“And on drums . . . lumbar dorsal fascia.” A spattering of applause, and performance artist Leslie Lashinsky, her sinewy dancer’s body covered in red spandex and enough electrodes to reanimate the economy, takes a bow. “On cheesy organ, sternocleidomastoid muscle.” More applause.
Welcome to the Electronic Cafe International, where the orders of the day are strong coffee and cyberspace. A crowd of technophiles is here to absorb a demonstration of BodySynth, a device that converts muscle tension into music by running electrical signals through a computer and-oh, suffice to say that you get the sounds of different instruments by flexing different muscle groups.
Just to make things more interesting, a Videophone beams the performance to Amsterdam. But there’s a foul-up with the up-link-the Dutch audience for the BodySynth performance thought it was supposed to be 10 p.m. its time, when it was really 10 p.m. our time. “Victims of our own chronocentrism,” as one of the cafe crowd puts it.
Not to worry. The director of the Dutch experimental music technology center is with us now on the Videophone, talking from his bedroom, where, chronocentrically speaking, it’s sometime in the middle of the night. That’s him now-that grainy black-and-white image, slowly unfurling down the video monitors every 15 or 20 seconds.
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, husband and wife, invented the Electronic Cafe International. They preside over it-and, to some extent, its 50-odd affiliates scattered from Santa Monica to Bulgaria-and even they have a hard time boiling it down to something you can lay a data glove on. But that, they say, is part of its essence.
What exactly is the Electronic Cafe? For starters, it’s an actual place, tucked behind a dead-end street in an industrial district. It is indeed a cafe-at least to the extent that cake and espresso are served-but it’s also jammed with video screens, camera equipment and computer monitors.
The ECI is, in the words of its founders, “a cafe for the global village.” This means you can do a lot of reaching out and touching on a global scale, aided by an extensive menu of state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment. As Galloway is fond of saying, “coffee’s a buck, Videophones $10 an hour, full-motion satellite, $48,000 an hour.”
But the cafe’s real focus runs toward more communal events, involving group “telelinks” or “videolinks” to other places around the world. Is it art? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. “We don’t worry a lot whether it’s artlike or not,” says Rabinowitz. “We produce living events, not artifacts.”
Most events are performance-oriented. Recently, for instance, there was the videolink held in conjunction with the Freiburg Theatre Festival.
“We did Brain Music,” Galloway says. Brain Music? “We had these brain-monitoring devices that people strapped onto their heads here and in Germany,” he continues. “It monitored brain wave activity, plus eye movement. We took the different beta and alpha waves and assigned different tones to them. It was very late at night in Germany, so our metabolisms were different and we were in different mental states, so we didn’t often get into the same mental state.”
“But you could kind of listen to it,” says Rabinowitz. “They had drunk a lot of beer by that time,” adds Galloway. “But we were drinking coffee,” his wife explains.
As one partner’s sentence trails off, the other picks it up and continues, so that a conversation runs like a series of tributaries flowing into a large and mostly abstract verbal river. The two are fortyish, clear products of the ’60s, jeans and T-shirts all the way. They met in Paris in the mid-’70s. It was cyberlove.
“We did a mind-meld, body-meld, and both decided to move from stand-alone video to multimedia communications,” explains Galloway, shaking back his graying ponytail and lighting another in a long chain of Carltons. In other words, they got married.
The Global Cafe Europe is a vital techno-territory for the global cafe set.
There are ECI affiliates at the Documenta 9 Museum in Kassel, Germany, and La Cite Museum of Science and Industry in Paris-both with technology that outstrips the hardware at the mother cafe here.
On the other hand, humble affairs such as Pepito’s, the cafe outpost in Managua, Nicaragua, operate with little more than a Videophone and a Mr. Coffee. Galloway and Rabinowitz are adamant that the network be inclusive, and not shun outlets that can’t afford all the equipment. And so, several times a month, Galloway finds himself packaging up a Videophone and sending it to some remote corner of the globe.
A recurring link-up involves what must be some of the more communication-starved individuals around, namely the inhabitants of Biosphere II, who are eking out a hermetically sealed existence somewhere in the vicinity of Oracle, Ariz. The Biospherians have participated in such activities as electronic painting and interactive musical events. Meanwhile, both the Biospherians and regulars at the ECI are periodically filled in by performance artist Barbara T. Smith, who has been wandering around the world with her Videophone in tow, filing reports and performances from such far-flung places as Katmandu. Her project is known as “21st Century Odyssey.”
