Here's how it happened: Rissy Ruddy, fellow Fringeoid helping with the physical-space side of operations here in Austin, had known and been close friends with Ranu Mukherjee and the rest of the OD crew for quite some time. We got in touch with Ranu, asked if the lot of them would be up for a tag-team free-form e-mail "interview." They were, we did, and here it is.

FWR - first question, to start us off right: who's in attendance? who are we getting answers from, here. sound off...

OD - This is our biography, which was written in 95, after [OD] had already been happening..:

0(rphan)d(rift>) started as insistent signal.
Sometime in 94 it coalesced in circuits plugging into us,
its human facilitators. fluidity. mutation.
Immersive experience infects your mind.
06.03.95 it became a dream factory. Monitor, reflect,
the impacting Future. Envisioning.human.recoding.
>Making contact
White violet light. White darkness. Fluid neon bright shadows. It'll burn you
away. > Communicate
0(rphan)d(rift>) spreading. Signal with no memory.
Data bleed Upriver liquefy

0(rphan)d(rift>) Image/text/sound fusion

FWR - is the group assembled here a form of creative collective, a loose affiliation, or what? when you all think of the work of "orphan drift," how do you think of yourselves?

OD - We are assembly units which work towards building components towards each manifestation. There is a core of five people who direct the signal manifestations -- and tend to, when it is an event in a 'real' space -- make the machine. There are lots of other people who get involved at different times, or for different projects -- often to do with sound production. There [are] also a lot of people circling around, who don't necessarily produce actual parts to the work, but are very influential.

The most useful analogy to our way of working would be cybernetic process -- we work out of feedback loops, frictions and meshing up of the units assembled by each of us. We are not talking about imaginary feedback loops etc. but very actual ones. We collectively wander across possibilities until an exact intensity is found. This is even how we are doing this interview. Each manifestation of OD has the same kind of process to it and by having no egos when it comes to a 'final' assembly, what is produced is always beyond any of us as individuals. We certainly believe in using ourselves as experiment. Rebellion within detail.

-=-

FORM[meat]

[[ ]]Meltdown has a slot for you a6 a schilzophrenic HIV+ trans6exual chine6e-latino stim-addlcted LA hooker with lmplanted mirrorshade6 and a bad attltude. Blitzed on a polydrug mlx of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have ju6t iced three Turing cops with a hi~hly cinematic 9mm automatlc.

The residue of animal twang ln your nerves transmit6 lmminent quake catastrophe. Zero ls coming in, and you're on the run..."

- o[rphan] d[rift>]

FWR - right on the publisher's imprint page of OD we see the telltale line: "anti-copyright." this could mean a number of things. is this essentially a license to appropriate from OD, as it has appropriated from the "CONTRIBUTORS [unasked]" listed in back?

OD - ...yes

FWR - how old is the material? in other words, was most of it generated over a given time-range, and if so what?

OD - ...The asked contributors material (The books focus) was generated between 1994 [and] 1995. Most of the sampled stuff went back a couple of years, some of it more than that. The book actually started as a catalogue for an exhibition at the Cabinet Gallery. We didn't want to end up with a catalogue that simply explained the show, so it turned into what it is.

FWR - was it all written with OD in mind, or is some of it drawn in from prior projects? [wanting to get a feel for how long these ideas have been stewing in yr folks' work].

OD - OD was a coalescence point. The name is the avatar. We can't necessarily comment on exactly what OD as itself is, but it was a clarity for us and a human strategy. There were three of us in similarly autistic zones, coming from an art school thing with this fuzzy sense that something wasn't quite right. There was too much metaphor, distance and safeness. The 'ideas' you are talking about [below] were just the things that were coming at us, pressuring us. The book came out of OD, and OD was the [process] of actually seeing what's around you -- creating a process of production which is responsive to its environment. The pressure, obviously, has been around for a long time. Its always there, we live in the pressure. Music and drugs are by nature physical abstracts so we move towards copying that kind of perception. It took being able to smear out across minds to get things fluid.

