The Performative Aesthetic Pwn

I jailbroke my iPhone last week. This act of willful consumer disobedience, to force a heavily-designed piece of electronics and device fetishism to do certain things that it was specifically designed not to do, was an attractive gesture of rebellion that I have always considered, ever since first letting my hand and fingers learn the ways of the magic relationship with a smart phone, now over two years ago. For others, executing unapproved code on their telephone might not be such a transgression. A thing to try, and like, or maybe not, and then reset. Just another ringtone to try for a day. But it was always a bit more to me–it was something dangerous, a refutation of the protective super-ego; a violation of the warranty that protected this palmed cyborg implant against the possibility of loss; my guardian against the threat of an inconsistent hardware lifetime. The liminal relationship between me and my information was guaranteed against faulty screens and battery degradation, and for a long time, the danger of losing this safety measure made the flirtation far too dangerous for anything other than fantasy. This was my iPhone we were talking about… not just an old computer.

But my warranty, and my Apple Care plan, are now both expired. Apple has thrown me to the fates, and so I’ve leaped out into that abyss.

On Saturday night, two days after downloading and executing the “redsn0w” hack, sending myself across that barrier into a modern day tinkerer’s version of forbidden ecstasy, we went to see Lucinda Childs’ Dance.

This dance piece, a collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, artist Sol LeWitt, and composer Philip Glass, is nothing short of beautiful. The work has no story. The gimmick, as it were, is that the dancers on stage perform behind a translucent screen, onto which film is projected, that mirrors the live dance. But the effect is no gimmick; the work creates a masterful symmetry and mimesis between representation and performance. In conjunction with the well-known minimalism of the Philip Glass Ensemble’s music, an experience of motion and repetition utterly ensnares the viewer, transporting the audience into a hypnotic dimension of art. The film, the original of which was used in the performance we saw, was recorded for the original performance in 1979, a time when dance as performance, as well as technique, was being explored by many artists. The medium of film, a material for capturing and augmenting performance, found its place in the dance company. The immaculately timed and edited film cuts sometimes lead the live choreography, sometimes trail it, sometimes mimic it as if meant to be precisely accurate, and other times deviate with a similar accuracy. The Cartesian lines on the floor of the dance studio in which the film was shot accentuate the live dancers’ motion across a static stage, extending the dance and giving it extra vectors of dimension. It is more than dance, music, and film. The performance is a nebula of sound, light, and body. It is
image, tone, and motion.

To see it performed, I was amazed. Not only by the overall aesthetic of the piece, but by its apparent tenuousness. The work that went into producing those film cuts, and editing them exactly with live dancers and with music. The collaboration between three artists, all quite powerful on their own terms. The work of the dance company, re-learning choreography in order to match a film shot over thirty years ago with precision. To be there was not like watching a screen. It was as if a glass projection tube of a miraculous, angelic television extended outward and over the head, and I sat among the electrons as they whirled with exaggerated arm movements, hands locked into vectors of potential travel. It was as if the third dimension had been removed, the live dancers hidden behind the translucent screen reduced to points on a plane, and then this dimension had been reinstated, artificially colorized and splendidly animated back into reality by the re-introduction of depth in the black and white film on the screen. This depth was something personally existential, because where you sat in the theater watching this performance affected the entire perspective between dancers projected on a flat screen and dancers moving in space beyond. My space-time, the experience of the symmetry between live action and film action, would be totally different from that witnessed by any other pair of stereo eyes elsewhere in the room.

And yet, this performance, for all the infinite emotions and aesthestic implications, was entirely finite. No recording of this performance was allowed. No cell phone use permitted. A piece of art with serious implicit commentary on the role of live performance and recorded projective media, itself, in any meta perspective, could not be filmed. These revolutions would not be recorded. It would live only in this space and particular time, for these sets of eyes, and the only media parity permitted would the hacked bootlegging of a verbose text editor, some variation on ASCII art, as an essayist attempts to put art into transmitted text.

I didn’t want to record Lucinda Childs’ Dance, and upload it onto a file sharing network, or embed it on my website. It still would be a hackneyed plagiarism, life decontextualized, preservation with a pin in a vacuum glass box. A violation of the functional quality of the work, as I interpret it. But the explicit refusal, the license of refusal by artist, producers, and the venue, served as a boundary. In a time period of continual media change, when individuals are expected by many to be constantly transmitting and receiving, interacting and network, broadcasting from the pocket and invocating from the finger, this was more than an expectation of courtesy to fellow art lovers. This is a boundary line, beyond which the power of art to transmit, inspire and inhabit would not cross. A ghettoization of experience. The underlying authoritarian impulse of the mind to control in order to make itself heard.

Meanwhile, drunk on its new found freedom, my iPhone was greedily slurping through the remains of its two-year old battery in my pocket.

There was freedom to be found in jailbreaking my iPhone. Jailbreaking made it a computer again. After the relatively easy process of running redsn0w (no one said anything about having a spare copy of the firmware on your computer, and the little button combination you have to time perfectly to get it into the right mode, but I finally figured it out) it was a thrill to see an actual live terminal screen, showing that what I had spent all this money on was not just a shiny black Narcissus mirror, but an actual computer. And after opening Cydia, and figuring out exactly how to install packages from the surprisingly limited amount of support material out there on the Internet, changing my root password and SSHing to the file system over Wifi felt like the future all over again. Not just because I did it, but because anyone can do it too. In this age when all technology is locked down in an attempt to ease things for the poor, tortured, overwhelmed consumer, the iPhone Dev Team, Saurik and others are trying to open it back up with gentle, consumer-driven hacking like redsn0w and Cydia. You can hack your iphone, and it doesn’t have to be hard. That is the future, in my opinion.

