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White collar crime >> [the User] direct a symphony of dot matrix printers by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
"The operative word is slave," remarks his partner, Emmanuel Madan. "Slavery is this continuous thing that never really went away. Basically, it's changed forms and now, instead of people being bonded labourers, they are slaves, in that they have no choice but to go to the office every day. They're completely in debt... they're slaves. You're punching numbers into a screen or writing these lines on a sheet of paper, and you don't know why you're doing it." [the User] wallow in what they call "the trailing edge of technology." As Madan explains it, "It's a comment on the obsessive fascination with new, modern, bigger, better, faster. People, on average, change their computers way too often." "What gets ignored is the consequences," continues McIntosh. "It's all very well to say, 'Look how wonderful all this stuff is.' But if you ignore the living conditions it creates and the fact that one of the largest sectors of waste management is computer equipment... [laughs] what do you do with this stuff?" What [the User] have done is turn that trash into art. With some help from Le Conseil des arts et des lettres de Québec, and a little hustle of the beg-borrow-and-steal variety, they've scrounged together a ragtag orchestra of obsolete dot matrix printers. "Some sound better than others," says Madan. "We have auditions. The printers all have personalities, they sound completely different from one another. Some of them are fast, some of them are slow or spunky or mournful." Playing these different "personalities" off one another, [the User] fed their new-found friends blocks of text. "We started by programming in 'the quick brown fox,'" says Madan, "but that came out pretty garbled. So we started going with things that are more geometric-looking, columns that are separated by wide spaces, bringing them closer together to speed things up." The result is a roaring chorus of carefully constructed mechanical chatter and grind. Song of the Cubicle Slave will likely strike a note of horrified déjà vu in the hearts of office workers, but there is an important point underlying it all. "The only way for things to start working in a way that is not leading to catastrophe," says McIntosh, "is for there to be some kind of empathy, or moral relationship, between person and machine. We love those things, in a weird way. When one of the printers dies, we're like, 'Oh, no!'" At Usine C with Interplace et Automates Ki, Friday, October 30, 7:30pm, $8 ($6 students)
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"They're insidious! Fluorescent light is soul-destroying!" It seems Thomas McIntosh, of local sound manipulators [the User], isn't all that fond of the Dilbertesque office environment that so many of us are trapped in every day. This world of toner fumes and dull grey compartment dividers is the inspiration behind Song of the Cubicle Slave, [the User]'s debut technological performance piece.