In his sci-fi novel 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a future 300 years from now, after a period he dubs the “accelerando”—a sort of civilizational inflection point when breakthroughs in quantum computing, genetic engineering and spaceship propulsion have ushered in the rapid colonization of the Solar System from Mercury to Pluto. His idea, of course, builds on the many such watersheds throughout history when certain innovations—the mastery of fire, the invention of writing, the harnessing of steam and electricity—utterly transformed mankind. In Doug Aitken’s latest video installation, the artist offers a tour de horizon of our latest accelerando, which began, according to Aitken, at a specific time and place: April 3, 1973 on Sixth Avenue near the New York Hilton.
What was it during the during the age of disco and cops with shaggy hair that could have unleashed this “New Era,” as Aitken titles his piece? A phone call, as it turns out, the first ever made in public from a cellular device, placed by the man who invented it: Martin Cooper.
Now 89, Cooper, white-haired and goateed, appears in Aitken’s piece as a Silicon Valley sage musing on the impact of his creation. He notes that even as he developed the cell phone, he realized that it would set off an exponential chain of causality where one individual with a device reaching another individual with a device would eventually coalesce into an undifferentiated mass sharing unlimited information—a hunch confirmed by every subway car packed with people staring at their smart phones.
Aitken’s trippy visualization of this revolution, delivered with his usual cinematic panache, unfolds on an polygonal arrangement of panoramic screens and mirrors that plops viewers into an immersive bath of imagery: Aerial views of fields covered with spidery metal towers; interstates at night, pulsing with headlights; Earth seen from orbit, serene and blue; and Cooper’s breakthrough itself—the so-called “brick” of nostalgic punch line fame—kaleidoscopically dividing and multiplying like a metastasizing cancer.
Such are the wages of progress run amok, Aitkens seems to say. But to illustrate that it was ever thus—that our ingenuity as clever apes often gets us into trouble—he includes a cave interior illuminated by light pouring through an eye-shaped entrance. As if to reinforce the point, Aitken’s video concludes with Cooper on a beach, water lapping at his shoes as he ruminates about progress outrunning human limitations.
One could say, rightly, that this is all a bit obvious. Aitken’s razzle-dazzle as a filmmaker, if not quite at the level of a Kubrick or a Malick, keeps you distracted with the experience of the work, which is, admittedly, a visual marvel. However, Aitken mistakes pizzazz for making a substantial point about the deleterious effect that technology can have on our humanity and our environment. Even so, New Era illustrates how one man can change the world with a seemingly inconsequential act.