Originally published in Colin Campbell Media Works, ed. Bruce Ferguson, Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991.

During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies into space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace, abolishing time and space as far as our planet is concerned.'

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Marshall McLuhan, 1965

... Was this my final fall from grace?- the queasy feeling that rose from my broken arm a simple parallel to sick economy? The patient was terminal. The air smells like war. In the 70s you got bad vibes. In the 80s you get diseases, moral diseases, like herpes and gay cancer. Sex kills. No kinky sex my doctor warned me. Actually, I thought that's what we were having in my isolation room-kinky sex-no phone-no visitors-everyone who came in wore a gown and a mask. Late at night, after my sleeping pill, the gown and the mask would come in and take out my IV which I thought was pretty kinky... (music) ... and then the gown and the mask would fuck me in the ass. I always figured it was the pathologist, so I knew that part was all right being fucked in the ass-with your lV dripping cortisone onto the floor. So what was kinky to this doctor...

Monologue from White Money A videotape by Colin Campbell, 1981

The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died of contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.'
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983

The fin de millennium is upon us. The twentieth century draws to a close. From the flickering black and white arrival of Lumiére's train transferred onto VHS for home viewing to the digitalized computer graphics simulating its departure, images that mark this century's beginning and its end converge upon the video screen. At once the pacifier of the masses and the electrified extension of mankind, this screen is vast and nebulous, small and contained. It is a black hole, a pinhole, an enormous camera obscura enveloping us with inverted dream fragments, shadowy mediations. A window upon the world, it offers an exterior and interior view, inundating us with the anxieties of a history that can be forever re-presented, re-ordered, fast-forwarded, freeze-framed. Illusion and identification, fiction and fixation, become the objectives of its closed-circuit mind game. From the constant signals of mass communication broadcast to the prerecorded impulses of the VCR playback machine, the electronic mosaic of the video screen pervades our culture, our politics, our consciousness.

Sinking deeper and deeper into a landscape of simulation, we begin, through the fabrications of a totalizing technology, to retrace the myths of the social body. High emotions are flattened to low definitions. The senses are squeezed into the confinement of a two-dimensional plane. The ideal is no longer a chance glance arrested in the mirror before language intervenes. It becomes instead an actively constructed projection, endlessly appropriated to commercial ends, constantly reinvented as a byproduct of cathode radiation. Sex without skin and interface without communication produce a generation of one-way lovers. Searching for the perfect Self gives way to channel hopping. Searching for the perfect Other means reaching for the remote control of compulsory heterosexuality. Like disheveled men who pace back and forth in front of the window of the TV/pawn shop on cold winter nights seeking solace in the pale reflections of others' lives, we gaze, as modern day Narcissuses, at frigid images through glass. The video screen becomes the perfect fetish: averting recognition of (our)selves as vulnerable, alone, auto-erotic machines occupying human form.

Sinking deeper and deeper into a landscape where simulation and capital meet, we begin to reshape the social body to the market specifications of a two-dimensional sexuality. Free-for-all fantasies interweave with the orthodox delusions of supply-side economics. From the dramatic intrigues of the soap opera to the romantic interludes of pay-as-you-talk phone sex, desire is intimately linked to cash-flow dynamics. Every transaction has a price tag, every exchange breeds more demand. Potency becomes an exercise in surplus accumulation. Impotency becomes the failure of material acquisition. Emotions are simultaneously exposed and discarded; underexposed and disregarded. Love as charitable act in a late capitalist system, by definition, no longer exists. Where white money meets white noise, the body becomes encased inside a wire mesh of high technology and surface ideology; its image wired to a fiscal delirium. Where desire and the traces of this body interface, a sexual economy for a new age emerges, turning inwards towards private perversions, turning outwards to become a metaphor for the pathology of an empire.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered... No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity. 3

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan, 1965

It was so silent. The birds had stopped singing.
Which was strange, I thought, because it was broad daylight.
My car radio was playing too loud, so I reached over to turn it down, but it was already turned off. This puzzled me. I was just coming back from my friend's ranch near Kelso. She had just found out four of her cattle had been mutilated that morning. Neither of us had heard anything that night. I decided to drive back to Malibu in the daylight.

I'm sure he said his name was Mr. Mould. I can't remember how I got there, but I was startled to feel the sand between my fingers. Hooked around me, and found I was on top of the highest sand dune... several hundred feet up in the air.

He was standing over me. He had on coveralls and black shiny pointed shoes.
He told me not to be afraid. But I was afraid he was going to molest me.

The sun is so bright all around me. I try to crawl away from him on my back. Hook to either side of me, but the horizon is empty. I begin to crawl on my hands and knees, but I am too afraid and fall down with my face on the sand. I try to call out, but no sound comes.

He has a knife of some kind. It is about five inches long. There seems to be no handle... only a blade. He scrapes it across my wrist. Then he placed his finger at the base of my ear. I didn't see the needle at first... drawing out my blood.

