PROGRAM FIVE: ELECTRIC
DELIVERY SYSTEMS
What would Mae West have said about beepers in our pockets and livecams in our
bedrooms? Digital communication devices, miniature appliances, television satellites,
hidden surveillance cameras, and laser tracking systems permeate the workplace,
shopping mall, school, library, freeway, and domestic sphere. The wonders of
immediate connectivity and global interface permit simultaneous recreation in
different spaces as well as multiple residence in virtual communities, MOOS,
and MUDS. Realizing the deepest fantasies of the Jetsons’ generation,
electric delivery systems come close to fulfilling the time-traveling wonders
of hypnotic seance and psychoanalytic transference. But technology and the new
media also contribute to the regulation of everyday life, the hypercommodification
of society and culture, and the power rift between the un-linked and the teched-up.
At the core of this Program lies discomfort with the very same digital systems
being celebrated by Contact Zones. Users of these CD-Roms will be challenged
to question the greater speed and efficiency that corporatize our personal lives,
to reflect on the impact of technology on domesticity and the everyday lives
of women, to experience the euphoria and hysteria surrounding new media, and
to share the psycho-techno delusions of a female time-traveler while visiting
the homes of Freud, Jung, Klein, Lacan, and Kristeva in the year 2058.
Natalie BOOKCHIN, Databank
of the Everyday, 1999 (USA)
Kevin and Jennifer MCCOY, Small
Appliances, 1997 (USA)
Sara TACK, Delivery Systems,
1998 (USA)
Suzanne TREISTER, No
Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1999 (Australia)