operetta, 1998
A beautiful yet annoying fly performs to the voice of a well-known alpha computer, HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fly’s ‘dance’ consists of a video projection depicting the jewel-like bug* wrestling to be animate. HAL’s ‘dialogue and musical number’ is borrowed from the precise moment in the film when Dave, the one astronaut remaining from HAL’s attempted take-over, finally disconnects HAL. HAL politely introduces himself and his designer, offering to sing a song his programmer installed – and proceeds to recite a mechanical rendition of ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ as his voice falters. The song was one of the first digital compositions, created in 1961 on software designed by Max Mathews using a cumbersome punchcard system. (MAX—the software currently used for real time jamming between human and machine, was named after him.) This tiny opera, the name for which in contemporary times has come to mean musical comedy, has us distrust the poignant death-throe pronouncements made by sentient machines and the proverbial ‘fly in the ointment’. Thereby causing a schism in the truth claims made by certain “observational” documentary practices, euphemistically known as “fly on the wall.”
* The term ‘bug’ originated with the discovery of actual insects causing early computers to malfunction.
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operetta, 1998
video projector, DVD/DVD player, CD/CD player, amplifier, speakers, steel structure for projector, steel cables.
Also available as 30" x 30" lightjet prints, or 10" x 10" lightjet prints with life size image of fly shot with 4 x 5 camera.