Monologue from Last Seen Wearing videotape by Colin Campbell, 1976

The real is not impossible, on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs. 4

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983

When Marshall McLuhan first published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man a quarter of a century ago, his vision of an expansionary technology did not foresee the collusion of capital and simulation as a potential breeding ground for the pathologies of an empire. Nevertheless, his prediction of an electronic future perfect was not without ambivalence. Catapulted from the obscurity of a media prophet to the limelight of a media guru, McLuhan tempered the flurry of optimism and corporate celebration surrounding his medium as the message with cautionary tales of impending anxiety and stress. As mankind moved from detachment to participation, from fragmentation to integration, McLuhan forewarned of a vortex of miscomprehension created from the incremental speed of change. As industrialization and data classification were replaced by automation and information retrieval, he forecast a numbing effect upon the human psyche. The heralded transition from rational surfaces to mythic depths was not to be without its side-effects, its uncertainties, its aberrations. The rewiring of bodily fibres to the electrified circuits of a global village, in effect, was to produce the symptoms of a temporary psychosis.

To counter the traumas precipitated by this electronic future shock, McLuhan accorded the artist a privileged position in combatting the environmental fallout. If modern technology had become, for McLuhan, a kind of communication H-bomb, embracing the disruptive potential of a surgical first strike capable of amputating the social body and obliterating the patterns of its interaction, then conversely, the artist had become his "early warning system." Functioning as the "antennae of the race," the artist second guessed the location of the target zones, diagnosed the symptoms of impact and assessed the depth and breadth of simulations' wounds. Holding "integral awareness" in his/her hands, the artist undertook to decode and recode the post-nuclear imagination, to decipher and restructure "sense-ratios" before catatonia set in. His/her production became a form of radar feedback, constructing a "counter-irritant" to the stress of technological transformation, creating antidotes for the psychic viruses of the new age. Ideally, s/he was both the anaesthetist and the shaman, cushioning the pain of infection as consciousness mutated, offering a salve to those extensions of mankind still raw and unassimilated.5

When Colin Campbell first took the body as sculptural imprint and dematerialized it with a primitive reel-to-reel video apparatus in 1972, he initiated a process of radar feedback that posited an antithetical vision to McLuhan's electronic future perfect. As one of Canada's pioneer video artists, Campbell's mapping of the social onto an expansionary technology does not function to soothe the psychic malaise of a melt-down landscape, nor to conceal the scars of a media conquest. In taking up the position of urban shaman who plays the part of the scientifically trained technician, Campbell's privileged position as a new age seer reveals instead an uncontrollable gangrene infecting McLuhan's custom-designed universe. Where McLuhan proposes a unifying principle for the video screen, fusing mass culture to innovation, Campbell unveils a further fragmentation. Where McLuhan envisions the intimacy of the medium, Campbell distances rather than integrates the senses and the body. Insisting upon the surface qualities of the medium, his work entraps the body inside a low definition where superficiality, not depth, becomes the byproduct of mediation. Isolating desire from simulation, he decodes and recodes the post-nuclear imagination, detects the symptoms of a temporary psychosis raging unconstrained and points out what McLuhan left aside as he enlarged the frame to embrace "mankind."

A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium. If the medium is of high definition, participation is low. If the medium is of low intensity, the participation is high. Perhaps this is why lovers mumble so. 6

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan, 1965

Monte: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We talked about this. Remember? Modern Love.
Robin: But what about Romantic Love?
Monte: That's a bunch of bullshit. Get with it. This is 1978. Modern Love is where it's at. We're just like two buses that pass in the night. Modern Love, well, it's like an orchestra, there's a horn section, but not strings, that's how I want our relationship to be, ...no strings attached.
Robin: Do you mean then that I'm just like some sort of side
order in your life? Like a salad?
Monte: No no. You'll always be more to me than french fries
on the side or onion rings, really. But it just can't be...

Dialogue from Modern Love Videotape by Colin Campbell, 1979

If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. .. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. 7

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983

In Colin Campbell's videotapes, there are no linear trajectories, no accessible points of entry. The video screen no longer functions as the perfect fetish. The social body no longer fits market specifications. Superimposing social mores upon mass culture, Campbell constructs a strategy of representation where collusion gives way to disjuncture, closure to disrupture. Surface identities slip in and out of focus. Characters talk, but not to the viewer. Bodies shift gender. Narrative threads unravel under pressure. From the cross-dressed, death-obsessed monologues of The Woman from Malibu to the sudden eruptions of homosexual imagery in the otherwise banal soap-opera of Black and Light, Campbell's work signals a refusal of adaptation to a closed circuit system. From the minimalist reinvention of himself as a New Brunswick Art-star reliving Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame north of the 49th parallel in Sackville I'm Yours to his deadpan mimicry of the perfect Other as an ingenious Toronto office girl in Modern Love, Campbell plays back the cultural mythologies of the empire through the distortions of a local specificity. Turning McLuhan's perfect machine inside out, Campbell locates in a mythic evocation to a global looking glass, a repository of fantasy gone sour. Wiring desire to the stimulus of low definition, Campbell reveals the promised tribal ecstacy of a two-dimensional sexuality to be a giant lonely hearts club.

