timetraveler_00

Went with Kari to see a performance of timetraveler_00 out at GMU last night, a “live movie” staged by Professor Kirby Malone’s Cyburbia Productions. time_traveler_00 is an adaptation of the story of John Titor, an entity who appeared on the net for six months in 2000-2001 claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036—sent to retrieve (of all things) an old IBM model 5100 needed to reverse-engineer aspects of the UNIX operating system and prevent a global computer crash!

Sound like bunk? Well, maybe so, but that’s not really the point. According to Malone in the Washington Post, “We don’t care if it’s real or true. We care what it means—the poetic truth and the way it gives us an avenue to critique our culture in a constructive way.” And, as was repeatedly pointed out during the performance, time travellers—time travel, incidentally, is a proven possibility under what we know of quantum physics—are never believed anyway. I mean, under what circumstances would you believe someone claiming to be from 2036? The Titor materials scattered around the net include detailed schematics and photographs of the putative time travel equipment, including one parituclarly eerie snap representing itself as an artifact from 2035 (“It shows my instructor beaming a handheld laser outside the vehicle during operation. The beam is being bent by the gravitational field produced outside the vehicle by the distortion unit. The beam is visible through smoke that is coming from his cigar”).

Much more emerges, including details of Titor’s world—a post-apocalyptic agrarian society that forms after a civil war in the US that culimates in a global thermonuclear exchange. The civil war is framed as a town and country divide, gentlemen farmers with guns resisting an increasingly authoritarian federal government. This aspect of the narrative was the least compelling to me, and is downplayed in Malone’s version of events; the Titor materials on the Web are more heavily inflected by the dogma of the American militia movement.

And what’s a live movie you ask? A multimedia production combining live action performance and music with extensive CGI. Theater for a new generation, as Malone conceives it. Or call it a cyberpunk rock opera. Whatever it is it’s quite a spectacle, the actors and the CGI often blending seamlessly.

Most interesting to me about the John Titor material—which I hadn’t heard of before the show—is the way in which a set of born-digital objects becomes the basis for subsequent interpretation and art-making in the “real world.”

The network informing an analog imaginary.

We’ll be seeing more of that I expect.

In the meantime (so to speak) I understand time_traveler_00 is going to be going on tour. The performances were outstanding, so I certainly recommend it.