The Amazing Talking Skull/ BAC/ Winter 2007

The Amazing Talking Skull/ BAC/ Winter 2007

You and three others enter a room, dressed to appear like a Victorian library or 19th century gentleman’s study. Books are shelved from floor to ceiling. There are four seats. You sit down. Above you there is a single domestic bulb, in front of you a human skull attached to a metal pole standing on a wooden box. The light bulb flickers, stammers, then goes off. You are in the dark. A book slips from the shelf and falls to the ground behind you. It causes you to jump, scream or laugh nervously. And then there is a strange mechanical whirring. The skull now looks up so that it is seemingly eyeballing you. Red lights in the socket replacing eyes flicker to life… reminding you of the Terminator after his synthetic flesh has been burnt away. The jaw begins to move, the skull begins to speak in a rich, sonorous voice. ‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ speaks of the fleeting nature of life, how quickly it passes, the dangers of us being distracted from this fact. It concludes, stating with authority, ‘One day you will die.’, the head pivots so that it looks at someone else and repeats, ‘One day you will die.’, it pivots again to a third person, ‘One day you will die.’, and finally to the fourth, ‘One day you will die.’ As though a battery has died, the head lowers, the eyes dim, the bulb goes on, the door is opened. And you and three others leave the room, laughing uneasily or delighted, spooked but charmed.

‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ is the work of Paul Granjon. The work itself was commissioned to occupy a room within a larger building-wide and site-sensitive project called ‘Masque of the Red Death’ by a company called ‘Punchdrunk’. The commission is therefore parasitical in its relationship to another piece of work: not authored by Punchdrunk but contributive to their work - both parasite and host drawing inspiration from the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The space ‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ occupies was not purpose built or dressed for it and has been the site of a number of other commissions mainly solo (human!) performers. In this immersive fiction a plague is rife; the library acts as a temporary haven of sorts. There is bleak comedy to being addressed by an automaton… we are reminded it is the non-biological which will survive. Granjon states on his website “I am interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines.” But in the context of the story, there is no ‘co-evolution‘, and the singularity is not in our favour.

Within the world of Punchdrunk, The Amazing Talking Skull avoids being jarringly anachronistic because its aesthetic fuses with our own sense of the fantasies of the Victorian imagination… because you can imagine the skull fittings so snugly in the works of the 19th century founders of modern science fiction, Jules Verne, H.G. Welles and Poe himself, it doesn’t break the illusion of the world in the way that a television would, although it is more advanced and contemporary in it’s use of technology. (We know there is a gleaming white Mac running Mac OS X whirring beneath the box). For the comic specialist, perhaps such suspensions of disbelief, or fusions of knowledge, are unnecessary because The Amazing Talking Skull compliments the subgenre of fantasy and sci-fi known as Steampunk (fantasy works set in an era of steam power, usually Victorian era England, often incorporating contemporary devices technologically achieved with 19th century means). I.e. we accept this because if Victorians had invented robots this satisfies how we imagine how they would look and talk. Any robot aping organic life instils a sense of the uncanny (although this is perhaps decreasing with our continuous and ever increasing exposure to robots both in toy shops, daily life and film).

Nonetheless this sense of the uncanny is magnified by various conflicts at play in this situation. The Webster dictionary defines a robot as ‘An automatic device that performs functions normally ascribed to humans or a machine in the form of a human ‘.The robot’s function hovers between that of storytelling and reminder of death, the content of the speech and the robot’s form compliment each other by different means. There is nothing new in the image of skull as ‘memento mori’. The robot as object can be seen as a descendant of the skull held by the monk in Zurbaran’s ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’ in the National Gallery, a 3D cousin, that has evolved into a piece of sound emitting kinetic sculpture. We also have robot as imitator of life, the inanimate programmed to appear alive, but it is a skull - classically representative of death, death is alive, talking about the nature of life, the robot is also a substitute for a human performer, specifically commissioned for the Christmas period when people are most likely to be with their families less willing to work! Perhaps it is this ricochet of conflicts accounting for captivating nature of this piece and the uneasy laughter it induces.