Man & Machine Orchestra
Man & Machine: A Naked Robotic Love Story is the tale of Godfried Willem-Raes, a pipe-smoking frazzle-haired dreamer who designs musical robots and his longtime lover and performance artist Moniek Darge.
They make a fascinating pair. The very sort of couple that’s proof there’s someone out there for everyone, no matter how strange or eccentric they may be.
They also get naked when they perform to “conduct” the various robots Godfried has created.
Filmmaker Jesse Roesler followed the couple to create the documentary Man & Machine: A Naked Robotic Love Story. We tracked him down to find out what it was all about, and why you need to be naked to conduct a robot orchestra.
Risky Fuel: Your film’s name is Man & Machine: A Naked Robotic Love Story. What’s that all about?
Jesse Roesler, director: We first started filming with Godfried and Moniek back in 2005 and it was pretty much strictly about holy crap, this guy makes robots and he’s made an entire orchestra and he constructs it in the nude using sonar Doppler radar. It’s all very scientific and crazy and out there, but it all makes perfect sense once you learn the technology. But the more time I spent with them, the more I learned about Moniek, his long-term partner, the more I learned about their creative endeavours and the story really sort of shifted, it was originally about the music but it became more and more about their relationship and how you collaborate as a romantic couple.
What’s fascinating to me is that these people found each other. Like, they’re cosmically made for each other.
Absolutely. That’s kinda how we built the story. They’re both kind of out there doing their own super-specific creation of these bizarre musical instruments or performances. They found each other and seem absolutely perfect. And there’s probably no one out there who would seem as absolutely perfect for each other as these two.
So what does the robotic orchestra actually sound like?
It’s pretty chaotic. It’s not melodic necessarily or particularly rhythmic. But it’s also very striking and you can definitely see the interplay that’s happening with the body movement and the sounds that are being made. If you never heard what type of music this is it’s probably an experience you can’t be prepared for. It’s very different.
Godfried was initially kicked out of music school for being, “Absolutely not musically gifted.” What do you think?
I think, being a documentary filmmaker you get to spend some time with some very fascinating people, but there are very few people that I’ve met in my life that I consider to be an absolute genius and Godfried Wilmer is one of those. His mind is working at a speed and a level that is just awesome to behold. And I get that “not musically gifted” in a traditional sense, because he’s not. He even says that so much of music is about the rhetoric, and you have to spend so much time repeating these things over and over again to learn how to play an instrument in a very specific way. And his idea is to just get rid of that. I think that’s fascinating. Let a machine do that. And the human still gets to do the creative part, but the machine does the repetitive task part. I think that’s brilliant. But I get that a traditional musician sees that and goes “How can you even compare this to what we’re doing because it is so different?”
Part of what’s fascinating to me is how completely unhinged the music is. It’s like a newly created universe.
Their music is out there. It’s not something people put on a headset and jam out to. It’s not like people are driving to work in the morning and rocking out to Man & Machine Orchestra tunes. It’s not about that.
Let’s talk about the robots. What do they actually look like? How do they make their sounds? How does everything work?
I think the kind of the coolest thing about how they built these robots is they follow very philosophically with his being nude and using radar. The robots are also nude in that he doesn’t cover up any of the wiring or mechanics. He wants it all to be visible. So every robot, when you’re up close, you get to see how ever little piece functions and works. It’s like having x-ray glasses on a computer. If you could see every synapse firing, that’s what this is equivalent to. Some of them are incredibly technologically advanced. He’s created, for wood instruments like a flute or a trumpet, like, a shape of a mouth you know when you’re trying to make that sound right? He’s using latex and rubber to recreate the inside of the mouth and how he pushes air through that thing. So he’s really taken it and done some really innovative thinking to figure out how these things will work.
Explain why he has to be naked.
There’s definitely a couple reasons. The first he’ll cite is that it’s completely scientific. He’ll put it that if you use the same technology that cops use in radar guns for speeding, if you covered your vehicle in a knit sweater the radar wouldn’t be able to get your speed because the radar needs to bounce off of a reflective surface. So it’s the same thing. If you were to be dressed and moving in front of the radar, yeah it would still probably pick up on the movement, but it wouldn’t be as precise as if it’s reflecting off of human skin. The naked body reflects the radar better. So there’s the scientific reason. But also there’s the philosophical thing. They would do demonstrations back in the ‘60s and ‘70s just because they’re of that mindset of the ‘60s that “Why are people so conservative about having nudity in public?” They were part of a demonstration on one of the beaches in Belgium where 20 or 30 people decided well, ‘Why should I have to wear clothes on the beach?’ It’s a very European attitude, but I know they were part of those early demonstrations. But I know that they believe why should we hide it? But it’s also in terms of the dance and the movement, he really believes that the human body is a machine, so just as he believes that he wants the robots to be naked, he wants you to see every muscle, every movement of your body. Why would a dancer cover that up? Because that’s essentially what’s making the body work. So that’s also what he’s seeing, the human body as a machine.
When you were putting the film together, what was the debate like when you had to decide, “OK, how much penis are we going to put in this?”
I still haven’t made the TV tape edit yet. Like, what do you do? Do you animate the blue dot to cover that up? That’s cheesy. And I didn’t want to cover it up and I wanted it to be how it is. So honestly I just wanted to present it as it was in all of its… it’s shocking to some people, most people probably at first, but it’s as you learn, as I learned from just being around them, after the initial first minute or two of going “Holy crap, they’re naked” then all of sudden you don’t notice anymore and it just goes away and it’s just part of who they are. I don’t know. I think it’s interesting and I think that’s part of why they do it too and you realize very soon there’s an initial shock but once you get used to it you just go, “Oh, this is how this works.”
What’s it like watching Godfried in his studio building things?
If you’ve seen any of the Frankenstein movies you get that feeling a little bit from the opening minute or two of the film. It’s like he is in the zone and he’s on to something and he knows exactly what he’s doing and there’s no way he can be distracted because as with any creative task painting or photography you get so immersed in the moment that everything else falls away. I think that there’s something kind of beautiful about that too and I definitely sense that being in the workshop with him that when he’s on to something his mind is working at an amazing rate. He has this all strategically and very scientifically planned out because he’s a musician but he’s also a performer and an engineer and he taught himself how to weld and there’s just so much knowledge into everything they do in a lot of different disciplines. For me, for example, I think I’m fairly creative in what I do, but I’m not a technician in the way that he is. So the fact that he can work both sides of his brain like that is pretty amazing.
What’s this movie really about? Musical rebellion, a whole new type of music? Or is this really just a love story?
I think for me it’s really two things and the first thing and the reason I was drawn to it was the idea of the authenticity of the work you’re creating as an artist and it’s like kind of a classic battle for anyone doing creative work. It’s like art vs. commerce. Like, how much do you pull back your creative inclinations to make your work more palatable to a larger general audience? I think it’s super-admirable that they have kind of never wavered from their creative vision and if people think that it’s wacky and out-there that’s totally fine. They’re just creating from this super-authentic space and I think that’s awesome and I think it’s something that a lot of commercial artists could learn from.
And I think the other component is definitely the love story. Also, no matter how out there you are, no matter how much you think you need to conform, there’s always going to be somebody else out there who hasn’t conformed if you haven’t and it might seem lonely at first but you’re going to find that person that also stuck to their guns and was kind of the outcast maybe for a little while. But when those two outcasts find each other it’s probably more meaningful.
Risky Fuel 