Who can compete with the Veldt? This is a OTR (old time radio) sound piece of early US Sci-fi futurism from a celebrated radio series called Dimension X. This radio adaptation based on a short story by Ray Bradbury was put on air in 1951. This very concise contemporary set piece, could easily enter the collection of historical vignettes employed by McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, also from 1951. Except the fact that it is a radio piece, it lacks the visual explosion and exuberance of magazine clips, revue cut-ups and gaudy adverts of that booming era. In the golden age of the radio, one was "free to listen", radio was really marketed as the least demanding and least hypnotic media. It allowed one to move freely around house, it supported multi-tasking, it was a primary instance of mediated infotainment. The busy bees of the economy could still follow their daily chores, something very important in the WWII aftermath. The radio was the first instantly transmitted voice of authority/charisma whispering directly into the public ear. Previously, Orson Wells Mercury Theater radio drama managed to land his radio show invaders and make them responsible for a host of other borderline trespassers employing the rules of psycho-auditive reality shows and instant news programs (War of the Worlds, 1938). I willingly stopped myself from adding and illustrating this radio piece with visual hints, because I consider the radio as a fully fledged model for VR. Radio is not a disembodied voice, it is completely embodied, and it also offers an embodiment of the virtual world before home computers and World Wide Web. Radio is a sort of kitchen-sink-eyes-closed holodeck, part of a polyphonic choir of caring and protective (mostly female) pre-recorded and taped voices, talking to us softly or forcefully in elevators, subways, shopping mall aisles and "mind your step" airport notices. Bio-matter is about the matters of the living, but not only about the squishy living dyed by fluorescent markers flickering in opposition to blinding lights and heliocentric moves. Let's close our eyes a bit and stop feeding the tumblresque hyperproduction of photos, images and digital re-bloggings. Let's listen and let's also speak and chatter aloud with these concerned dead voices on air.
The Veldt is not just a plain African landscape, it is also a coded white-man's fantasy of Africa. A palpable fantasy about rounded-up holism and wholesome nature. It is also about decoding an environment spelled out in Afrikaans that is not necessarily about a particular ecosystem inside a particular continent. African ecosystems and thousands of local political entities where forced to fit countries and territories after they where cut-out, divided and literally drawn at a distance, at a distance on maps in Berlin-Kongokonferenz rooms of the 19th century by foreign powers. Before the nursery, the conference room is the space where a kind of savage geopolitical imperial very real simulation of the future was forced with immense human loss and material cost on the African peoples, countries and entire civilizations. By 1951, the struggle had already begun to contest decisions made by remote control, as the anti-British and anti-colonial Mau-Mau Uprising (Mau-Mau Rebellion or Mau Mau Revolt) in Kenya gained momentum, setting the stage for the 1963 Kenyan independence. Mau Mau also became one of the first colonial white fear stories in countless films and books generally depicting the rebels as destructive and murdering zombies and the white settlers as hapless victims. This Veldt should be placed just 10 years before the 1960 wave of African liberations, the year when 15 African countries gained independence. At home the place in the United States McCarthyism was nurturing its own simulated cold-war scenario's. So this future home nursery, as one of the first barely recognized instances of virtual reality rooms, should be considered critically and culturally salient as much as any ENIAC, RAND Corp or ARPANET orphan.
I had to stop myself illustrating this quite sinister piece of radio with romantic images of the Veldt, with lavish cover artworks of children's books and boy bestsellers that shaped the rise of Western childhood literature till our National Geographic and Animal Planet TV escapades. I am pretty sure that the not-so-lost literary world of Rider Haggard(She, King Solomon's Mines) was already riding high in the discursive fields of concerned parents and their progeny. Shortly after that we have Edgar Rice Burroughs swinging high with Tarzan above the Congo. The dutch-sounding Veld (also spelled Veldt) was a specific South African Afrikaans toponym, a distinctly white-African literary and pastoral act of acclimatisation. The lion grasslands became the African version of a rustic field. The Veldt was a training ground, a proper martial landscape for the sons of the Boer commando's and also for growing up to proper manhood. For the holistically minded Jan Smuts of South Africa it was both a childish way of communing with nature and a sort of epiphany between the grazing cattle, him and God.
Curiously enough, the entry of the Veldt via Ray Bradbury into technoscience matters because it shows how the wild African landscape was virtually used as a backdrop for adventure stories by Euro-American white male big game hunters on safari trips, their popular grit&pluck biographies and journals garnering a readership of young boy's/girl's and future 50s teenagers. Animated versions of the African animals in Lion King and Madagascar are its contemporary follow-ups, urging the commercialization of childhood with a zoo(logical) experience of Africa.
This 1951 radio drama should not be heard as just another technophobic jeremiad. Sure, it talks about unemployed and suddenly superfluous parents, about powerful illusions, it talks about life-sucking technologies. It talks about "soundproofed, happy life" inside sentient homes harboring an evil telos. Nevertheless it also talks specifically about the highly rated inner core of family life: the children's nursery, the very place where rapacious commodification was most hidden and most cherished. The place where not only childhood was kept alive but where parents bought and paid dearly for the commercialization of childhood and the wild ravages of hype and craze.
