Rev. Ivan Stang and Techno-Spirituality
Rev. Ivan Stang aka Douglass St.Clair Smith has spent time as a
filmmaker, animator, music video director, and advertising lackey. He
found his true calling, however, as the founder of the world's first
admittedly for-profit religion, the tongue-in-cheek Church of the
Subgenius. Built around the iconic image of J.T. "Bob" Dobbs, whose
smiling, pipe-smoking visage can be spotted everywhere from the opening
credits of Pee-Wee's Playhouse to the side walls of vandalized
warehouses, the Church has found its most solid base in the Internet (
http://www.subgenius.com/). Their website draws over 1,300 human
visitors a day and is roughly 650 megs in size. From the site, one can
join various SubGenius live chat devivals, watch the Church's "sacred"
video and 3D animation creations in video streaming, or hear any of "The
Hour of Slack" radio show episodes, in RealAudio. The "Websites of the
Gods" section points one to all collections of all weird website
collections. "In short," says Stang, "the Internet was sitting there
waiting for us to take it over, so we did. "Bob's" Trademark Face is
probably the most- ASCIIed graphic on the Net, alt.slack is one of the
busiest, craziest newsgroups around, and half of the people who invented
the Internet were dues-paying SubGenii when they were teenagers in the
80s. "After years of just getting by on the occasional Devo video and
sales of the Book of the Subgenius (still available in the obsolete
print format), Stang has found himself Pope of a world called
cyberspace, and to say that he is pleased with the wonders of technology
that have sprung from the net would be a massive understatement; "My
films and me were too weird and lazy for Hollywood," he grins (via
e-mail), "but we can now control all reality from the inside of a Power
Mac 7500." -- Ken Lieck
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Stang will be in town for the South by Southwest Multimedia/Interactive
Festival, participating in forums addressing Techno-spirituality and
smart computers as well as the multimedia aspects of the Church of the
SubGenius.
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