SCRIPT
unnatural history
starring machine, mikki, sam, and laura
with text from Heidegger, Tiqqun, Sophocles, and Happify.com
april 6, 2016 draft
mikki-wants to understand desire/capital-living in the moment and taking advantage of the system, apathy-teenager-individual getting on top, donald trump
samantha- obsessed with cosmic transfiguration, leaving the body to become something more than human. proof in systems-testing structure-wondering why people need structure? why do people need cults? the future
machine-outsider, by not participating, the past, primitive lifestyle
laura-is obsessed with sex without getting dirty. she has in some way not made any choice about how to use the internet to her advantage, she is seeing which of the other strategies of her friends’ pays off, maybe all, but it is a risk
Antigone is an AI voice computer, daughter of Siri
the background sound of each person (machine’s gong meditation, sam’s cult confessionals, machine’s body/robot /health mantra’s, mikki’s small business self-help guru?, laura’s techno or jamaican steel drum music) is amplified when they are talking in the chats.
prologue
(Screens are black)
MO: how do you start? can you ask antigone?
(silence)
SR: We’ve been here forever you just got something in the...
LS: oh (moves obstruction to web camera, appears on screen)
Machine writes: anyway, the hologram thing she’s in ends like this. “Pray thou no more; for mortals have no escape from destined woe.”
Intro to the show:
(“Shopping sex relationships” song through computer voice and techno music with image same on all screens)
scene 1: HEALTH
(ad about ap that can read your vitals and suggest a meal for you and then upload pictures, smells, pills of it)
Antigone: Health.
Machine writes: sometimes you have to let go of love. and my love was cocaine.
SR: scuba, ski, caveman is so in.
LS: is death relevant anymore?
SR: death is no longer trending. You should really consider denying your current form. Multidimensional transcension, ascension, obsession, so so in in.
LS: this is so great.
SR: Not a phase but a time, not a time but a feeling, it’s a thing but not a thing.
MO: my app tells me i’m fine, but i need to upgrade to see if i have cancer. but if you want the cancer experience i can get it for you. i moonlight as a virtual doctor. cancer patients are like so deep.
LS: well, I get a discount if you guys sign up for my urine sample app, it only takes a minute. And you get a free personalized screensaver based on your results.
MO: How much of a discount? Can I use my roll over credit from my digital roleplay as an investment banker?
Machine: Why are you manifesting discounts? Time is the new money.
MO: Oh you haven’t you switched over to the Sumerian calendars? I get an extra month that I use for me time.
Machine writes: I don’t have time for that, feel what happened to me today.
LS: um, My random access memory is down, what does your face look like?
Machine: (her vitals tell us that she needs x food so our backgrounds change and we all go to that restaurant and look at picture of food...food porn)
scene 2: GIRLS ON BREAK
(during breaks things can overlap and come in and out of being heard)
Antigone: BREAK.
All: Break.
LS: (speaking into her webcam, makes a tedxxx video and uploads it to her channel)
hi guys it’s me, emanuelle kunt, i’m back, sorry it’s been a while. but here’s another episode of ‘giving head’ for you guys.
(she uses the remote control to bring the robot to her crotch. it moves its head up and down robotically. you can hear the battery. otherwise it is fairly silent)
the moon reflects the light from the sun, it is a mirror, it is nothing, it is the idea of no thing, it’s the idea of the thing, the moon is a screen, the moon is the internet. In the tropics there is a pool if you look in you die; a bad spirit traps your reflection on the water, and so he traps you. Did you know that the footage of the first landing on the moon is actually a combination of real and reenacted footage? Did you know that the word Techné in its original Greek referred to both the doing and that which the doing does—that techné is both art and artifice, a knowing about to do a doing?
(the things the others are doing at this point grow in volume)
Technically techne is "a process of reflection" that assimilates existence to the technological model. “What remains decisive is that the idea rises up as the solid and definitive interpretation of Being. The visage offered by the thing, and no longer the thing itself, now becomes what is decisive. The control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life. Now that self-preservation [of man] has been finally automated, reason is dismissed.”
SR: ooo. An alien.
MO: I’ve never bought an alien, but I did get a hologram from a discount supplier in Taipei, which I wouldn’t recommend. I thought she would boost my ad revenue but she actually gained consciousness then started her own brand, which was in direct competition with mine and I ended up losing like 27% of my likes. That’s why I’m never having children.
