Gob Squad and The Borg
Till M?ller-Klug once collaborated with Gob Squad on a project. Here he tells all and explains why Gob Squad are rather similar to the Borg from Star Trek.
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| The word collective makes me think of endlessly debating Dungarees. Or about the Borg, an evil insatiable Cyborg organism from Star Trek that attempts to assimilate everything that it can get its hands on. Or even Gob Squad. In the 70s, collectives were widespread but today they have become a rare species. Instead, millions of mini-bosses populate the working world, their staff reduced to one single person, namely themselves. Being ones’ own Boss is being a temp with open prospects, it is unforgiving and masochistic, the choice of victims for workplace bullying not exactly copious. Like the hero in the film „Fight Club“, who punches himself upstairs, the self employed creature tries to claw his own way up the ladder of success or at least cling on to the current rung. In light of this contemporary societal phenomenon and business environment, groups like Gob Squad should really be swamped with job applications and lots of similar collectives should be founded. Sarah said to me once that one reason to join a group is to assuage the fear of having to make and then perform something on one’s own. In contrast, if the outcome of a piece of group work is not so great, one can always say, “Oh well, I was great but the others didn’t quite pull it off”. Such statements stem of course, from an early phase of assimilation, where the individual and collective brain cannot be clearly differentiated; a borderline that is increasingly lost during the collectivisation process of both the Borg and Gob Squad. Today, in place of this, a complex unmanageable mesh of life and work relations blink and proliferate, kilometres of cable, ten years of know-how, their own hi-tech equipment and hundredweights of group-owned junk (Gob Squad’s basement store in Podewil was a unique, involuntary installation), pictures of couples, of new lives and the whirring gyration of human satellites from circles of friends and acquaintances, to which I too belong. I was once absorbed into the group core from my personal orbit. Together we developed the live sound piece Little White Lies for the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1999. I experienced the temporary assimilation for three weeks. It struck me firstly that the hedonistic aspect was not as forthcoming as I thought and perhaps hoped it would be. To put it another way: we worked on it a lot, from morning till sometimes late at night and all this on an equally poor wage for everyone. Later it was clear to me that most of the Gob Squaddies did not see it that way at all, because for them the division between work and private life had long since been blurred. Because I had been less entangled in the amorphous collective organism, I initially rated the time together in the rehearsal room as work in the old fashioned sense. From day to day I was ensnared ever more in the collective pattern of production and life. I was convinced that the greater part of the working time actually consisted of productively hanging out with each other, especially at the early stage of the project. We talked about this and that, drank tea and beer, had barbeques, listened to music, watched videos, rummaged through flea markets and collections of old clothes and tinkered around with technical equipment and bits of junk. It would always return to the project but in the beginning it was never focussed in the sense of a master plan because in Gob Squad, there is no master. Similarly, I cannot remember placing votes or other nominally democratic rituals of decision-making. It proceeded seemingly without a plan. Everyone threw in whatever occurred to him or her during the rehearsals. If someone ran out of ideas, he or she would say less for a couple of hours or for a day, but resume again sometime later. Naturally, at times there was tension but it was rarely so about concrete work decisions. Absolutely no skirmishes arose about how much text or scenes someone should play, that was self regulated. I only remember one isolated, familial moan over the question of someone mothering too much. On the whole, it proved to be a shining example of British manners in hindrance of conflict and furtherance of communication. Without a boss or initial plan and apparently casually, an astonishingly precise product finally arose. That was a fascinating experience. There was never the feeling that the performance was the result of compromise. Instead of which I found “my” ideas realised, multiplied with those of the others and in the end, standing together on the stage. With their decentralised nervous system, Gob Squad and the Borg are extremely adaptable, toughened, capricious creative organisms. On their 10th birthday we experience the tender beginnings of their global and intergalactic dissemination. Graphic: Anette Schaefer |