“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
— Donna Haraway (1)

George Bures Miller is part Einstein, and part Dr. Frankenstein. Miller’s work focuses on technology, and our human relationship to it, both physically and psychologically. Artists throughout this century have created mechanical art – the uncontrollable machines of Jean Tinguley come to mind – but what makes this work distinctly contemporary is that it situates the viewers’ reactions and perceptions as central elements to the work itself. This is interactive art. Not the pseudo-interactivity of the internet or television, this is work that uses the bodily presence of the viewer to fully achieve its purpose.

Miller’s art works are anachronistic cyborgs made from surplus technological parts. Much like even the most benevolent cyborgs of science fiction, they not only carry out our orders, but take on a life and mind of their own. These machines use their new organic life to raise questions about an ever-enveloping technology.

Simple Experiments in Aerodynamics 6 & 7 sit less in the realm of physics than in sensory psychology. They examine the reciprocal relationship between humans and our technological creations. While the two mixed media works are physically different – Escape Velocity’s central object is an old-fashioned floor lamp, and Jump uses a video monitor – they share a similar minimal architecture. Both use computer controlled pistons to make these objects perform variable and fixed movements through time and space.

Jump’s video monitor hangs from a metal rack and shows a pair of bare feet standing on tip-toes, and jumping purposefully on a floor. Body and machine fused into one. A sound pulse from the salient feet sets off the pistons in the supporting architecture, causing the rack/monitor combination to sway, seemingly under the control of the feet. Just like balancing on a swing, when the feet land forward, the rack tilts backward. When the feet land near centre stage, and stop, the rack slows down and eventually balances out, stable enough for the feet to walk off and the time-based loop to begin again. Each forward jump negates the last backward jump until the bodies are at rest and no force is acting upon them, achieving an equilibrium of motion.

Where Jump uses time as a medium, Escape Velocity acts on a given space. Even before entering the dark, square room, you can hear the clatter from this piece. An old-fashioned floor lamp hangs from a similar piston controlled rack on the ceiling. When the pistons begin their cycle of hissing and snapping, the lamp begins its trajectory. The gallery space is now dark, save the lamp’s lone bulb, which casts spiny shadows on the dim white walls. The lamp builds momentum with centrifugal dizziness. The machine is alive! Just when you think the bulb will smash against the wall, or worse, into you, the pistons stop, now silent, and the lamp’s speed slows until it dangles, now still, ready to begin its flight path again seconds later.

Not quite faster than the speed of light, the lamp’s velocity is predetermined by the artist’s programming, and our reactions may be as well. The experience is the necessary outcome – one of uncertainty and fear. The artist has put us, like the lamp, in an agitated state, and the effect is adrenaline inducing, acting on our autonomic nervous systems – a space between “panic and euphoria.” (2) Instead of a calm, white gallery for contemplation, we are given dramatic visual and aural juxtapositions in a darkened room. Miller’s clattering robots seem uncontrollable.

Both of these works share a similar intent. They raise questions about technology, and our human connection with it, and they do so in a way that brings us into the work as part of the performance – Escape Velocity most dramatically. There is an undeniable authenticity and reality to these ficto-creations. The fear we feel is coupled with a compulsion to keep watching and experiencing, affecting a visceral transformation, not just a metaphysical one.

The pieces themselves depict another transformation – the fusion between body and machine, these are cybernetic beings. Jump uses human feet, extending their image through time and space via video, and couples them with mechanical parts. The feet move first, naturally in real time; they move again through the replicated and repeated motion on the screen, and yet again via the technological prosthetics. Not just a mechanical reproduction of feet, but a whole new organism has been created. Escape Velocity’s organic life evolves only after the scientist/artist flips the switch. Once in motion, the lamp jangles and flings. Its trajectory is fixed, but since the lamp is on a chain, its rotation and jolting are entirely variable, as are the shadows on the walls. The pre-programmed circuitry evolves into self-contained “intelligent life,” whipping about wildly, affecting our viewing bodies, until the artist seizes control again, before it’s too late.

Dangling from the ceiling, suspended in mid-air, these works call to mind our current relationship to technology. At this turn of the century, we are in a state of limbo. Man no longer haunts his machines, as in the early part of the Industrial Revolution, and the lines between natural and artificial, mind and body, organic and machine, are blurring. The materiality of the body may, sometime in the future, be obsolete. Though scientific research is advancing in these areas through bio- and information technology, we are not (yet) able to clone humans, or to literally fuse our minds with machines. We are at a transition point, between pure organics and pure cybernetics, and these machines picture these lost distinctions.

Part of the problem with technology, however, is the human error. We see technology as having a certain character, and we impose this character onto our relationship with it. Our customary involvement with technology is one of ambivalence: we are seduced by its hypnotic logic, much like the cyberpunks in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and by technology’s cool effects, much like you’ll find in any “Sega Playdium.” But we are also wary of technology’s consequences to be used for evil. Consider that many advances in industry and more recently artificial intelligence, have come first from the US Military.(3) We often have a tendency not to believe technology – possibly out of fear – and to banish it to the realm of science fiction. As such, the viewer is projecting this technological character onto the work.

Luckily, we see these cyborgs, though at times frightening in a filmic sort of way, as being benevolent. This is Art, it can’t hurt us. As in cinema, we have suspended our belief, and allowed the flickering images to carry us away and entertain us for a while. But the artist here has a higher intent, to probe us and get us thinking about the equilibrium we share with technology. The “frightening inert[ia]” that Donna Haraway describes could very well be our inability to see past these seductively lively machines.

1 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 152.
2 Wayne Baerwaldt, George Bures Miller (Toronto: Mercer Union Gallery, 1998).
3 For more on military involvement in artificial intelligence, see: Manuel De Landa, “Inorganic Life and Predatory Machines,” in Culture Lab 1, ed. Brian Boigon, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).