Their "theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms, delirious with dystopian cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of ideas per sentence. CCRU try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been synthetically processed, with all the vowels removed to leave just consonants and fricatives.Įven without the back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the piece is an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming for-an ultra-vivid amalgam of text, sound, and visuals designed to "libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. The third ghettoblaster emits what could either be Stockhausen-style electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of the insect world.
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From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a female American voice-not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full of imagery of "swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The first cassette-player issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an incantation or spell.
CCRU have prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their Virotechnics conference in October 1997. The walls, though, are covered with peculiar diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and bizareness of the unit's research.īut before I can enquire further, I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghettoblasters. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I find three women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look reassuringly normal. Since my knowledge of CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output-the journal Abstract Culture-plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea what I'll encounter after pressing the button marked 'Central Computer'. Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office on The Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the Philosophy Department of Warwick University a few miles away, as was the case the last academic year. Now in its third year of existence, CCRU's institutional status is, to say the least, disputed. But the town has darker undercurrents: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious entity called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
Smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less picturesque Bath-genteel, sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece Theater sort of way. RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unitĭirector's cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999 short remix appeared in Springerin, 2000
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