Machine: children distract you from your divine path
MO: Why make something that you will just end up having to compete with?
SR: With all your wonder, what do you tell you child? Could you tell your child anything? Human children, earthlings, slaves ‘til they’re saved. Why not consider becoming your own child through self regeneration? You are mother, you are child, butterfly.
LS: I like to think of children as future likes.
Antigone: And through the future, near and far, as through the past, shall this law hold good: Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.
scene 3: HAPPINESS/SAFETY
(ad that you can be sent a memory to experience something in a safe way. if you made x decision x would happen. memories are sent at exact time (aka 12 years old is a puberty memory, for each person to experience something. can pay to have other better memories erase over the trauma.)
Antigone: Happiness and safety.
MO: Scuba, ski, caveman is so dead.
SR: Health as you know it is so supremely and humanly dead. If you earthlings are tired of being human, I’ll sell you memories so you finally forget about health and move into the next dimension. Health is a such a human concept, for when you have a body. Get over your personal body and become one with The Divine Body. You’re more than your body!
Machine writes: at one point the body was a temple, now it just remains as a conspiracy theory.
LS:my brain keeps time like ripples in a pond.
SR: memory is karma.
MO: im out of memory and desperate to score.
LS: i’m happier now that i use my computer for (personal) memory. when i used my brain, when the neurons processed information, they also modified the synapses, which is related to memory, so sometimes retrieval from brain memory altered the memory-was that good my audition is tomorrow you guys?!
Machine: I visit a guru who wipes my memory clean every 2 weeks. I feel like a new woman afterwards, plus I’ve lost 7 pounds and all that baggage around the death of my furby.
MO: Did you guys get the puberty memory yet? Every hu man has gotten that memory but me. Do you have a free trial I could stream, I’ll trade you for Dementia.
SR: Collective “human memory” is so caged. A human, a prisoner in theirvery human body, sees other beings from any other vibrational level as alien. Dissolve this concept and what do you get? Higher Access Power. Other beings are “alien” only to humans! Access your higher personal power, forget your earthly whatevs. Become a DIVA, and swim in the blissed out memory pool of Divine Interdimensional Vibrational Aliens aka every other galactic being~
All: DIVAAAA’s
Machine writes: The practice of gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%.
LS: ew.
MO: error. file not found.
SR: my favorite memory i ever ordered was the big bang.
Machine: memories are usless when you live in the present
Antigone: Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men.
LS: savor the moment
MO: Aannttiiggooooonnnnnee, hating money is so 1990s anarcho-punk. Yes I drink diet coke but it’s only for irony and rebeling against the vegan, utopian, witch socialist yogis. so who’s punk now, beeatch?
LS: It’s the same for me with getting gated communities coded into the second-life programming.
All: receive a memory at the same time
All: you can live us.
(commercial related to topic slides through)
scene 4: GIRLS ON BREAK
Antigone: BREAK.
All: Break
SR: “And slowly we too turn the same blue, our arms, our bodies, our necks and finally our faces. We merge with the water, into the water, and we merge with each other, into each other.” Deny your current form! (begins intake on a new cult member?) >plays statement of return audio< (Cult Stuff)
MO: loading
Antigone: Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth doth he wear, turning the soil with horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.
SR: (pause) What is she talking about?
MO: translate please.
Machine writes: (maybe making fun of antigone?) And he masters with his (f)art the beast whore who has a lair in the wilds, he roams around and combs his horsees hair, he puts reins on it. done, he tamed the mountain bull and he plants stuff in the ground.
MO: Now he can talk, and think really quickly, and he TAed a course in psychology from an accredited online college, then he bought a space heater and made a small house for when he doesn’t feel like camping in the rain.
SCENE 5: FRIENDS
(an app that changes your background to have a new experience with friends. higher paying customers get more backgrounds, mikki doesn’t get to come to the exclusive backgrounds because she doesn’t have enough money. we are selling a background with memories of hanging out with us with president swift.)
Antiogne: Friends.
MO:Duck face is over, fish gape is in. The data is in my social media.
LS: byte me
MO: You are so Windows 95.
SR: Intranet connexion: spill to spend, gain a friend. My online confessional currency is the highlight of my techno~wallet.
Machine writes: Upgrade using “like, cash” for a more present friend that actually talks to you.
LS: i prefer to use myself as currency, so much easier than money.