Thematic rooms are still all the rage, one could buy in the SW age everything from Chewbacca bed sheets and pillows to Jedi light-saber lamps. The management and nucleonic thermostats, odor banks and the iridium sponge servo-brains in this house of the future are made to sound like the innermost futuristic wishes of a new generation parents wanting the best for their children. The nursery room is a veritable virtual economy engine that exists just in order to produce and materialize consumer wishes, a self-serving, turning-itself-into-a-perfect-family-room-environment, described under the motto of the company as "soft automaticity". Soft(ware?!) automaticity defines this new environment as geared towards education, entertainment and therapeutic purpose. You can't refused it because it is the very best. Grass, dirt, air, scent can be easily designed and reproduced and simulated using electro-and encephalographic key signals from the brains of your own children. And children are not just blank slates. Pirates, Robin Hood, Wizard of OZ, Hansel and Gretel are all being signaled and materialized by the children with the help of the subservient nursery machinery. But in this competitive fairy tale programming environment, nothing can match the brutal idea of African wilderness. And this wilderness and bestiality is none other than the living red claws and teeth of the African Veldt. There are many Veldt's but this mid-century homespun Veldt was a primary educational tool of modern natural history pedagogy. It got preserved and mounted as a diorama of Teddy Bear Patriarchy by taxidermists such as Carl Akeley, described in fine detail and deep insight by Donna Haraway. More closer to home, the African giraffe (no taxidermy this time just a mold) still advertised the reopening of the Romanian Natural History Museum in 2011 sticking out its head FX in mid city center Bucharest.
Hyper-realism and enhanced reality may have started as a taxidermic technique. But to en-liven reality, animals had to bite and work hard fixed for life after death. For life to be life-like after death, it had to show its fangs, to growl and prepare to jump on you. The African Veldt has been shown to be a perfect 'natural' reality engine, combining human and non-human chemical products and synthesizing smells of the water hole, the antelope, the swirling vultures and the howl of the jackal. Already a concoct made up of all these disparate natural elements is deployed from a cultural zoological repertoire enhanced by hunting, exhaustion and danger. The ultimate realism of virtual reality builds up on a very palpable and concrete environmental reconstruction, that is being fashioned after a particular kind of Euro-American fantasy of the African ecosystem. The effect of the real is not just any kind of natural special effect, just the conifer waving in the wind, just the perfect shade of the palm tree - it mimics a particular historical tropical grassland biome in this case: the (field) Veldt. And when that settles, we can enter the veldt as a reminder of both colonial lore and a recently primordial(ized) vision of a hominid home. "Back to Africa" is fostering a new kind of reinsertion into the trophic landscape, as Western safari travelers realized they could become food just like hominds and other primates where food in the past for the vultures and the great felines. As part of 20th century paleontological history, the hominid past in Africa is itself a very recent discovery, displacing a former focus on Asia and Europe as the mother-continent, when initially ignored South African remains of the so-called Taung Child where finally taken into account. This raw living scenery is spelled out in particular safari terms of a living-biting fantasy placed without much geographic precision somewhere in wilderness of Africa. The animals inhabiting this indeterminate region are big, charismatic wildlife species of Africa that became logo's and mascots since at least 100 years, as fighting emblems for every environmental protection campaigns. Everybody else, the African Kenyans, Tanzanians and South Africans are being kept at a safe distance from the veldt or increasingly mentioned just as poachers and rebels. Filming and exhibiting Africa as the wild continent satisfies a kind of grisly pornoecologic pleasure replaying countless lion attacks, crocodile mauling gnu's and cheetah slow-motion reruns. This snuff wildlife programming from a distance, inside the Western nursery persists as a reality TV loop of blood lust and raw living excitement. The Veldt story had several endings, generally quite family-unfriendly. In the subsequent versions it was slightly changed and at least a bit softened (because it didn't have a happy ending at all) in having both parents getting psychiatric treatment after their shocking African experience (if you can call that soft!). In this initial version the ending was even more final. No Tarzan to help them, the parents get seemingly eaten alive by the animal monsters spawned by their own children's imagination. But hey, who would expect even a couple of endangered monsters to willingly evacuate their virtual Savannah reservation? This initial proto-cyberspace nursery conspires with the children/hackers in an oedipal coup, with both parents trapped inside a very scary and suddenly unfriendly home-made Veldt world. In every ending, the parents already come too late. In a post Dr Spock expert parenting world, the usual monstrous props and fiendish children can be turned on the hunters and trainers themselves (the parents, the engineers, the baas), for these future children will literally befriend and co-habit this wild nature of deadly realism and familiar beasts. Hardware (the machine ticking and churning personal data behind our back) becomes indistinguishable from wilderness, technical acumen and bush skills are interchangeable in a soft territory that cannot and does not merely go away and switch itself off. Val Plumwood writes in her powerful retelling of a crocodile attack (from The Ultimate Journey, 2000) on herself in 80s Australia, when Crocodile Dundee's characters where the new survivor macho types, that human supremacist culture in the West has always denied its place in the food chain. Horror stories often derive their visceral horror from the fact that intangible human actors/predators/hunters are becoming prey as part of this food chain, realizing finally that they are also meat for other species:
Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sand flies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria.
This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food.
