There was a time when most of us looked to the future–a world of flying cars, teleportation and free-willed android babes that look like Sean Young and Daryl Hannah–with giddy anticipation. Now that the future is here, not only are cars still on the ground, but it’s difficult to discern the good from the evil, the authentic from the synthetic–much like Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner encountered.
Take Tod Machover, for example, a composer and the head of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Machover and his MIT colleagues are working on a frontier where technology teams with artistic expression. It is not immediately clear whether these efforts will eventually serve mankind or doom it. Machover and his group are composing music and designing a magnificently cutting-edge stage set for a production of their cyber opera, Death and the Powers. Machover’s opera is the story of a wildly-successful businessman, Simon Powers, who cannot countenance the inevitability of his own death and strives to live on in perpetuity by, in Machover’s words, “download[ing] himself into his environment. Turning his furniture, his books, his walls, everything into a living version of himself”. Powers endeavors to meld himself with all of his stuff and morph into a massive cyber organism called The System. As the story progresses, the entire set–in the process of evolving into a binary electronic mechanization of Powers–becomes the central character of the narrative. Once Powers has embodied the books on the wall-high shelves, they move in and out of their places in the stacks in sequences correlative to Power’s emotional experience. There is a forty-foot wide chandelier that is also an immense instrument comprised of piano strings that are played, or rather, manipulated by robotic gizmos.
Press hype blurbs for Death–as well as Machover himself–promise, from the story of Simon Powers, redeeming social commentary and the raising of important questions relevant to a civilization situated in a murky spiritual landscape. But it all rings a tad hokey. Even though Machover has already produced an opera based on legendary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s novel Valis, Dick is surely banging his head against the walls of his grave at this atrocious misappropriation and ironic misreading of his own peerless foresight.
One aspect of the entire sordid affair that certainly could not have been lost on the cynical acumen of Dick is that the funding of Machover’s dubious potential atrocity is provided by the Prince of Monaco. Yeah, that Prince of Monaco, the one from Monte Carlo, where the show will premiere in September 2009.
The tiny preview of music made available on Machover’s web page is typically spooky, trance-y and soundtrack-y. One clip consists of a simple harmonic drone tone from the gargantuan chandelier robot harp, and it sounds capable of emanating an absurdly deep rumble, commensurate with its size, that will surely jimmy loose a couple of fillings in a live setting. There will be human musicians as well, but the instruments they play will be emotio-sensitive, meaning they are designed to respond to the energy field emitted by the players’ bodies and represent that energy in the sound the instruments produce. Singers might even have available ingestible software chips that change the pitch and timbre of their voices. Vocals will also be run through processors capable of varying the register and affecting a singer’s tone in the same fashion as would a high-tech pitch shifter or a DJ scratching 12-inch vinyl on turntables. Machover and crew have also innovated an “army” of “opera bots” that provide a choral backing to the drama while they move about the set in drill-team-style, choreographed union.
Maybe it is all in good fun, but if we learned anything from Philip K. Dick, it is never to trust the guy who controls the robots.