BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SUMMER 2001

The sun is going down now: light slants in through the western windows, glows in golden pools on Thomas' sofa. Lydia lies there, her legs propped on the sofa's armrest, crossed at the ankles. Her body feels completely filmed with sweat. Today the temperature is 95 degrees; with the heat index it feels over 100. Or so they said on the radio. It sure feels hot, she could tell you that much. She considers getting up, moving out of direct sunlight, but Thomas' apartment isn't air-conditioned: there's no real cool spot anywhere. She adjusts the straps of her shirt.

On the other side of the room, Thomas sits at his desk, his back to her. He is going to check his e-mail and then the two of them are going to walk on up to the Chopin Theatre. There's a screening there tonight, a program of video work from the 1970's, entitled "Feedback and Other Signals." She read about it in an e-mail that circulated on one of the listservs she's on: At the infancy of video during the early 1970's, many artists, often working outside of the commercial worlds of television and film, began experimenting with the tools of video as means for new ways of image making. Most of the videos in the program were made before she was born (1978).

Hand built instruments, sampling, feedback and other tools were used to translate energy and time into waveforms, frequencies, voltages, and finally into video and audio images. As well as documenting the relationship between these tools and the audio and video signals, many videos from this period are records of live performances where the tool itself plays a role, dialoging with the central performer. Yes. When she read the forwarded e-mail, those were the sentences that jumped out. They fit into a field of interest already established within her. She is interested in the relationship between human beings and their tools, particularly when those tools are electronic. She spent much of her teenage years immersed in the thump and glamour of Detroit dancefloors, and she began to experience a conviction that she and the bodies that moved in conjunction around her formed a sort of machine, that they were all circuits plugged into some unspeakably complex motherboard. That they were essentially becoming tools. The dancefloor as a kind of factory: producing cyborgs.

Right around the time when she was beginning to chalk that feeling up to youthful naiveté, one of her Communications professors at Indiane University introduced her to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes. She thought: yes. She thought: this is what I lived through.

Since she got to Chicago she's been listening to more and more computer music: CDs which are less songs and more just arrangements of glitches and textures. Every once in a while Marvin or Paul, her roommates, will make fun of her for listening to that kind of music, and she has trouble describing what about it seems so intuitively right to her. She thinks the key to it is what the music is about: it is obvious to her that the music is about its own production, about the tools used to create it. She sees this, and so much of the other cultural material from the late twentieth century, as attempts to come to terms with electricity. Electricity is the tool that creates us. What is little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man. Turns him into software.

Thomas stands up from the computer, pushes his hands into the small of his back. —Urgh, he says.

—All done? Lydia asks him.

—Yeah, he says. He looks over at her for a moment. The bare flesh of her shoulders seems to radiate. They still have not had sex yet. —Let me just shut down.

What do you want the computer to do?

Stand by

Shut down

Restart

Restart in MS-DOS mode

He selects Shut down and lets the computer go through its closing motions. He walks over to where she is on the couch. She turns her face towards him: squints because the sun is in her eyes. He moves his body to cast shade on her face and she relaxes, closes her eyes in a fair approximation of a blissful look, shakes out her hair.

—Kiss me, she says.

He does.