The Computer-Forward Cyberpunk Icons of Eurythmics
- One minute read - 213 words
Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart on a train in 1986, Stewart working a Tandy 200.
Look at these cyberpunk heroes. He’s collapsed after the time-tunnel brought them back to this era, reading one of these “books” that he read about on his PersoComp in school. Here, in the 20th century, he’s going to read about an artist he heard about in a holofilm once. She remains focused on the mission and is using this century’s primitive PersoComp – in this era they call it a Tandy 200 – to determine details about her assassination target in BASIC.
The Tandy 200, ready for its close-up.
In all seriousness, in Reagan/Thatcher 1986 she’s programming (synthesizer timings?) or taking notes while riding on a train. He’s mirrorshaded-out like a William Gibson assassin.
There’s really not much else I can add to how awesome Eurythmics were and still are. Catching their videos (or Bowie’s or Prince’s) back then was like seeing a show at MoMa or Cooper-Hewitt or the Whitney tunneled 50 years backward in time to early MTV. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I knew, even then, that it was art. Just listen to those adversarially timed hand-programmed synthesizers in some sort of technological dialectic with modernity itself at the opening of “Sweet Dreams.”