Imperfect projects of a perfect machine, Campbell's characters occupy a territory where each body speaks in isolation, each word echoes in a hollow chamber of dead-end desire. Engaged in a relentless effort to find meaning in modern love, Campbell's monologue performances unveil a narcissistic stranglehold upon the Self, a decomposing Other. Seeking to locate in desire and its object more than pale inflections of the social order, they reveal a gaping emptiness that underlies a rhetoric of low intensity and high participation. As if somehow conscious of their construction as torn apart flesh sewed back together into so many electronic dots, they twist and turn inside the restraints of simulation, deflecting the self-recognition of their spiritual amputation. From White Money's visceral entanglement of raw meat and roadkill to The Woman from Malibu's necrophiliac attempts to simultaneously talk death and think sex, a new age sexual economy unravels at the edges.' From Robin's escapades as the office girl embracing Queen Street in Modern Love and Bad Girls to Rosa Cosa's misadventures in the theoretical jungle of semiotics ten years later, it becomes clear that intimacy has its price: the cost effectiveness of 1980s overriding the original promise of a sexual revolution where no money down and free love forever challenged a capitalist equation.

In Colin Campbell's videotapes, there are no prescriptions filled for the viral infections of mediation, no articulation of a call to liberation from the oppression of a cultural imperialism. Speaking the confessional does not propose a talking cure, nor a therapeutic dialogue. Squeezing his body inside a screen of high technology and surface ideology, Campbell chooses to accentuate rather than to placate the pathologies underlying a collusion of capital and simulation. Wearing a two-dimensionality uncomfortably, his video personas become manifestations of the disjunctures between identification and illusion, fiction and fixation. Encountering a sexual economy teetering close to death these disconnected figures confront a schizophrenic disintegration of the self and other. Unable to completely shed the electronic impulses that intertwine desire with dominance, they become metaphoric transcriptions of the reshaping of culture to capital, of the social to simulation. Entrapped by the magnetic pull of a poisoned future perfect, they become symptoms of a contemporary retreat from political revolution to private obsession. At moments it seems as if their phantom existence will succeed in rupturing the video screen, in puncturing the smooth mirror of simulation to spill the blood and guts of the empire's underbelly. But in the end, as byproducts of late capitalism's all-enfolding contradictions, they too sink deeper and deeper into a landscape of mediation, becoming the chorus in a requiem for a modern love, the bodily traces of a failed promise for a social transformation.

'The Mockworth head-camera, when worn by children watching TV, has revealed that their eyes follow, not the actions, but the reactions. The eyes scarcely deviate from the faces of the actors, even during scenes of violence. This head-camera shows by projection both the scene and eye movement simultaneously. Such extraordinary behaviour is another indication of the very cool and involving character of this medium.'

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan, 1965

It's just that, I saw you both, and you're both, so, well, good looking, and well dressed, then I saw you see each other, and, it's like you have some kind of antenna or something, you know?, like, gay men just know, know what l mean?, like, it's just so easy for gay people, because they just know, and they can talk so easily, I mean don 't get me wrong, my brother's gay, and I still love him, it's just that we heterosexuals have such a hard time, know what I mean, like we are really repressed, I can't tell you how hard it is to start a conversation with another heterosexual, know what I mean, like it's heterosexuals that are oppressed, it's just so unfair, like you're all organized, Gay Rights, Gay Pride, Softball teams, parades, forums, Gay Studies, I mean, what about Hetero Studies, or Hetero Pride?, I can't talk to anyone, they just think I'm a tramp, or if I talk to a woman she's afraid I'm a dyke, know what I mean, and...

Dialogue from Black and Light Videotape by Colin Campbell, 1987

There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. 10

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of man, Toronto, McGraw-Hill, 1965, page 3.
2. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, pg. 151.
3. Understanding Media, page. 64.
4. Anti-Oedipus, page 27.
5. Understanding Media, page x.
6. Ibid, page. 319.
7. Anti-Oedipus, page 26.
8. Colin Campbell's videotape, White Money opens with the following monologue by a woman eating a large raw steak in a restaurant: “Ever eat roadkill? - well if you're into it I'll introduce you to a guy I know - Mike. I went camping with him in Florida - you know me I go to Florida for the sun and in case of rain for manicures not the nature. Nature is out of control down there and I think it's contagious because Mike got it - went right out of control and I think I got a touch of it myself just being with the guy. Camping - can you imagine - just give me Miami or give me death - give me Arpeche but don't give me Mike and camping and roadkill dinners. See Mike made me dinner one night and I'm not talking hotdogs - the guy cooked me an alligator - roadkill - you know the look on a cat's face when it brings home a bird between its teeth - well Mike had that look - the night that he showed it to me - he said it was fresh - looked a little overripe to me - like gater-egg - headless - baby alligator - and baby alligators arc fat just like baby people are fat - only a lot greener - don't ask me if they're cute - because this baby's face had been pancaked by an eighteen wheeler - and was gone - lost - plunked at the bottom - on State 107 just outside of Tallahassee where w e were - or where I left Mike - but get this - dessert was on me - I put the pedal to the floor - and left him a couple of snacks - and went hungry man dinners - see yon tomorrow Ann on my way to Miami - excuse me do you have any HP sauce please.

9. Understanding Media, page 309.
10. Anti-Oedipus, page 29.