INTERSTATE

Art Futura '91

INTERSTATE was a performance I created in collaboration with Perry Hoberman for the Art Futura '91 festival in Barcelona. The story was based on the noir movie of the same name which involves a hitchhiking protagonist who keeps stepping into deeper layers of trouble along his path. In our story this character was an escaped robot accompanied by four Spanish-speaking actors.

I am still wondering how I managed to direct in Spanish. The most difficult part of the job was translating the concept of "cynical jadedness". I used words like abatida and deprimada but the cast never quite took to the expression of Northern techno-gloom.

Computer-generated sets

Real actors, real robot, virtual sets

Perry's brother, Chuck, a professional robot designer, created the guts of our robot so it was, in fact, quite authentic. However, the robot's look was retro, as was the entire look and feel of the piece - generic mid-century film noir. The Catalan audience was expecting something less kitsch and more futuristic so there were these pitos heard with the applause which I interpreted to be baseball game cheering until I found out that they were, in fact, the Spanish way to boo. It was initially distressing, however, William Gibson told us that he liked our piece and I got invited to Dali's seaside village and then to Sweden to create some new projects... it all turned out pretty well in the end.

In the Art Futura '91 catalog I wrote:

"I admire and pity the creative minds behind technological innovation. Feverishly, technologists work incessantly at achieving the "State of the Art", knowing all the while that their efforts will be outmoded before they are even fabricated. INTERSTATE stars such a commodity of this feverish techno-passion. It is a robot and, like all other automatons, it is simultaneously, awkwardly, dead and alive. It also has the dubious distinction of being the first benefactor of the latest discoveries in artificial intelligence. This AI is of the sort that is close enough to the human prototype to have become messy, more baroque and dangerous than earlier models. As our robot navigates through a culture of greed it becomes enmeshed in its own perceptions. A battle of wits ensues, leading to a showdown between the robotic and the human, between artificial and authentic intelligence. Essentially, ours is a tale of the pain of being born into a world of planned obsolescence."

CREDITS:
Music: the Rova Saxophone Quartet
with/con: Joan Minguell, Aina Compte, Enric Cervera, Fellini, Mario Catelli
technical support: Digital Equipment Corp. and Symbolics, Inc.
Robot design: Chuck Hoberman
Costume design: Juliann Kroboth
Castillian Translation: Gemma Salva and David Capurso
special thanks to: Montxo Algora, Johnie Horn, Darnell Williams, Steve Rein, Sally Rosenthal and Ken Brain