Then there’s the monthly “Telepoetics” gathering-your basic neo-beatnik poetical diatribe, with telelinks to other cafes, during which poetry is read back and forth.
A skeptic might regard all this as so much techno-foolery, but to Galloway and Rabinowitz, it’s nothing less than an alternative reality. It’s electronic space. Or cyberspace or virtual space.
“Telecommunications is probably the strongest magic that contemporary culture has created, including Western medicine and the automobile,” says Galloway. “Those are very profound things for the planet. But to pick up the telephone and talk to somebody on the other side of the planet, that’s species-modifying stuff. And it’s the only thing that’s going to allow us to manage a system as large as the planet-not imperialistically, but collectively.”
Still, couldn’t one make the case that this isn’t all that different from, well, watching television? “That’s broadcast!” huffs Galloway. “You’ve got to make a distinction between this and mass, spoon-fed invasion media. We need conversation media. It’s really a different activity.”
But how different is it from corporate video conferencing?
Rabinowitz: “If you take the technology out of the workplace and put it in a cultural place, there are very different applications.”
The ECI is by no means Galloway and Rabinowitz’s first endeavor into the cyber-arts. In the early ’70s, Indiana-born Galloway was involved with a Dutch artistic collective that experimented with live video. Rabinowitz, a New Jersey native, worked with the Optic Nerve underground video/guerrilla television collective while a student at University of California, Berkeley.
They spent a year together in Paris, then went to New York to pursue “satellite art”-including the NASA-sponsored Satellite Arts Project. (Dancers on both sides of the continent performed together by watching a live satellite transmission of their separate images joined together in a video composite.)
Another memorable project was “Hole in Space,” which involved setting up two rear-projection television screens, one in a Century City, Calif., department store, the other at Lincoln Center in New York City-without any posted explanation to passersby. For a weekend, bystanders were startled to find themselves staring into the faces of similar crowds on the other side of the continent with whom they were able to interact. These and other endeavors won them acclaim in the teleconferencing field, including an invitation to an international video hoo-ha in Reston recently.
The ECI grew out of a project commissioned by the Olympic Arts Committee in 1984. “We put state-of-the-art multimedia telecom installations in five real ma-and-pa restaurants in different ethnic areas of L.A.,” recalls Rabinowitz. “It was sort of virtual tourism.
“International visitors could electronically zip around town and figure out where they wanted to eat,” says Galloway. That installation lasted six weeks, after which the two decided it was time to work on something more enduring. “We wanted the next project to be permanent,” says Rabinowitz. “We wanted a base for all our other projects, which is what the ECI really is.”
And so, the Electronic Cafe International officially opened its doors on New Year’s Eve 1989, with its first New Year’s Eve Telebration. Starting at about 5 a.m., Galloway, Rabinowitz and fellow revelers telelinked with every time zone on the planet, just as the New Year came into being in each time zone, from Australia to Hawaii.
“There are two ways to look at this,” says Michael Heim, a doctor of philosophy, consultant and author of the forthcoming “The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality,” to be published by Oxford Press.
“The first is to say we’re dealing with an electronic tool, and that’s that. The second is to say we’re creating a new level of reality in electronic space. What these people are trying to do is involve us more in that layer of reality, by way of putting our bodies there more fully.”
Heim himself was “bilocated” to a cafe in Arizona while lecturing the ECI on virtual reality, but seems to have come through the process unscathed. But Heim observes that “The people who go (to the Electronic Cafe) out of curiosity are generally disappointed.
“There is no shockingly new technology there. But I think their manipulation of it is different than anywhere else. ECI just might stumble across something that could be a terrific innovation. But they’re artists. They don’t want to know too much about what they’re doing.”
And so Galloway and Rabinowitz will continue their quest to plug in the world, making their way as best they can with the clumsy technology available to them, until the day when their ultimate dream comes true.
Which is-“Global universal cheap fiber optics!” roars Galloway. “For every shack and shanty in the world! That’s my dream machine!”
