The Net (Das Netz)

Tom and it's my pleasure to inform

you we're in the capable hands of Captain Walker

and he is assisted by First Officer Hawkins.

Captain Walker has informed me

our flight time today will be five hours.

Your beverages will be complimentary.

For a complete listing of the beverages we do offer,

you can refer to the back, to Hemispheres magazine.

Novels used to be the content of movies. When a new medium

arrives, the old medium is the content and it is highly

observable, highly also, but the real revving up

and massaging is done by the...

I was walking through Central Park one day

playing my banjo and along comes Jonas Mekas,

with his little eight millimeter camera.

He starts filming me.

We started to talk and within a day, I was the new director

of the Film-Maker's Cinematheque.

And I quit my job and he said he wanted to put together

a festival based on cinema but incorporating other arts

and that was the mandate, he made some suggestions,

we thought about it, talked about it, it was up to me

to put it together.

And so I called it the Expanded Cinema Festival.

And I went to Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Nam June Paik,

the USCO Group, Carolee Schneemann, dancers, artists, poets,

audio visual people and the only requirement was

cinema somehow was incorporated into the piece.

Just a total rearranging of the senses.

You didn't know what you were looking at.

And all these people were experimenting with media.

They were dealing with technological stuff.

Nobody was talking about cybernetics at the time but

they were all reading McLuhan.

Rauschenberg told me about McLuhan.

Suggested I read it, then Cage handed me a copy

of "Cybernetics" by Norbert Wiener and said,

"This is something for you."

I was extremely interested in notions of feedback

and nonlinearity.

I got a call from A.K. Solomon who was head of Biophysics

at Harvard and he had read about the Expanded Cinema

Festival, said, "We have all these scientists up here

"at Harvard and MIT and who of us would like to invite

"a group of artists to spend a couple of days

"in a seminar to talk about mutual interests."

So I was invited to put this together which I did.

And then they took us to see the computer.

There was a room and everybody there was wearing white coats

and they were cold and we were cold watching the computer

with all these cards and file cards.

I just stood there like a kid with my nose against

the window and it was so exciting.

And I had no idea why.

JZ Young, an Oxford biologist, in "Doubt and Certainty

in Science " said, " We create tools and then we mold ourself

"through our use of them."

And I read that in 1964 and something went off

and I suddenly realized that reality isn't this thing

in front of us on a proscenium stage, it's a mobile piece.

We are creating technologies, then we are the technologies.

It's not your heart is like a pump, your heart is a pump.

It's not your brain is like a computer,

your brain is a computer

until the next thing comes along.

Now you're a neural net or now you're an information system.

The circles widened so it was Heinz von Foerster who was the

dean of the world's cyberneticist. It was Gregory Bateson,

Stewart Brand, almost all these people were authors

as I was, I read all their books, and no one in New York

had a clue that there was something happening.

That there was a consciousness or mindset that had evolved

and you could connect all these people.

You can connect this and this.

There are ways to put it together and to see a cohesive

whole and they were bestselling authors

and they were getting screwed by the publishing industry.

So I was dragooned into becoming an agent because I had

a business background and they said, "Why don't you just

"go back and look after our interests?

"It'll take you an hour a day" and I thought it would

be a nice way to pick up some money while I wrote books

and I found out very quickly that I was sitting

on an oil well I couldn't control

and that was 30 years ago.

In 1993, someone attacked your network.

We talked about your network and David Gelernter,

one of your fabulous writers, received a letter

from the Unabomber.

Right.

Why do you think he was a target?

Well, I know he was a target, this madman, criminal madman

would read the New York Times and a lot of the people he

picked as targets were people that John Markoff

had profiled, so Gelernter was the subject

of one of the biggest profiles ever in the Times in 1991.

And I'm sure that had something to do with it.

But the Unabomber, he studied in Harvard

and he was a mathematician.

Yeah, and he's a sick criminal.

I wouldn't have a serious discussion about this guy.

You know, he doesn't rise to the level.

I think he's a guy that wrote this manifesto that he

couldn't possibly get published because it's written so

badly and it's so flawed, so in order to get it published

he killed people.

End of story.

People can have arguments about environment and science

but you don't need to kill people to make your point.

And I wouldn't dignify him by discussing him any further.

Let's change the subject.

Call a car.

This historic endeavor,

thanks to a personal invitation extended to me by...

In 1960 and '61, I was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army

based in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

And on weekends when I could get away, I went to the

Lower East Side of New York and hung out with artists

because by then I was hanging out with artists

in San Francisco in 1959 and '60.

John Brockman was part of that, a fella named Steve Durkee,

a poet named Gerd Stern, a group of artists and engineers

called USCO was taking shape about then, standing for

Us Company.

The mechanism of meeting Ken Kesey was very straightforward.

It was through Indians.

By chance, I was a photo journalist then and I got

a job through a friend photographing Indians in Oregon

at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

So I photographed these guys and I thought this is

a real interesting, different America

that I didn't know about, that is fundamental and profound.

Then Kesey's book came out,

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" which had a character

in it named Chief Broom.

Chief Broom was portrayed as an Indian from the reservation

where I'd been working, so I was moved by that and it

sort of gave me the rest of the permission to think

what I was thinking, that Indians were important.

And so I sent Kesey photographs, through a mutual friend

I knew his address that I'd taken and he basically

sent back a note, "Come on down."

And was welcomed right in and blended in and became

part of it.

We're on our way to LA. - We'll have to...

We're on our way to LA. - We'll all get together.

On one plan of attack. - How we coming in?

Everywhere, everywhere.

Everywhere, production at the moment

is the acid test.

Okay, once again, the train is in.

Being on the bus going from acid test to acid test

basically which was Kesey's form of performance art,

our band was a group called the Warlocks which

later became the Grateful Dead.

A number of people around the group were ex-army,

like I was, a number of them were artists.

And it was intensely improvisational.

Oh yeah, come on now.

Get some power up here on the stage.

Our best technicians are now on the problem,

alright turn up the microphone.

Sounds, pick that up.

Was it a moving laboratory? Yes.

In Kesey's mind, it was a moving laboratory.

He said, "You know, these scientists talk about doing

"research and that's really all they're doing is research.

"We're doing research and if we don't boil rocks

"and drink the water, how do we know it won't

"make us drunk." And what we do is boil rocks and we just

try any damn thing.

And some of them were pretty interesting experiments.

One for example would be, take a whole bunch of garden,

people sitting around basically stoned.

About 15 people.

Take a bunch of garden hose, cut it up into eight or ten

foot lengths, tie it all together in a knot, grab two

pieces, talk in one and listen to the other. And everybody's

doing this, and so you know who you're hearing but you don't

know who you're talking to and this is happening in a group

of 15 people just to see what happens.

That was a search.

The Whole Earth Catalog project

certainly hit all of that frame of reference, but it

specifically came out of an LSD afternoon where I was

on a rooftop with probably 200 micrograms of LSD in me,

you know, nothing better to do.

And thinking about, or in context of lectures I had

recently heard by Buckminster Fuller and Fuller like McLuhan

was one of the people we were paying attention to then

and Wiener was in there, Cage was a little bit in there.

The initial audience in my mind was communes.

People who were trying to reinvent civilization

and I was just trying to provide the tools for which

to reinvent civilization. And turned out, a lot of people

were interested in that.

The communes that try to quote, "go back to basics"

and just farm made a real good try at doing that.

And some of them even learned a fair amount

of serious farming.