Ah the digital hinterland, where romantics produce glowing transhuman narratives while datacynics spawn dystopian cyberpunk. Both seek to code a culture of cool, to compile a real-time analysis of a program thats already running- the executable of societal transformation. There are misgivings on both sides, what will be lost in digitally translating the analog equations of humanity? Will society endure its bitmapping? Can a civilization of the corporeal conceptualize or relate to a realm of the virtual, a space beyond the automonic, an informatic identity field?

Which brings us to Daft Punk. Masked with impressive LED display helmets, Daft Punk manifests the visions of the transhumanists and the cyberpunks alike, rendering a pop music collective that appears to be robotic and human simultaneously. Their music investigates this problematic identity, wondering in its song titles whether it is Human After All orTechnologic. These questions are more than superficial or band specific. They consider the nature of the music Daft Punk produces, electronica. With a realiance of digital instruments, glitch sound aesthetics, loop and sample oriented lyrics, and steady, mechanistic beats Daft Punks expresses the rhythmic music of industry and electronic instrumentation. It is the interpretation of the electronic world as music, which appeals because of the machines penchant for rhythm to a sense of dance.

In a release of their recent live music, Daft Punk included a track entitled "Robot Rock/Oh Yeah." The piece is a perfect case study for the duos ubquitious meditation on the blurring line between humanity and its machine-model progeny, the robot. With a heavily distorted, mechanistic voice, the song begins by uttering a single phrase,rooooo-boooot. There is a pause, filled only by the track's crowd noise, cheers and applause. "Huuuuu-maaaaan" comes the response, in a similar, if not identically rendered mechanistic voice. Over the ensuing minute and a half, the two words become like flipsides of a coin, seemingly inreconciliable opposites that offer themselves, through emphatic inflections, as a sort of argument. "Robot" is the suggestion, and "human"is the retort. Syllabically, human is rendered long and garbled, perhaps an attempt to suggest its organic composition. Robot, is said the same way on every utterance except the first, as a quick two syllable reply, "ro-bot."

The argument is interestingly flawed. Though the "robot" sample makes sense in a "robotic" voicing, the "human" sample is also rendered "robotically" with the same electronic filtering employed on the robot clip. Rather than use, a "human" voice Daft Punk re-inscribes the human argument into an electronic articulation, suggesting that the argument is merely for show, having already reached a conclusion towards the electronic and robotic. Maybe this loading of the dice is symptomatic of the genre, electronica rendering the human robotic and in this way already knowing the answer before it even starts the debate. Or perhaps, the suggestion is that humanity is already robotic, and the robotic inherently human. They are the same voice, offering their constructed at one another as terms they only think are different, but are actually the same.

This last view of "Robot Rock / Oh Yeah" would be consistent with what happens in the course of the song, the slow coming together of the clip, with a rhythmic intensification of the speed of the argument until the terms are completely overlapping. At this moment of convergence, a beat develops, seeming born of the human-robot unity, and after a few more bars, a signature Daft Punk clip cuts into the argument, erasing the two terms, but suggesting that the by-product of human-robot convergence is music. Electronic music. The music of Daft Punk.

Much of Daft Punks work ponders these questions of digital identity and robotic humanism. As an insightful critic once pointed out, the robotic sounds of Daft Punk, particularly their treatment of voice, are inherently human creations- produced by humans who were imagining the robotic. In the simulated voices of robots, listeners will hear more human than robotic, because the voice patterns and frequencys are modeled on human speech to be understood by human ears. These voices are only styled robotic, not inherently mechanized or the speech of the electronic. In this way, we may understand Daft Punk more as a imagining of the robotic, and romance of the electronic, than an actual autonomous music of the programmable.

This would return us to an investigation of the aesthetics of the Daft Punk crew, wearing LED robotic helmets, and posing as robotic musicians, but ultimately human. They are as their own music states, "human after all." Which leaves something to be desired by those roaming the digital hinterland in search of answers, something else to be found and hoped for- namely, a music of the autonomous electronic, a music that is born of the digital unassisted by human considerations, a music that would indeed bring humanity more into a debate with its robotic other. But of course, by this point, we might no longer be human.