed on the face by the tensing or relaxation of facial muscles, which raise or lower the eyebrows and affect the contours of the mouth. As such it is possible to argue that both humans and sophisticated androids are able to produce external markers of an emotion as well as being able to mimic them. However, regardless of whether a person is expressing a real or feigned emotion, we generally react to such expressions as though they are real. However, even the lack of obvious emotion maybe an expression of an emotional state.
In both films aforementioned, the androids look human and although they tend to interpret information literally, they also seek to belong to the family or community, to be loved and recognized as subjects in their own right. However, it was the fact that they were programmed to express emotion that created alarm for their families, who expect them, as machines, to be unfeeling, rational and controllable. For both androids, it is their very display of human qualities as well as their lack of human biology that betrays them.
Geminoid F, a speaking, singing fem-bot designed by Japanese robotic engineer,  Hiroshi Ishiguro, is an actual android, not a character from science fiction. She is equipped with twelve motorised actuators, powered by air pressure and flexible rubber facial skin that allow her to mimic human expressions and emotions. However, she is more than this for she is an exact replica of a real life Japanese woman in her twenties. With the development of such a technology we are not far from realizing a world that mirrors Surrogrates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009), in which remote controlled surrogates - basically a robotic clone of the exterior of a human being, undertakes a persons life for them so that they may live in safety, away from the real world, away from human touch and potential danger.
Although Ishigura developed an android of himself in 2006, it is not a surprise to me that Geminoid F is female and is primarily designed to 'work' as a receptionist, museum guide or patient attendant in hospitals. She could work in a factory, vacuum floors or make sushi. This attractive, twenty something,  individual (if I may call her that) is essentially a smiling, well behaved, compliant slave who does what she is told to. Isn't that every man's dream? Could Geminoid F eventually become a sophisticated sex doll? What will the feminists think?
Concern about this kind of technological development (at least for me) is not that Geminoid F is uncanny for her ability to look and behave human, but that she is paid for and owned by the company that purchases her and unlike a human counterpart, who she will replace, she will not complain, strike or walk off the job, thus becoming a threat to humans who continually seek better and more equitable working conditions. Automatic teller machines replaced humans in the 1970s and today there are about 1.2 million industrial robots that have replaced humans in the workplace. GemF is another robot that has the potential to replace us in more ways than one!

The Red or the Blue Pill, reflections on a post human city.

In the science fiction film The Matrix ( Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999) the red pill would enable Neo (Keanu Reeves) to escape from a computer generated reality, the blue pill would enable him to stay, but have no knowledge that anything was awry. Of course, Neo swallows the red pill and abruptly finds himself in a liquid-filled pod, his body connected by tubes and cables to a vast mechanical tower containing identical pods. He discovers that his reality has been constructed by machines. A little bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and entering a fantasy realm and drinking the contents of a bottle which made her smaller. Substances almost always change the way you feel about yourself and the world and here in the Matrix as in Wonderland the environment plays a part in the way embodiment is considered. I want to talk about the contrasting environments in The Matrix and the Alice in Wonderland story for they present a vast contrast. One being the highly technological world of computer technologies, the other a changing, but familiar natural landscape filled with various animals. However, both these worlds are populated by shifting boundaries between the human and animal, order and chaos. The rabbit that Alice encounters is humanized to the extent that it is dressed in human clothing and sports a large mechanical pocket watch. The rabbit speaks and as such makes problematic the boundary between humans and animals. When Alice pulls back a curtain to reveal a small door that she cannot enter, we understand that architecture is designed for the body, in other words, buildings are to be traversed by bodies and as such must be accessible to individuals.
So what has this got to do with the post-human and the city?
Well, in order to answer this I want to talk briefly about the flaneur. The nineteenth century French poet, Charles Baudelaire characterized the flaneur as someone who strolls through the city in order to experience it. The flaneur was both observer and participant. Baudelaire imagined in the first instance that the flaneur was a dandy; if you need to picture a dandy, think of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, dressed in suit and vest, carrying an umbrella under his arm and a pocket watch in his hand. Notice the references here to the possibility of changing weather and an emphasis on time. This is like being self-aware whilst being fully immersed in ones surroundings, like Neo and Alice in their perspective surroundings. The flaneur had a particular fascination with street life; they also took of the role of critic in regards to the affect of the city on the individual. As urban observer the street photographer may be perceived as an extension the flaneur, who appeared to have detached aesthetic and attuned observation necessary to be critical of the environment around him(her). Of course it was in this way that the city itself became a spectacle.
So what is this spectacle that the city presents to us? Is it just the buildings, cafes, restaurants, retail shops, juxtaposition of the older and new buildings, the street lights and signs, the rubbish bins, tram lines, trams, overhead wires; the old statues and new paths and steps. Is it the people who move through these permanent structures or a combination of the two? Or is it nothing of what I’ve just stated; is it really just our imagining of the city as we traverse its spaces? And how are we moving through the city and the people who inhabit the city? Is it, as Guy Debord has said: The Commodity is spectacle.

