Auslander, Philip. “Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology.” Performing Arts Journal. 14.1 (1992): 30-42.

Early in the film [Home of the Brave], Anderson appears masked, lecturing the audience in a digitally synthesize ‘male’ voice. The subjects of her lecture are the digits ‘0’ and ‘1.’ She points out that in common discourse, these signs have opposite meanings: to be ‘number one’ is at the other end of the spectrum from being a ‘zero.’ She suggests that this way of using signs needs to be reformed, because the distance between the highest and lowest, between ‘0’ and ‘1,’ leaves ‘very little room…for everybody else. Just not enough range.’ She proposes that we should abandon the value judgments associated with these signs and recognize them as of equal value because they are equally the building blocks of the modern computer age. Anything that can be expressed in words or numbers, in any language, can be communicated using this simple, foolproof system. It’s all here in a nutshell—the entire alphanumerical system, A to Z, the zero to infinity of digital intelligence.

She then gives examples of letters, numbers, and a musical phrase expressed as digital combinations, zeroes and ones filling the projection screen behind her. As she concludes, she counts off a two-beat rhythm (‘and zero—and one’). Projections of a large zero and large one alternate behind her, accompanied by a metallic, rasping sound. 37

In this section of her performance, Anderson not only describes the leveling of cultural binaries implicit within the epstimology of digital technology, but enacts it. The figure we see before us displays both male and female signs, yet ultimately is neither. It is also a cyborg, a human being whose voice is produced by the very digital technology it describes for us. This figure claims to have written the song from which Anderson extracts her example of binary code: the irony may be that the cyborg, the amalgam of human and machine, truly is the composer in this case, as Anderson used a computer in composing the song. 37-38

The passage is comic in that the lecturer’s hyperbole and the seeming inefficiency of expressing a simple number, letter or musical note as a huge number of ones and zeroes appear somewhat ridiculous, yet underlying this gently deflating humor is the suggestion of the deep technological utopia Haraway has in mind. Computer logic cannot abolish binaries—it cannot exist without them—yet those binaries imply no value judgments; unlike the societies and cultures it has had such an impact on, digital technology itself is genuinely indifferent to the differences between the terms of the binaries it employs.

Through the mediation of electronics, Anderson’s and Burroughs’s voices merge: the voice that emerges from the tape-bow violin is his, yet it is not. It is her ‘voice’ in that she plays the instrument, yet it is not her voice. He ‘authored’ the sentence by speaking it, yet she wrote the words and actually controls the articulation of the spoken text with her bow. The homosexual-junkie-misogynist-Beat novelist, and the heterosexual-feminist-postmodernist entertainer-performance artist achieve a strange and unstable unity of the kind described by Haraway for the duration of the song by speaking through a single voice that belongs to both, yet to neither. 40

Her work reflects a provisional glimpse of the cultural environment that will become possible if new technologies are indeed permitted to realize their potential as ‘technologies of freedom.’ 41