This "important notice" is one of the operating instructions for The John Dillinger Computer, the name Richard Brautigan gave to the Com/Co communications operation inside the Invisible Circus. The notice sends the bearer through the physical space of Glide Church to the communication room on the second floor of the back building, behind the sanctuary, where the paper is to be delivered to Claude or Chester. It also asks the participant to begin counting from the moment the sheet is handed over and to report that number on arrival. The sheet is not merely informational; it turns the reader into a messenger and the building into a circuit. In this sense, The John Dillinger Computer was a performative simulacrum of a cybernetic organism, sending out instructions and receiving back poems, drawings, observations, and other human data as the event unfolded. It can also be seen as an early, handmade prototype of Brautigan’s later vision of “machines of loving grace”: not a real computer, but a comic, outlaw, paper-and-people machine for producing attention, connection, and feedback. |