Getting Natural

The top floor of the Frankfurt branch of the Kong Excelsior glowed in a halogen halo formed by the late November fog. Looking out into the gloom, she caught his glance in the reflection of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Champagne glass in hand, he strode over to her with a raised eyebrow. She wasn’t in the mood for flirting.

“Lovely solo tonight. It’s Lisa, right?”

“Right. Thanks. And you’re?”

“Peter.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Yes. Nice.”

An awkward pause. He just waited. Despite having lived in Germany for over eight years, she still found it surprising how even the most laden lapses in conversation wouldn’t phase any of her German conversation partners. He tried a more intellectual second attempt.

“So I had a question for you. About rehearsals.”

His English was practically accent free. She guessed he was one of the bankers, but it was hard to tell. The weave of his suit — the trendy Dutch variety with embedded proximity sensors and microfibers — fluxed from herringbone to hound’s tooth. He smelled of new money, but he was German: only very few German executives at Kong Excelsior Frankfurt were high ranking; the majority were underlings of Chinese and British vice presidents. If he was with the bank, he was a hotshot.

“Rehearsals?”

“Yes. As I understand it, the holographs are programmed with generative systems to create interactive feedback loops with your movements. Does this mean that they learn and therefore get better with every rehearsal?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s right.”

“OK — that’s what I thought. The problem is: how does the choreographer know when its enough?”

“What’s enough?”

“When it’s enough time in rehearsal. Theoretically, the holograph’s learning curve is infinite. How would your choreographer know when the holograph had reached its best performance?”

There it was again. The Teutonic obsession with quantification. How many times had she had precisely these sorts of conversations after a show in Germany. Never a sense of wonderment; always a need to know how it worked. And what could she say anyhow? The so-called “best” performance of a generative system based on an artificial intelligence algorithm was an evasive ideal; a fictional construct. How could she begin to explain the meaninglessness of the concept of a “best” performance when the very notion of its value was completely invisible to an algorithm?

“The choreographer just knows based on her intuition.”

“Ah ha. I had a feeling it would be something irrational like that.”

This seemed to satisfy his curiosity. Another pause ensued. She let her mind drift and sipped her gin and tonic. It had been a long four years working in the shadow of Kong Excelsior. The funding the bank had provided for the holographic project had been excessively generous and had allowed the creative director extreme liberties and privileges in scouting talent. It was rumored that the bank would retain the entire engineering team as well as a slew of patents after the project’s conclusion.

Over the years, her sense of disillusionment had grown considerably; whereas it seemed the software engineers had landed a longterm post-project career opportunity, the dancers were out on a limb. From a choreographic perspective, the only logical extension of the project involved touring with the holographic shows throughout Greater China, a prospect which had financial incentives but few cultural perks.

Her curious conversation partner emptied his champagne glass and absentmindedly stroked the lapels of his shimmering suit jacket. Lisa became conscious that her feelings of impending obsolescence had resurfaced and taken solid form, in no small part thanks to Peter’s prodding about the holograph. The creeping sensations of the panic nibbled at her awareness. Since The Crash of 2017 she had been experiencing bouts of social anxiety. It didn’t help that she caught him scanning the contours of her dress with his eyes.

“If you’ll excuse me…”

She crossed the room headed towards the toilets, setting her empty tumbler on a wafer-thin graphene cocktail table.

She stood facing the mirrored wall above the polished steel sinks and took deep breaths. In and out. The expensive Chinese tiles fluxed their orthogonal geometry at the edges of her peripheral vision.

Her mind raced on memories. 2017 had been the year when hyperinflation finally hit Germany, having swallowed up Greece, Ireland and Spain in the years before. North America had followed suit, having introduced the Amero with catastrophic results. The global financial picture was reshuffled faster than anyone had expected. The lion’s share of the social market economies of continental Europe became subsidiary interests of the Chinese. Small pockets of aristocracy survived in Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg. Some European corporate buyouts happened, mostly in the UK and The Netherlands. Meanwhile the largest Silicon Valley companies executed massive buyouts of US government debt. Facebook, Apple and Google had more or less equal shares of the American system. The media had naturally spun it as a win for the American businessman.

In this climate, an artist’s ability to interface with bankers had become the essential professional skill. In Lisa’s reality as an expat dancer in Germany it simply changed the nature of her stress. The financiers of her dance company’s productions before The Crash had been dominated by state money and infusions from the booming German car industry. After The Crash, the subsequent reorganization had the banks shift into a position of cultural dominance. The effect on the dance community was a political cleansing. With a single-patron system dominated by Chinese money the agenda became wholly technocratic.

She knew she was alone with her ruminations in the company. Most of her fellow dancers were happy enough to be employed dancing without having to worry about the financial machinations of the company and the bank. In Lisa’s case, as a star soloist with an unused Harvard economics degree, she had an unusual level of access to the internal gossip. Few had seen the coming holographic revolution being tied to contemporary dance. She remembered the early prototypes. A closed-door demo presented at one of the dance company’s quarterly publicity spectacles during an invitation only press conference. Something from a specialist generative graphics shop invited from the Bitcoin Freestate of Berlin Kreuzberg. Vectors of polygons shifting in the vapors of a fog machine, the swirls of the fog forming eddies around the muscular arms of a break dancer.

Deep breaths. In and out. She tried to calm her thoughts and focus on her body. She entered a stall and loosened the zipper on her dress. Its luminescent microfiber slowly winked out as the zipper was also a dimmer control. Free of her dress, she stretched, raising her arms up, fingertips high into the stall’s shallow volume. Closing her eyes, a wave of gratitude washed over her. She had a private name for these cool down sessions. It was a superstition she’d had since she was a kid. Whenever her body was not directly physically touching any sort of digital technology. Her private name for it was ‘getting natural’ and she’d found it was the best way to calm her nerves. She felt her heart rate returning to something like normal. Her mind slowly emptied of the machinations of international finance. A singular idea formed in the space of her newfound clarity.

There was a desperation, an urge in the technocracy to get closer to embodiment, to flesh. The manifestation of the corporation into the corporeal. This somatic connection she knew as a dancer: it was a rare trace of lifeblood in a system that had become pervasively prosthetic. She exhaled, bringing her arms down to her side, then around herself in an embrace. Hugging the lifeblood.