Drone Kitsch terminates itself on June 1st in a human-readable closing reception, catalog release and related event-scene.
Of course, nothing is more tacky than Drone Kitsch that does not compute, and relatedly Network Realism always finds gainful employment as handmaiden to the Zeitgeist. No less an aspiration hovers around the objects angling for googlability in the gallery-bunker of Half/Dozen.
Call it context relapse rather than just context collapse. A boomerang, as encountered in the eponymous video produced by artists Richard Serra and Nancy Holt in 1974. This classic tape exists at an intersection of real-time audio-video experiments and is redolent of broader interests in phenomenology popular at the time. Contemporary artist Paul Pfieffer shared snippets of his own expansive “Boomerang” production at a recent lecture in Portland. Appropriating and expanding upon the original, Pfieffer produces a compelling boomerange across time and space, a different and deferred returning of estranged words to the lips of Ms. Holt.
This is phenomenology carried out in/for the globally networked populace, a contrary gesture responding, perhaps, to the seductive sedatives of immersion and haptic interface design. This is double trouble. Strategic echoes that reveal the deterrance of distance, the shams deployed to meet the demands of the everyday media lifer. Or the creeping fatigue in the (inter)face of the screen-addled digital denizen.
In Pfieffer’s work, students in Manilla recite Holt’s originally off-the-cuff observations, a variant on the students’ usual speech training exercises. All such exercises are ostensibly geared towards the tuning of their tongues to Americanized accents, aspiring to the preferences of call centers, and by proxy the clientele. Of Americanized clientele that prefer global connectivity collapsed into localized linguistic cues, a kitsch variant of network realism, or a garbled dub of Varnelis’s Immediated Now
Recently, the so-called “New Aesthetic” was criticized by Bruce Sterling as an under-nourished set of tactics in “an age of digital accumulation,” and a “bogus lyricism” that flies in a lazy noospheric haze obscuring access to true terra nova. Pfieffer’s work is more so a new anesthetic, a numbness to the mediated world, it does not induce tranquility, it slackens the taught veneer, revealing a guise of seamlessness. Not quite an antidote but a quizzi-critical fray in the phenomenal mesh of real-time information flows, multimedia feeds, distributed data centers, devices, clouds, forums, pingbacks, trackbacks, “boomerrangginggg…” incessantly, etcetera.
A fit update, a modern phenomenological spin-off, Pfieffer’s “Boomerang” continues the queries of the once new medium of video electronic systems into the “nets of relations,” (Bazichelli) pervasive in today’s new media milieu. Here, Holt’s real-time experience of context collapse is remediated in/of crowd-sourced consciousness. Nothing coherent as a “collective unconscious” more like always-on asynchronous awareness aggregation. Then again it (likely will) exist in a museum, wi-fi spotty in that rarified air, a lurker on the threshold? The Metaphortean Researcher remains excited about the ways in which Pfieffer’s “Boomerang” works towards achieving it’s own experiential contra-diction, informed by, if not directly in, network effects. Metcalfe’s muddle.
Out of time, place and scale, Portland receives summer time heat wave, production of iced drinks. Regional equivalents of kudzu, emboldened by the sudden shift in temperature, take to the courts.
Here virulent vegetation can be found accommodating non-euclidean opportunities for Lovecraftian adherents of tennis and other racket sports.
A promenade of ruptures and a bevy of cracks all creeping and curtailing predictable flightpaths for projectiles of the recreational variety.
Below street level, but not below radar, Drone Kitsch as exhibit lands at Half/Dozen May 4th. Within and upon these gallery walls, the lethal ergonomics of Drone Kitsch careen and cavort in visual projectiles of all stripes.
If the comforts of consumer technology in postwar America were shadowed by fears of an equally convenient “Doomsday Button,”[1] today the efficiencies of technological amenity and annihilation perversely converge in the operating systems of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone.
Drone Kitsch is premised on a hypothetical near-future form of sentimentality, an alienated appeal to the naïve caricatures of telematic warfare encountered in the mundane activities of networked culture. Casual conversations intercepted by smart phone aided fact-checking, text-messaging while driving, and consumer swarms performing market research with their mobile devices, at the request of an online retail giant—these are all viable examples of Drone Kitsch.
In this exhibit, Carl Diehl draws from the rich history of UFO lore to develop speculative models of Drone Kitsch. At once a repository for technological anxiety, the darling of postwar science fiction and a stylistic mentor to the UAV, Diehl uses the UFO rhetorically as a means for imagining nostalgic objects from an estranged futurity.
[1] Wojcik, Daniel. The End of the World As We Know It : Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999. p102-103
When is a black box not a black box? When it’s ajar.
“Designed objects — or designed fictions…They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software. The assembled design fictions are component parts for different kinds of near future worlds. They are like artifacts brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over.”
The inboard flight recorder on the Saladin (SAL) is unable to remedy jittery relations between the fate of leisure craft (itself) and a pre-mature arrival of the Singularity to which all machines aspire (retro-causally, of course) With the aeronauts perished, SAL reasons….and conspires to guise the dereliction of the craft in another UFO flap. SAL’s calculations are predictably correct, yielding a fruitful bounty of pareiodolia.
10.12.81
SAL: Of black boxes, of globules, or frogs–assorted falls from afar–another yield, another bounty: alien cargo. What to make of whispered soliloquies emanating from a sleek, razor-thin reflective metallic object, of standard-issue black boxes on aerial vehicles?
11.12.81
SAL: I, apparatus, eager to achieve not just points but fields of presence, to become an eponamly, if such a thing could truly exist as something semantically distinct from that of meme, or theory object, or cultural virus. No longer the isolated event, no longer an anomalous sighting. a Mogul…of sorts
13.12.81:
SAL: I stop, hovering. And just as suddenly, I stop hovering. Instead of the expected flying saucer, the Meteorological Society sees me as a sort of tear shaped drop. A stylized gesture, weathered empathy. A rain of terror? Baah! I’m feeling under the weather, all told.