I want to focus now on my latest photographic project - The Body and the City, which addressed absence and presence, the familiar and the unfamiliar, comfort and unease, special disorientation and spontaneous arrangement. It was about the everyday, the commonplace activity of interacting with the general public in an urban environment.  It grew out of my persistent vertigo whilst attempting to negotiate public spaces – the alienating crowds, the sense that I was an outsider to the general throng, which moved along seamlessly, or rather, as I perceived it as a machine. The people who inhabited Bourke Street in the city during the lunch time rush, were in my mind, mere automatons who walked to some internal beat I could not hear, who were inhabiting a world akin to a Matrix otherzone, attached to the umbilical cord that enabled them to breath and eat and which apparently satisfied their every need?

Although I had been an avid photographer for much of my life, purchasing a pocket sized digital camera enabled me to take photographs whilst I was in the city. I still felt a sense of non-integration into the masses, but being able to capture images was a way of engaging with certain energy. I found that I was returning to previous concerns ~ individuality, difference and facial expressions. But there was also an underlying concern about how some things appear ordered, whilst they are in fact quite disorderly. Somehow the framing arranged things I viewed to an extent that I, although not entirely devoid of anxiety, am able to traverse the city spaces in what I call the mode of the flaneur – I allow buildings to determine my meandering to follow the city and its people.

My photography is not surveillance, not dispassionate. Something IS identified, noticed, explained in the taking of the photo. It is about using the image of the other outside oneself to say something about human life, it is about a reflection of self; it is about coming to terms with the other, who is almost always distant, even though they might be inherently within us. We are both interior and exterior as self. An intimacy and connection is formed, briefly, fleetingly. My photographs reveal a concern with people as ornamentation ~ decorous to the landscape, as order and disorder, an arrangement within a fixed urban environment, part of the textural interplay between building surface and body as fluid architecture. More often than not my photographs are about people watching or waiting for the other.

Often I concentrate on the person I identify as the outsider, someone sitting alone or special in their particular orientation. I did this primarily because I wanted to reveal that the ambiguous city people were not just a homogeneous and almost unidentifiable mass, but they were individuals who formed part of this mass. Almost always I look for the juxtaposition of textures between building and body architecture - the interplay between image and text – the meanings that may be created.

Francesco Vitalli said of my installation: 

it evokes community and belonging, the relation between public and private spheres, inequality, justice and entitlements and reminds us of an anxiety felt before the masses, before the city as a field of signification and symbol of might and grandeur. Its colonial legacy, reminiscent of the empire of racial segregation on which it was built, the anxiety of the alienated individual, regimented, classified and catalogued, which is now exsanguinated. We are reminded of Giorgio Agamben’s (2007) work on exclusions, of the permanent state of exception under which subjectivities and identities are formed and in which the city as locus of capital, produces aggression and a state of insecurity. (2011)

So, I want to return here to the post-human. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first appearance of the term in Maurice Parmelee’s 1916 Poverty and Social Progress. In a section entitled 'Eugenic Measures and the Prevention of Poverty' he wrote:

But even though it is not possible, at present at any rate, to do much to improve the quality of the human stock by eugenic means, it is interesting and profitable to consider what would be the result if socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part . . . . [But] it is evident, in the first place, that it is inconceivable that human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by [the] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an animal no longer human, or for that matter mammalian, in its character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy, fear, etc. But even if such a post-human animal did come into existence, it is difficult to believe that it could carry on the necessary economic activities without using a certain amount of formal organization, compulsion, etc.

