When thinking about the topic of technology, music and body, i come up with the video i watched during my History of Jazz class last semester:
It's the music video for Rockit by Herbie Hancock; the song is recorded in his electronic music album Future Shock during the 80s. During that time both the music was quite a blow in that Herbie exploited revolutionary special effects, including scratching and other turntablist techniques, which formed the DJ culture in the following decades,combined with electronic keyboard and drum synthesizers. The music video was even more shocking with its portrait of mechanized mannequins mimicking the life of human beings. Disassembled legs and torsos of the mannequins move around and fulfilling the tasks of everyday life. The body parts are animated by electrical signals and controlled by mechanic arms, the procedure of which indicates the absence of brain and emotion. The only part that relates to the real human body is the television presenting Herbie Hancock's own hands playing the keyboard, but the television got smashed at the end of the video, symbolizing the last trace of humanity is destroyed.
There is a contradiction of attitude shown in Herbie Hancock's creation. Rockit on one hand celebrating a whole new genre and discovery of possibility in music, but on the other hand revealing the horror for the possibility of a dehumanized future. The music became a hit and played repeatedly in pubs for both reasons, with the latter become paradoxically the obsession of contemporary people.
This kind of obsession can be more easily seen in the popularity of the electrical band Daft Punk. Here's a video of their live performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9MszVE7aR4
The members of Daft Punk only show up in public wearing the robot mask, never revealing their real appearance. Interestingly they claimed themselves robots that turned from human beings. The dance cannot be more appropriate for their music, being highly repetitive, fragmented and angular, detached from any kind of personal expression. The human bodies are represented as being homogenized, in almost a religious way, under the higher order of electrical signals and sounds.
Comparing those two videos, which are 20-30 years away, we see a lot of similarities of expression, that electrical music being de-personalized and bodies being detached from both visceral and cerebral functions. Both of them become enormously popular no matter what their stances are in their music making because they both visualized and audiblized the fetish for the mechanized corporeality.
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