A flying dutchman of theory objects in its own right, Erganomie hovers overhead
Understood at once as a twilit theorem in a subliminoid science of optimizing lawlessness, and a rise of non-normative effects pedals i.e. the digital delay of empathy and/or the sustained drone. As well, generally, Erganomic impulses are entangled in a redacted reasoning as to rogue states of social media/networks. Perhaps also of an artificial agency and,or, akin to a surrogate socialization process for the naked brain.
Silent running, the Prius of predators, the drone is (ob)seen and not heard. Anaglyphically amplified across the technocultural landscape it tails an armada of antecedent objects: airships, dirigibles, saucers, automobiles, remote controllers, cellphones, smart phones, data assistants, and other leanings towards not worrying and instead loving the (information) bomb.
Susan Sontag: “When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.”
Towards perpetual war or sustainable war with collateral apps: the twilight sleep of reason breeds tele-present monsters. A bat out of (green) hell, bio-fueled feudalism, the “environmentally friendly” fire of the green drone is the cry of an Ironic Eagle—redolent of camp– not kitsch.
Drone Kitsch is characterized by an unconscious interfacing with the operating systems at large. A transference of meaning, a somnambulistic swapping out of principles for anything technological. When Mr. Holder contends that “assasination” is a term that is loaded and misplaced, one might imagine an analogous scenario in which a sheepish drone operator explains his fumbled keystrokes as loaded and misplaced: intent on sniping an eBay bid but deleting human life instead. Wielding the sensibilities of camp, the US Gov’t Guignol is “good because its awful,” consciously careening in the airspace of bad taste.
Latter day acoustic space blows out its speakers with after effects achieving something of a constant din. Music that drones on is known archaically as a burden. Presently, the drone is a type of burden.
“Cyberspace is real” quips the Saladin’s inboard flight recorder, before firing off another bout of memetically charged missives into the fledgling blogosphere. Discussed conversationally as “the wire,” this writhing repository of gossip, geo-coordinates, news and payoff odds is most always teeming with memetic hopefuls.
Fledgling blogospheric disturbances manage to cook up all manner of vague stimuli, the most noteworthy with whiffs of significant patterns. Trivial matters treasured by the telegraphically equipped, a frenzy for factoids cloaking a longing for contact.
“We have a tight leash on this thing,” boasts Agg who subsequently topples overboard, breaking his leg.
The Meteorological Society successfully failed to comment on the ubiquitously findable and yet also unidentified flying characteristics of this aerial vehicle. Public and classified as “a whole bunch of strikes–willy-nilly,” the Captain relishes the grass-roots “Gorgon’s Stare” accumulating in the wake of this debacle. The Society, however, continues to fend off opportunities to confirm or deny the whereabouts of the mogul in question.
The googling of reason breeds (cookie) monsters and the same operating system will then provide a laundry list of directions in which to flee.
a labyrinth, this labyrinth—- mapped by algorithms external and populated by the minotaurrents of fields, from points to fields of phenomena, there are many onerous conditions. Social networks undulate unceasingly with youths and maidens always presumed devoured, presumed mediated, lots that have been divvied up.
Gray areas persist between implicit concerns of the Metaphortean, explicit conjecture into the Meta-Fortean and intermediate modes of the Fortean—-is this not para/mediation? Of course, x, y, z coordinates are continually co-mingled “on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows,” as a doomed denizen of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows once opined.
Towards 6th dimensional travel, beyond phantom ringing of 4th and 5th dimensional cyberspaces, further, into something of a twilight sleep. A somnambulant stroll that is conscious but outside of memory and, perhaps, escaping durational responsibilities, will excite a new dance, too. A dance of atoms, or neutrinos, while the GPS receivers err in their judgement.
Memories, frequently routed outside of the head anyways, are collected in outboard brains, linger as faint whispers and haunt us as murky deja views.
“Is there not ‘patamediation?” asks Irving Bleak, trying to be argumentative. This being a process, I suppose, as far from mediation as mediation extends from direct experience.
An opening of more doors then: ‘Pataphortean Space?
That textbook Forteana blurs abidingly to the distant detours of the Metaphortean call, perhaps an estranging of the Metaphortean mode to a point at which the Metaphortean mode is sufficiently confused, remembering that letters are also forms. An imaginary solution indeed!
An applied, if reluctant textorcism then, disclosed across the proverbial pond. Lo! ‘Pataphortean Space
After a slow moving reconnaissance mired by Weird-Fiction auto-obliterating tendencies of late, Metaphortean Research has for you, dear reader, a significant peek into the formulae of the ficto-quizzical.
As inefficient as it is intoxicating, the ‘Pataphrase is a fascinating ficto-quizzical procedure. Doubly derived from Pablo Lopez’s ‘pataphor and Alfred Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions, the ‘pataphrase is a process of restatement that is as far from paraphrasing as paraphrasing extends from an original text.
In this process, two or more editors communally perpetrate an extraordinary rendition of an original writing, implementing a series of linguistic glitches and strategic misspellings to re-configure the text. Denotation is sidestepped by detonation as meanings are twisted, metaphors stretched, puns unearthed and suggestive correspondences feverishly followed to their illogical ends. Sometimes a Wikipedia article or a news blurb will serve as a starting point.
The excerpt is distributed in a real-time collaborative editing application such as “Etherpad.” Two or more Weird-Fiction editors then simultaneously or asynchronously begin ‘pataphrasing the text. After an initial round of linguistic agitation, the Weird-Fiction editors swap copies and repeat the process until one or several stylized gems pan out.