OD gave us some maps. The future impacting on the present at differing speeds is a good way of describing what these maps are about.

This direction gives a tool for describing non linear time. Linear time is only one line in a track, in terms of the book.

FWR - describe the assemblage process for the final text. did the text we see today arise quickly, or over an extended editing period?

OD - It downloaded itself very quickly -- in about a month, so the editing assembly process was not long at all. The rhythms in it were assembled intuitively out of studied learning from techno.

FWR - what other media does the group work in?

OD - ...synesthesia, immersion, touch becoming, speed and detail, voodoo tactics, Mayan code clumping, camouflage, mapping mapping, seduction, magic infection, machine vision, in the wind of unknown chemistries. Video, slides, photos, lighting, smells, diagrams, voice, sound. Used to fuck up recognition. We work in a variety of contexts (in 'real' space terms), each time the manifestation is different -- but always tries to be an immersive and layered environment where different registers and media fold into real -- becoming mobius strips experientially. We do work in clubs, event based spaces, gallery installations, magazine contributions (image and text), seeding (dispersed distribution of flyers, stickers, etc.), computer game blueprint (not yet produced)...

FWR - there are a few diagrams, illustrations, and pictures in OD. given how much other work in image you all do, why not more images than this?

OD - ...the book [...] was initially made as the catalogue to a show that was entirely image and sound based. It was a parallel thing, and about making a very tactile written thing. More images would have been too easily captured into being illustrations of the text, in that case. The text in the book is already visual and rhythmic. (Not that we have any problems with image text merging in other projects)

FWR - what are your current plans, if any, to release either more material in paperback print format under either the title "o[rphan]d[rift>]" or some other?

OD - Text at the moment seems to be working in short bursts and there is much material not assimilated yet. A lot of it is being channeled into voice material for possession events. There is an output for another large chunk of OD material in a book at beginning stages of its production, being made by a group called Switch at Warwick University.

FWR - what are some of your other influences, in any medium? i.e., folks or works not listed in back under "contributors unasked"?

OD - ... Our influences change quite a lot as we work off experience, so we prefer to mention newer influences that appeared as part of the signal after the book. difference is a big one, so we all try to bring in new material, for this friction thing we were talking about. Major contributions in the last couple of years include:

• Using the machines (Vid, computer, cameras etc.) not only as controllable tools, but learning from accidents, feedback, distortion, etc. Letting the machines navigate through some of the excess they produce. The OD units' relationship to the machines is core. More on machine vision later....


• horror. imagination. darkness. We trust imagination as a real actor.


• Mayan meshed up with voodoo. The way the Mayan image/symbol/number ideographics work is very important. The source is in the images, though we haven't found any writing around that actually deals with the stuff the way we are seeing it. Linda Schele is pretty good but it exists for us in another place which is where it meshes up with possession and voodoo tactics.


• Artaud


• fleshing things out. flesh


• width, temperature, holes, reaching, passing through spaces in electronic music. That Mayan thing about holograms -- that you move out from this contained self in experiential stages. extended emotion.

FWR - how have you, as individuals and as a group, changed since OD's publication or assembly as a text?

OD - The book was made at a point of having enormous backlog of material. The viewpoints in it were very schizoid and looping rhythms. We have since become able to silently assemble something. zooming in and zooming out of a thing has become much more active. micro and astral. many registers of the same thing. rebelling ones own detail continues as a process. For this reason your first question [i.e. "who-all is there?"] is unanswerable.

FWR - :) understood.

-=-

Funxion[teeth]

"Jesus said, 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'"
- Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 45.29-33; NHL.