MO: When I giggle, I am working. The male gaze feels less threatened and that leads to more likes. less threat equals more likes. it’s like social media science.
SR: So and so is trying to join the group. They asked me to airdrop how we felt during our group meditation. Should we?
MO: Tell me the stats: followers, likes, sponsership, tweets, retweets… Are they trending? Who is their audience? What sign are they? WHAT’S THEIR BRAND? Should we ask Antigone?
LS: remember when twitter used to allow so many more characters?
MO: I think it was called a book. You had to use your hands to hold it, so proletarian.
(commercial related to topic slides through)
scene 6: GIRLS ON BREAK
Antigone: BREAK.
All: Break.
LS: (speaking into her webcam, makes a tedxxx video and uploads it to her channel)
hi guys, it’s me, emanuelle kunt, back with another episode of “giving head.” this is a really exciting text.
(she uses the remote control to bring the robot to her crotch. it moves its head up and down robotically. you can hear the battery.)
The telegraph was invented for generals to get messages from the front. Cybernetics was developed to make target-seeking weapons. The first electronic calculation machine was used to make artillery firing tables. The origination of cities is war. Once there were cities, then organization, walls, catapults, logistics. Walls made the cities efficient, unnomadic. The essence of war is efficiency. Now, with the collapse of time and space, there is no more political decision of war, it is an electronic one. Information bombardment has replaced carpet bombing. The next war is a war of the mind. (Climax-nuclear bomb goes off)
MO: I didnt get that but my app translated it into a really funny meme. It’s copy righted but if you sign up for a membership you can see it. So who needs a mind to compute, thats why comput ers were made.
SR: I’m telling you, just lose your mind already. There are so many better minds to access, totally worth your sacrifice. You know, like flowers, deep tissue, tomorrow’s breakfast, black holes, orgasms…
Machine: i was addicted to thought. now that all functions are run by the computer my mind can be in a constant state of meditation.
Antigone: for I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living
MO: Antigone, daughter of Siri, GETTING DEEP. Maybe there needs to be a paternity test?
Machine: Paternity? There hasn’t been men in decades.
SCENE 7: SEX
(long distance intimacy. online dating. imprinting love. we have tamagachi computer pets we take care of as motherhood, press buttons on screen to wash it, feed etc… is there a place where slaves are actually taking care of real babies?)
Antigone: Sex.
LS: I always thought that it was STDs that made bodies seem gross but after those were eradicated I realized it was just bodies that are gross. Now finally I can get off without touching. disappointing sex is such a waste of time. I could be sunning myself next to a palm-shaped pool in Dubai in the time it takes her to take off her thong, and it may be bad, so why risk it?
Like a warhead, like time travel, like a big metal refrigerator full of juice, like a stripper pole that will never be touched, like silver of uncertain origins, like commitment with no commitment.
MO: oooh. How much?
LS:It is not cheap. Duh.
MO: But to erradicate risk is progress and should be our data given right. I’m starting an online petition.
Machine writes: I programmed risk out of my emotions app.
(Demonstrates vibration touch. Everyone goes uhhhh, but not super sexy)
LS: In other news, I wi-fucked chantal
SR: Still fucking on the physical level?
LS: and now i have another tamagachi baby. this is so mormon, i don’t have time to in-design another cradle. plus now i have to pay for another IRNevada surrogate mom because i went over my limit. this is so un-feminist.
MO: I thought when we finally got a cyborg with a vagina in the White House things were going to change.
SR: sigh.
(commercial related to topic slides through)
scene 8: GIRLS ON BREAK (break down)
All: Break.
LS: EK here. (starts robot, it is not working well) Strategy is to search with subject words, outsource coincidence to categories. The importance of information is calculated by gathering and averaging. Average is the most important concept in the equation. The electricity of the search becomes circuitry of the masses, one brain farmed for answers. The global best of list is the new neuronal map. The most popular keyword is monetize.
MO: Nay, there are other fields for him to plough.
SR: These things are in the future; present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest.
MO: emanuelle, you’re running out of “like, cash” what happened, no one likes “giving head?
(the screens start to flutter and pixelate, sam, mikki, and machine briefly turn into cats, then the screens go dead/start to pixelate and gradually settle into the image of machine’s screensaver of a beautiful forest. LS stares at screen. asia comes out dressed as LS’s virtual date of the day, a LARPER. they dahnce.)