But this everconstant lifehacking of the future–what does it get us? As @doingitwrong so aptly tweeted, “I jailbroke my iPhone and all I got was this lousy wallpaper.” I installed Winterboard first thing, and downloaded several themes to try. No app or program I’ve run on my jailbroken phone eats battery like the themes. It’s actually ridiculous. I do like the ability to place my lock screen wallpaper back over the springboard, and of course I get a huge kick out of seeing the POSZU logo replace the Apple logo during boot (neither of which require Winterboard, btw). But the majority of downloads through Cydia are hot-girl-wallpaper sets. There was one Hot Anime Girl set added per day, for at least a few months. Still in there, clogging the search results. Good times.

There are useful apps. SMSettings is masterful–allowing you to hide app icons, (like the useless native Weather app) and deploy a screen overlay no matter what you are doing (mine is set to deploy on a downward swipe from the status bar) that lets you disable any of the antennas, boot a custom list of apps, and kill processes. I was very interested to see that Safari and the iPod are often left running behind the scenes without your knowledge, sticking their own straws into my valuable battery. Now, easily terminated. I also like LockInfo, that let’s you read text of emails and SMS from the lock screen along with other notifications–and supposedly Twitter too, though I can’t get this to work yet. Video game emulators are plentiful, though very slow on my 3G. There is multitasking, and there is tethering. There is VNC, and there is data over Bluetooth. I set my battery indicator to show me a percentage rather than a meaningless battery icon, using the basic redsn0w settings. Sometimes the simplest tweaks are the best.

The problem is that there is no uniformity. Cydia is great, but it is not the App Store, in which every app is verified to work with all recent versions of iOS, and do, most of the time. In the world of Cydia, everything has not been checked for consistency. Information about troubleshooting is rare, and hard to find. Free apps are rare, because the jailbroken app market is slim. I can’t get the supposedly excellent video player apps to work. And the real reason I jailbroke my phone, to find a music player that will handle ogg files and sync with Linux, is still unfulfilled: PwnPlayer has disappeared, it didn’t work with iOS 4.x anyway, and nothing else has come to take its place. To a real programmer, the jailbroken iPhone is fertile ground. But to a user like myself, it only allows me to extend my fantasies about what awesome features might have been–had the app not crashed, had it been extended to 4.x, had anyone with the chops put in the incredible amount of volunteer work to make it a reality.

The sublime artistry of the iPhone doesn’t recede into a seedy red-light district of custom wallpaper for a lack of effort on the part of jailbreak developers. Despite Apple’s mammoth efforts to lock down the iPhone, these folks have continued to find the chinks in the armor, and make user-friendly ways of exploiting them. As Saurik put it when describing the merger of Cydia with the other large jailbroken app service, RockYourPhone, the primary goal is to put everyone back on track with cooperation rather competition. That is the general goal for most iPhone hackers. For openness, and cooperation towards that end. As opposed to the goals of Apple, which is (other than simply to make money) to provide the unique artistry of a seamless user experience. Two modern goals, alike in dignity, but yet overall at odds. And when you put these two at odds, you know the hackers will come up short. It’s a simple (okay, complex) matter of infrastructure, time, and resources. Now that I’ve looked at my iPhone’s filesystem, I see the problem. It’s a twisted mess. Apps store data in multiple places, compressed in bizarre formats. The fact that it’s been opened up at all to a casual tinkerer like myself is amazing, but the fact that this is not your Home folder, in any sense of the term, is sobering. The genius of the iPhone’s ease of use is it’s internal inaccessibility. This is not a causal relationship, but it is psychical. The exterior looks the way it looks because the interior has turned inward, to express such an exterior. The division between designer and art, performer and audience, is a loop that could not bend back towards its initial point if it first it did not move away. It is easy to suggest that Apple could have designed things to better help those who would like to peer inside. I’m sure they could have. But they didn’t, and they won’t. Not because they are assholes, but because this is an iPhone. If it was not built the way it’s built, it would not be an iPhone. And all that that entails.

I’m going to keep my iPhone jailbroken rather than reset. Even though we aren’t meant to delve into that dark network of the id, we invariably do. For one, it is the principle of the thing. I go to avant-gaarde dance performances with a smart phone in my pocket, set to silent mode. I, after much wrestling with a pseudo-sexual techno puritanism, did the leg work and rooted my smart phone. And there are good functions of doing so. I like SMSettings enough that it is reason alone to keep the jailbreak, just as tweeted about Lucinda Childs (after the performance, of course), even though I think it might have cost me a couple of followers. This place between curated event and distributed network creativity, between high-end consumer design and dirty third-party work around, is where I seem to fall, in this year of atemporal technology, 2010. I still want features I don’t, and seemingly can’t, have. I want to capture experience and intellectual rumination exactly in all its sublime instantaneousness, and project it back onto a screen for everyone to see, but I can’t. For Intellectual Property reasons, and also because even if I could, then experience would no longer be unique.

Our human devices are simply beautiful, and infinitely limited by the realities of collaboration and performance–nevertheless, we get our hands dirty in hacking them, every day. The good part is, that people keep staging such performances, and that people keep going. And also that people don’t go, but are willing to hear about it later, and perhaps catch it next time.