RoboChorus February 18 to March 12, 2005

The Siren Song of Michael Waterman's Robochorus

Written by Katie Bethune-Leamen

The cultural past is littered with countless examples of the monsters and homunculi we have created: Judaism's golem, Dr. Frankenstein's troubled creation, Geppetto's Pinocchio, Dr. Moreau and his hybrids. In the stories describing these anthropoids, their formation stands in for the creative and reproductive processes, and frequently involves an attempt at communication with, or usurpation of, various gods. In 1920, Czech writer Karel Capek published his play RUR, which included the first published use of the word "robot," given to the anthropomorphic mechanical apparatuses in his text that did the work of humans. The word derives from the Czech "robota" meaning "labour":

DOMIN. Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.
HELENA. How do you know they have no soul?
DOMIN. Have you ever seen what a robot looks like inside?

Artist Michael Waterman's sound installation, Robochorus (2003) is a series of eight human-scaled robot-like figures that stand alertly throughout the gallery. Lurking in the penumbra of the darkened space, when a viewer enters the room they come liminally alive with glowing LEDs, their awakening spurred by the motion sensors they are equipped with, and each begin emitting one of the tones from the first eight notes of the harmonic series.

These "robomorphic" figures have been hewn together from a trans-decade assemblage of stereo components including tube amps, transistor amps, and bits of microchip-circuited audio equipment from the 80s and 90s. They have cassette deck mouths, spinning CD player brains, and circuit board intestines and vitals, poised on top of tubular legs, housed in speaker chest cavities, crowned by lumpen heads. The result is a series of units which aren't merely imitations of humans-robots-but which are imitations of robots, and therefore imitations of imitations of humans. Waterman has made no attempt to hide the innards of his creations; they are laid bare to our eyes, their bits not only exposed but tarted up with strips of adhesive holographic vinyl and careful attention paid to arrangement and design. Like St. Lucy piteously offering up her plucked eyeballs on a silver salver, or an 18th century wax anatomical medical dummy that courteously peels back its flesh to let us see its guts, these robot-like sculptures allow us a peek inside of themselves.

For Capek's automatons, the sight of their innards reveals them as soulless, but Waterman's humanlike, robotesque wannabe robots carry no intent of divine animation. The display of the Robochorus' insides merely allows beguiling sound and light to be emitted, and the impossibility of their being a true attempt at homoninity to be made obvious as each member of the octet sings and illuminates in response to our movements and actions. With motion sensors activating their emittances, the figures engage in a song with us, and become the beguiling Loreleis of the white cube.

In music, the harmonic scale is a series of tones consisting of a fundamental tone-the lowest and most predominant pitch-and the consecutive harmonics produced by it. The noise emitted by Waterman's little army is lovely, the artist having made each tone by layering successive samples of sound drawn from disparate sources including radio shows, television commercials, records, spoken word samples, and soundscape recordings. A painter and collagist by training, and a chronic audio artist, Waterman has melded his métiers together, becoming a stage dad with a responsive brood of twinkling little performers.

While characters such as the Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau are rather sinister and horribly misguided paternal figures, Waterman is more akin to Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka in his chocolate factory, Vincent Price's character "The Inventor" in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990), or the loving scientist father/creator of the animated Power Puff girls, Professor Utonium. However, despite the benign intentions behind Robochorus, the sweet song emitted by the group as it serenades its animating audience still sounds a death knell.

The song of sirens traditionally lured sailors to their deaths. In this case, the prepossessing Robochorus members cause us to witness the elaborated death of various trailing-edge audio technologies. In effect their paean becomes a eulogy for the commercial cycle of music relay, and a proposition that it might find rebirth in forms exactly like the one created by Michael Waterman. Just as collage images are a pastiche that have traditionally recontextualised and reanimated their source imagery, Waterman's bricolaged figures are a Greek chorus commenting on a push and pull between the sounding off of audio and its sound. And as it is our motion that gives the Robochorus life, we become Dr. Frankenstein's lightning bolt: which in this case is a positive symbiosis.

i. Karel Capek, R.U.R. (1920; New York: Dover, 2001).
ii. This is the word the artist uses to describe his sculptures. Interestingly, as a robot is typically made in the image of a person, and the Robochorus members are essentially made in the image of robots, these become a second level of abstraction from the human form (that is, robots are humanesque, and the Robochorus is robotesque, making them humanesque-esque): more on this further on in the essay.

Photo Credit: Gavin Finney