FWR - now, questions on the Funxion of the text. you should be forewarned that OD wasn't entirely easy for me to digest. stylistically, i could handle it and parse / decrypt it fine, and the ideas themselves i had seen in other places before -- but never in as concentrated a form, and certainly never written with such a first-person certainty .. almost as if they were uttered as Invocation. many of the core expressions of OD are, to me, the central notions of post-human cyberpunk dystopia distilled down to a tight, aesthetically hybrid core. this density really caused me to question some fundamental things while working through the text. so, if i take a sort of tactical stance in relation to some of the messages i sense coming through, it's not an attempt to invalidate or attack the group's expression of the ideas, but more a way for me to express my own fears and wariness of those ideas.

if writing is in some sense a magical / magickal act, in which an utterance sent into the world carries the power to alter that world, then what is being intended by the utterances of OD?

OD - With these questions we are in the same place as you. The invocation that you picked up on is the voice. The rhythms give the space of invokation. It functions like chemistry. From that place the concept of dystopian doesn't make sense. As we said before we start with what real feels like. change is a process which is more real than usually acknowledged. If there is a sense that the book is dystopian in some way, it is because everything else wants us to believe in fixity, despite how nonexistent and totally hollow a construct that is. Pain. something is moving. the answer is never to save up for a mortgage. There are points where tools appear. access points. The book is so much about tools. Shamanic knowledge, voodoo, Mayan are for modeling more real and other real. very pragmatic in that way. The tools function by reaching through you, into you. Most people don't seem to read books this way. leaking. Most people also are taught to think of the future as something which comes after the present. The future is more like a coating on everything.

FWR - post-humanism is a concept which, as OD's voice points out, the human mind rejects as repulsive due to the mind's meshing with the meat. the authorial voice of OD sees this post-humanizing techno-cultural process as inevitable, and perhaps, desirable -- from the perspective of the meme-complex of post-humanism, the viral contagion of this process. BUT: OD also points out that the wise parasite tends to its host. [paraphrase].

now: i'm asking you, as authors, and then as humans, and then as a neo-tribal unit/group, what your visceral responses are to the post-human contagion? surrender? glee? wrath? powerlessness? resistance? numbness? revulsion? attraction?

OD - ...yes. the complexity of responding is brilliant. That's why we have no understanding of the 'concept' post humanism. Post humanism is a concept which comes from the idea that the mind and the meat are separate finite entities. In all the signs around us, there is no real separation; its more about the fine tuning of sentient processing to expand the real. coding your want. vibration, matter, mind, memory, dream -- its all the same thing with different registers. radically heterogeneous.

FWR - do you think that "cyberpunk fiction" and its aesthetic is "guilty" of creating the post-human contagion as self-fulfilling aesthetic prophecy, or was cyberpunk fiction simply a very sensitive / responsive "symptom" of a process already in motion?

OD - ...definitely more like the latter -- though the feedback does up the temperature (spates of alien films, etc.). Human codes might be fucked -- and from those codes we are always stuck between some idea of dystopia and Utopia -- which is where the humor comes in. This condition is where the inevitability exists and controls. conspiracy comes in here. It moves so quickly from really close in yourself to really far out. Capitalism is of course fucked in that it is about using everything up -- but we all still want it in some way or can't physically separate from it and survive.. That is where addiction is. mirrors.

FWR - if "already in motion," and you had to plant a flag at the time or event or period where the post-human contagion event-horizon was passed, when would that be?

OD - ...chameleon in a box of mirrors

FWR - finally..: i can safely say that, for this reader, i will from here on separate my reading of modern science fiction into two categories: "pre-OD" and "post-OD." it plants that undeniable of a flag in my maps of fixion and the possible. on this level, you've succeeded completely in conveying this thing.

now i ask: do you see the message encapsulated and disseminated and schizoanalyzed through the voice of OD -- post-human contagion and its explication / exorcism / invocation -- as one which can bring any strength to one facing the process unfolding, or do you simply see it as a bitter fucking pill that must be swallowed..?

OD - ...you want to swallow the pill. we are all the process unfolding. we just need more good channelers.

-=-

o[rphan d[rift>] was published in 1995 by o[rphan d[rift>] / Cabinet Editions; 429 Colharbour Lane; London SW9 8LL. ISBN 0-952-58240-6