CONNECT DISCONNECT
At the computer, again. Music playing. Nobody here is the title of the ghostly track by Oneohtrix Point Never. It runs a sample from the old Chris de Burgh tearjerker Lady in Red on a continuous loop. The video shows a car ride on a cheaply digitally animated road that leads towards a simulated city centre and re-centres itself every few seconds. On the Road to Nowhere you never reach your destination, as the Talking Heads knew even back in the day. Vaporwave is the microgenre this type of music is associated with. It is a creature of the internet – psychedelically oriented music that fetishises pop-cultural scraps of memory, works with extreme time stretching, thereby preparing the ground for bizarre alienation stimuli: songs by Radiohead or Lady Gaga, for example, are slowed down by 800 to 1,600 percent and then posted on the net as ambient readymades.
Liquid Loft’s latest stage creation, lost in freaky evolution_L.I.F.E., features a trimmed-down ensemble of five people, who don’t quite know where the journey is going, either, in this second part of the ongoing L.I.F.E. cycle. From the murmur, based on the largely unfiltered recordings of conversations during rehearsals and audio clips of self-presenters on the internet (and, as is customary with Liquid Loft, lip-synced by the performers on stage), one sentence emerges and stands out: “He went to places he has never been to before.”
At the places you’ve never been to before, the upper-body outfits sparkle in retro-glam style. The light shines white, red, blue and green on a stage that gradually fills with people. Aligned at an obtuse angle, the two projection screens display live images from two mobile mini cameras. The footage is supplied by the ensemble who find ever new positions as they play with PVC mirror foils. On account of the technical transformation, visually changeable constellations emerge that go beyond naturalistic representations. At the same time, real bodies assert their “natural” origin ‒ a presence that has become precarious under digital conditions ‒ by way of contortions and other ordeals. This peculiar experience of alienation laid open and made transparent for the eyes of the audience is only possible because of the existence of media that can do magic. The artistic intelligence of the technically simple combination of camera images and mirror foils used so cleverly by Liquid Loft in recent pieces creates illusory images that need not fear comparison with the inventiveness of artificial intelligence.
In this setting, bodies find and lose themselves as they reach into nothingness, embracing the void and suggesting a partner dance without a partner. The existential forlornness of the gestures, the lack of responsiveness, i.e. of the possibility of satisfactory answers and successful references to the world, serves as the basis for lost in freaky evolution_ ‒ even though choreographically fragile relationships are repeatedly established between individual performers. A whirl, a vortex that seems to develop an erratic pull at times – much like science fiction films that direct the gaze to the darkness and weightlessness of the universe behind reeling protagonists. The piece is based on the increasing presence of a phenomenon that Roberto Simanowski calls the everyday dominance of “smombies” (or “smartphone zombies” in full). We are smombies ourselves: beings who no longer want, can or have to distinguish between body and technology, consciousness and network. All of us are influencers or watchers of influencers, living in an endless present of network participation and losing the complex skill of spatial awareness because everything seems equally far away – everything is just a link, a post, a Google search away.
Liquid Loft frames this loss of relevance of analog experiences of space and time as an ambivalent state in which the “inforg”, the informational organism, seems to move beyond affirmation but also beyond criticism of existing conditions. The loquaciousness of the “Thumbelinas” of the Internet (Michel Serres) makes an appearance, as do mirror foils put over heads that might lend wings to the data self, or projections of lonely heads that appear to be detached from their bodies. The constantly changing, sometimes dreamlike scenes create spaces that have an illusory and at the same time a disillusioning effect, in which the banality of questions like “Are you recording?” is negotiated as well as the existential question of the status of reality and certainty. In almost repetitive, only slightly varied sequences, heads are stuck in mirror foils shaped into dog cones, while at the same time looking through a wormhole into another dimension that is beyond comprehension. There, vaporised, delicate music awaits, sometimes distorting into a caricature of entertainment, then again compressed and sped up to enervating hyperpop – or slowed down to low-pitched alien sounds.
Roberto Simanowski wrote the liner notes for this stage work about the forced and at the same time savoured adaptation to the reality of the virtual, without being aware of its connection with either the piece or the music: “One has already disappeared while still being present. Smombies are not the undead who have returned but absentees who have left their bodies behind. They are removed from the local space because they feel connected to another. Connectivity of disconnection.”
Thomas Edlinger (b. 1967 in Vienna) is a radio producer (FM4 Im Sumpf, Ö1), independent arts and culture journalist, author of books and artistic director of the Donaufestival in Krems (since 2017).