LOW GRADE: IT'S OK TO BE A LUDDITE

Michael Connor
2005

"Is it OK to be a Luddite?"

When Thomas Pynchon posed this question in 1984, he was really asking whether technological progress and social progress are mutually exclusive. Technology had long been seen as an enemy of the working classes, imposing tighter systems of control, eliminating jobs; but the release of the Macintosh perhaps contributed to a euphoria around technology that led Pynchon to conclude:

'The deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk.'

This conclusion runs counter to the popular conception held by 19th century Luddite class warriors, that technology - or certain kinds of it - stifled the cause of the working man. They mounted a series of late-night raids between 1811 and 1816, destroying the machinery used for manufacturing textiles. When their exploits became mythologised in the popular imagination, they were cast (somewhat inaccurately, as Pynchon points out, but accuracy counts for little) as the 'counter-revolutionaries of the Industrial Revolution,' enemies of the new technologies that were putting labourers out of work.

Perhaps the artists of Low Grade could be considered the counter-revolutionaries of the technological revolution. They find inspiration in outmoded technologies, treating the narrative of technological progress with due skepticism and a fair bit of absurdity. Cat Mazza uses software to generate needlepoint patterns; TreeWave use a dot matrix printer to make pop music; Alexei Shulgin uses obsolete Windows interfaces as the source material of his live VJ sets. The Low Grade approach to technology is rooted in the here-and-now, the day-to-day.

Technology is too rarely presented in this kind of light, as something mundane. More often, technological development is seen as a hyperbolic line, accelerating upwards towards some 'unimaginable, post-human'[1] endpoint, bringing about sweeping social change as it goes. This idea is often reflected in the press, academia, and the arts. One recent example was an article in the Observer under the headline '2050 - and immortality is within our grasp: Britain's leading thinker on the future offers an extraordinary vision of life in the next 45 years'. The article predicted, 'aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers.'

Such claims for the future should be taken with a grain of salt. The promise that tomorrow's gadgets will expose your current hi-tech belongings as mere playthings is a great way to get people to throw away a perfectly good computer after only two years of use. The human and environmental cost of this lack of commitment to our tools is staggering: armed conflict over metals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo[2], huge areas of China laid waste by acid and heavy metals from e-waste recovery and disposal operations.

Just down the street from my old house in Austin, Texas was a 21,000 square foot computer recycling warehouse run by Perce 'Putty' Collins. It was like a museum of the recent past: piles of computers, printers, and cathode ray tube monitors stacked from floor to ceiling; bins full of VGA cables, sound cards, power supplies. A cash register, server rack mount, the occasional nostalgia-inducing Commodore 64 or Apple IIc. 'Computers age six years for every year a car ages,' explained Putty. 'They're the dogs of the electronics world. A year ago (2001) I could sell a Pentium 66 for $100, now I couldn't sell the same machine for $25.'

At these kind of prices, its no wonder that many artists are now looking afresh at the computer lying in the back of their closet, the printer in their attic, the ZX Spectrum on the bottom shelf of their local Oxfam, and re-using them to create something new: music, art, or software.

And this is what Low Grade is fundamentally about. The future is immutable. Only the past can be changed.

The Low Grade programme would not have happened without the collaboration and support of a number of friends and colleagues. Many of the artists that I put forward for the Low Grade programme were suggested to me by my long-time friend and collaborator Kendra Gaeta, former Director of New York Underground Film Festival. The Low Grade theme itself was the brainchild of Ben Ponton of amino. Big thank yous go to the co-curator on the project, Jackie Passmore, and to Drew Hemment, Eliza Tyrell, Susie Stubbs and the Futuresonic team.

Michael Connor, 2005

[1] This turn of phrase was lifted from 'Your Future as a Black Hole', a talk by Bruce Sterling. Accessed at http://seminars.moose.cc/ on 30 May 2005.
[2] http://www.un.int/drcongo/war/coltan.htm