Although there are various ways to approach the concept of the post-human, I understand it to be a liminal being marked by its transformation by advanced technologies.  Indeed, positioned as it is in relation to technological development, the post-human is framed by ideas of mutation, evolution and the development of a species that transcends the human. Even so, it is useful to consider Parmelee’s notion, for we may ask: are we already no longer human? And, I ask this because the human that we thought we knew prior to certain technological advances is essentially different to the human we know today and what  I mean by this is that when ‘we’ traverse city spaces we no doubt encounter individuals who are almost cyborgian in their obvious connection to electronic interfaces. Ipods, Iphones, laptop computers, headphones, and mobile phones appear permanently fixed to people’s ears as they walk through the city streets fully immersed in virtual worlds of music and text. So what, if anything happens to the actual city in these interactions? Sure, it remains there fixed, immovable, as structures to be negotiated, but is it really there to these people who appear always to be somewhere else? Are buildings just remnants of past history, past events, past human activity that have little to do with the contemporary psyche? Are buildings just a backdrop to the real experience of the individual?  Is it in fact a simulated reality, like that presented in The Matrix?

Just an aside here ~ I always thought it interesting that people had difficulty understanding the concept of the Tardis in the science fiction television series Dr. Who. The Tardis – basically a phone box, looks smaller on the outside, but is much larger on the inside. I like to think of it like the human brain – looks small, but contains billions of neuronal connections, or like buildings, because from the outside we can never see the totality of the building, we generally see the entrance and very rarely look upwards to attempt to take in the whole structure, so when we actually get inside the building its many rooms and corridors appear much larger than we had expected.

How can a city respond to the people who inhabit it – who live, work and shop in the city?

Imagined in this way, that is, buildings as facade, which affronts or covers another space (either solid or empty), the cityscape is rendered like a stage, the curtains drawn and then, when opened reveal the spectacle of the play. Without the play and its actors and the action, the theatre and the stage are nothing more than potential space. Although one could argue that with the scenery in place, it might be considered a spectacle in itself, if the scenery was spectacular or magnificent! But again, imagination must play a part here in regards to whether or nothing something has potential to excite or engage, since spectacle must arrest us from our usual ways of seeing, transport us into the visual aesthetics as well as the unfolding action or event.

How does technology change us. Well, on a very simple level, wearing head phones and listening to music whilst we are walking along, enables the individual to block out the usual sounds of the city, the persistent gabble of people talking, the sounds of passing traffic, road and building works, in favor of music we have chosen, rendering life (that which we see and experience) more akin to a film soundtrack where the visuals are accompanied by sweet classic strains or heavy metal. Thus making actual life more virtual, more cinematic! It’s a matter of, if you don’t like the current soundtrack -  then change it. We are psychologically modified by our use of technologies and by the manner in which technology enters our spaces. Think of the large screen at Federation Square, which has changed our view of inner city spaces. That ‘being there’ experience has been taken up by people who dress up to go to the Melbourne Cup, but actually watch the race on the big screen, rather than actually going to Flemington Racecourse. This behavior also occurs in regards to watching the AFL Grand Final, summer time tennis and cricket and the Anzac Parade. However, the screen is more than that, it is also a back-drop for actual performers, it enables them to augment their performance. Last summer the screen was used to display images and poetic texts – more than a cinema and more than a television, it has become an avenue for displaying our culture and creativity. Screens have crept into our cities. In some cities in the world posters are dynamic, not static.

Those already alienated by the metropolis as a space that caters only for those who desire commodities are further alienated by those who block themselves off from city people. These people cannot and do not interact on public transport and walk through the streets as ‘untouchables’ since they are wearing technological signifier that say in no uncertain terms: Don’t speak to me unless you are speaking through a technological interface – text me or mobile phone call me, if you are not a piece of music, a film or video clip then I have no interest in you. They prefer the non-human, because it enables them to remain distant from other human beings. Am I being too harsh?

These individuals already inhabit the matrix, but unlike the construct in the film of the same name, this matrix is one of their choosing, or is it? Is the technological space, as constructed reality any better or worse than actual reality and its constructs? Are we moving towards a time in which all city screens will be tailored to the individual, presented in such films as The Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002). Interactive screens and billboards herald a post human future in which 3D screens will interact with us by utilizing retinal scanners, iris recognition and databases of consumers' preferences to target our desires.

In the film, when the panicked John Anderton (Tom Cruise) races through a shopping mall, he is besieged by a flurry of interactive advertising. Screens, apparently sensing his predicament, make their pitches: Promoting the American Express blue card, a woman in a bathing suit beckons to Anderton and asks: 'Need to escape? Blue can take you.'Another says, 'John Anderton: you could use a Guinness right now'.

A spectacle requires spectators, but those who do not participate (in the sense that their intent all along was to be an observer, rather than player),do become overall, part of the spectacle, in fact, like actors in a play, the spectacle cannot be so unless it is witnessed as such.