Meat and mechanism.

At eight pm on Friday September 17th 1993, the doors of the Waikato Museum of Art and History were thrown open. The cyberpunk art show Synasthesia, opening gun of the Southend Festival, had started.

In one corner of the building a tableaux was being enacted. A statuesque woman, painted silver, stood behind a hollow TV cabinet, that had been suspended above the floor by a metal frame. Looking reminiscent of the robot in the movie Metropolis, her hand motions drew attention to the prone form of a female dancer. Clad in white, the dancer stood slowly and then performed, while video cameras picked up her image. This was projected, overexposed and huge on the two white walls behind her. Running forward, the dancer opened her mouth to scream. No sound issued, however. Instead, her stamping foot triggered a pressure sensitive switch. Amplifiers, speakers and tapes kicked in and the gallery was flooded with a deafening electronic cry.

Synasthesia. Fusion of people and processors. An eclectic selection of everyone and electronics. Just like Cubist movement founded by Picasso, the creation of author William Gibson, Cyberpunk, has outgrown its maker. Artists of all stripes have taken up the banner and are running.

Throughout the evening on three metre high screens scattered throughout the building, virtual reality style video clips were being projected. These were indespersed with images of performances from places around the gallery, and even of the crowds who moved from exhibit to exhibit. Indeed, the patrons looked as strange as the displays: with shaven heads or Mohawks, leather or denim jackets, body parts with multiple piercings and other badges of this vigorous art movement.

The group Wendy House performed live for the first time, their song lyrics " We're all gonna die a horrible death " and the laconic " Shoot shoot, kill kill " delivered while wearing out of style leisure suits of brown or orange.

A man stripped to the waist and painted with wierd black symbols, played a percussion set on household appliances with bamboo sticks. The iron and jug clanked. The heater barked, the Mr Coffee Machine made a low growl, the refrigerator produced a deep toned electronic melody and the biscuit tin made a deafening clatter. I was too stunned to note what sound the TV and microwave made. Vibration detectors in each object were used to trigger the appropriate audio sample from a nearby machine, and this blared forth from speakers.

Elsewhere, a photocopier spewed forth images of sledge hammers in an agonisingly prescient understanding of its own fate. Multiple times a grey clad technician attempted to fix the distressed object, eliciting only loud explosions from its innards by way of reply. Between the technical onslaughts, McGillicuddy's Street Theatre, dressed in Victorian garb or cromagnon rags, regarded the machine with distaste. Finally, in semi-darkness, figures clad only in thick coatings of mud destroyed the hapless machine with hammers and crowbars. As the lights came up, chefs attacked the wreckage with gusto, and immaculately dressed waitresses offered tasty morsals of the slaughter to appreciative patrons, keen for the novelty of a new cuisine.

As a deep thrumming issued from speaker stacks and the floor vibrated with powerful subsonics, the lights came up on an incredibly twisted male figure, crumpled up on the floor. Pale in colour and clad in a black smock, the figure stirred uncertainly. Accompanied by disturbing metallic shrieks, he slowly hauled his warped frame semi-erect. Folding upon himself, he cowered against a wall, green light spilling from his half open mouth, a look of pain and supplication on his face. Conveying a sense of torture and a desperation to appease an unseen and malevolent master, the figure crushed himself painfully to the floor as the lights faded.

Throughout this night celebrating the black mass and unholy union of Homo sapiens and synthetics I frequently found myself moved:

I laughed, I cried, and I was afraid.

Later, a synthesiser band played. A lot of other things happened. There was a dark room where people triggered the sounds of musical instruments, and peoples voices, as they walked over hidden pressure switches. A roomful of people engaging each other in a cacophonic conversation of sampled sounds.

On the stage the dancer was drawing to a finish.
On a nearby wall were projected slides of the woman taken at some other time.
Scratched onto each transparency were words which spelled out a message:
THIS. IS. IN. YOUR. FUTURE.
The last slide was an image of a video screen showing the grey colour of radio static.