[Original at http://www.3via.org/index.php?htm=electric_jesus/index
also at https://www.turborebop.net/html.php?htm=electric_jesus/index]

Borut Savski – druga od treh miniatur iz serije Zvok kot metafora

Borut Savski – second of three miniatures from the series Sound as Metaphore

ELECTRIC JESUS

This concept (->story) was built on the basis of the above reasoning on objects and contexts. Again it resulted in deliberate use of existant symbolic field, but hopefully with enough of humour and wit, so that it didn’t hide the conceptual issue. The installation was built live during a (meta) lecture that was declared as performance from the very start. It took about 45 minutes to present the concept and build (a functioning?) object. True: the functionality of the object was all in building it in real time and afterwards it did not have any purpose anymore. It can still function as a sound object in a different context, but the story that it would tell wouldn’t be as interesting.

The path (towards the truth?) was the opposite than with the bazooka. Since it proved that it is hard to decompose (->to uncover the innermost layers) a ready made object (because of it’s primary functionality -> “the looks” of it, “the use” of it,…), I decided (in a period of a month of preparation it was decided just a day before the lecture/performance) that the building (of metaphorical relations) would be more appropriate. However the bazooka also had a shortcut to “understanding” – it was a large print of this text just beside the object.

The experiment took place in May 2004 in Warszawia, Poland at the Turning Sounds conference/meeting. The word experiment also means that it will not be repeated anymore. The conference took an interesting direction bringing into close contact the composers and the Djs – in symbolic domain this could mean: the mind and the body (though it turned out also that it was the DJs who were asking “where is the logic!”). Anyway, it was about body (->improvisation) and mind (->structure). In building the Electric Jesus it was also about that. Flesh (the body, the moment, the real-time, the material reality, the rotting,…) and the Structure (the mind, the non-material but equally real, the concept of time, the ability to get a glimpse of the absolute,…).

The story of the lecture was organized around the stereotype that Poland is “a very” catholic country. The presence of “god” was therefore a very powerfull symbolic field (-> with a lot of “flesh”). In the sense that the flesh is the emotional potential of the particular symbolic field which defines an object. But this was not the path I took – it would be a manipulation and a very cheap one. Therefore the final object (->the crucifix) didn’t have any value left when the lecture was over.

Having a strong symbolic field present made it possible to simultaneously feel/compare the difference between multiple contexts (->spaces of evaluation – fields of discourse that provide the meaning). It was about the vertical piercing through the layers of discourses (as mentioned high up above). The tool for this was a little bit of psychoanalysis (and psychology). The heart of lecture was a holistic approach of balancing the dualistic values that form the basis of any cognitive matrix (discoursive field). The space of evaluation was described as dynamic system structured by active (->generative; mentioned up above) participants with cybernetic/autopoietic (nonlinear and complex) loop of self-cognition. The latter does not allow for a “circle” of cognition to be precise, since there is a sequencing of associative translations/representations taking place.
Still, a human mind can touch the absolute. The beginning of lecture started with the equation Human=Machine=God. The representation of absolute is God. English language comes handy in this case:

Man=Machine=God
||                          ||
Mean                   Good

I didn’t use it during lecture, but this leads to relations (hu)man=mean, god=good and we are even more firmly into “balancing”. The first idea for installation was a simple dynamic system made of listening and sound-generating elements that would have their autopoietic loops individualy listening to the sound that the whole system produces. This is a kind o a metaphore of a society or “the collective principle”. There would be two elements on both halves of the weighing scale (balancing the already mentioned dualistic categories). In the middle there would be a motor, which would translate sound into movement (motor control via microphone – this moves the “hands” with two more microphones caught in a acoustic feedback loop). The idea of the crucifix slowly became apparent.
I had an idea for Jesus too – a piece of rubber hose twisted together. I bought it and it’s colour was tan – like the flesh. Great! But the idea already seemed too cheap. Better to be formless (->abstract), than to let the parasitical meanings spread all over the recognizable form. So I temporarily dropped the idea, but I brought the material over to Warszawa. The “fleshy” substance was regained when the idea of live performance came about.

Before the “show” it was apparent that the Jesus was a “shortcut” from man to god (in the equation the intermediate link was the machine). True – concepts (ideas, beliefs, motivation, ideologies,…) are more (perfect) than a human. After the show it became apparent that Jesus as a metaphore of human suffering (-> the passion) is the balancing force. Well, the motor was too week (-> Jesus was too strong?). So, the link with the psychoanalysis: the psychologic split immanent to humans is… the suffering. Ok, simplified – but the simplification is part of the structural view. Still, the result seemed obvious. One could draw conclusions even at the start of this text – but with analysis we provided a kind of mathematical proof. Hopefully with the above mentioned method of vertical cut.

Elektric Jesus 2 – distributed body and study of symbols

Further work was done according to the ideas described above – in relation to systems / objects / »bodies«. Artificial body that does not ressemble human’s, must also have a different structure. An eye can be larger than head, the heayd can be on the floor, instead of two arms there can be only one, etc… Furher questions can be: what represents the heart in the machine, what is the brain, etc… – I am talking about the so-called »distributed« body. At my first approach to »distributed body« I returned again to Electric Jesus. The body was made out of roughly knitted wires, in-between there were black boxes with electronicsand sensors. The idea of cables is very clear – these are veins of the body, the functional boxes are the internal organs, and the sensorsare the organs of reception. A very simple way to understand – as it is also very clear that the humans build (understand, percieve, measure) everything according to our image.