Birds of a Feather

Summer is arrived with a wave of brain addling heat –and so I will keep this post necessarily brief.  Brief and necessary, compelled by unknown mechanisms.  Truly,  I find myself pestered both passively and aggressively into continuing my reports on the ficto-quizzical agents of the Weird Fiction milieu.  So I’ll dredge up some tidbits now on the creature known as This Owl.

This Owl is purported to be omniscient, panopticonscious, densely networked and, at times, creepy as all hell. Rarely materialized into “humanoid” form at Weird Fiction event-scenes, yet always quick with reviews and anecdotes of any particular evening’s occurrences. Some audiences have reported hearing a faint fluttering of wings, incessant ringing of phones and other anomalous sounds.

While shy of a confirmed link, or two, there is reason enough to consider the “Mothman,” or “Bird man”  as an adjunct operative.  Zoological authorities will always laugh off any cryptid by pointing to a commonplace look-a-like.  In presence of Mothmania circa 1966 and various points onwards, many experts have cited the barn owl to quell anxious denizens of the West Virginian countryside.   Truly, the colossal corpus and red glaring eyes don’t compute with typical taxonomies of owls but the point here is not merely Fortean formulations on intermediacy.   Owls, especially the species inhabiting info-ecosystems, are most curious and perhaps paranormal creatures, to be wary of…period!

Visual associations aside, This Owl, like the Mothman (and so many other monstrous creatures) is also a sort of portent or omen of impending crises.  Alas, as noted, the heat is close at hand and my Metaphortean diagostics are greatly incapacitated  presently.  I will have to end here, taking cover in shadier climes for a spell.

Confusion as Nest

In China, “a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb,” is found.  A tomb that “had been undisturbed since it was created during the Ming dynasty four centuries ago” (Fortean Times, June 2009). Out of place artifacts persist in the excavation of ancient cities, while general displacement is rampant in modern metropolises by way of newfangled techno-accessories.

We are familiar with the Meanderthal, that wandering cyborg variant studied closely by Matthew Tiessen. Further analysis suggests the Meanderthal is in fact a megapod. Etymologically it is “large -footed” like its Bigfoot brethren, but emphasis here is on its carbon footprint, the sort sighted increasingly across e-wastelands. Alternately, we view the “pod” as vehicle or craft, the Meanderthal enclosed in the simultaneous environments of the Megapod.  Limited not just to the omnipresent iPod but all manner of other mobile tech…the mega pod/device as multitude become mesh…life in the cocoon.

Network culture by way of the megapod frees one from the immobility of desktop computing while promoting a local anesthesia, a numbness to the immediate world, as well. Worlds within worlds, cities within cities, echoes and splinter forms of Archigram’s insectoid armada and/or Martijn de Waal’s myspace urbanisms.

This is the tele-cocoon, lifeforce of the Meanderthal. Is there a next-level butterfly that will hatch one day? Insert post-human hybrids and signs of the Singularity here. Animals everywhere are drawn to urban environments to make their nests, a form of adaptation in hostile environments. Why should anyone wonder differently about bi-pedal humanoids seeking refuge in continuous partial attention?  Confusion is nest.

Exploding Views

Retrograde Remediation is a mode of moving backwards, or perhaps sideways, often (but not always) in the face of new media provocation. A medium re-framed in another form does not inherently necessitate a linear, forwards motion or mobilize, only, concerns of the market. Conceptual hacking of the remediation process can produce other hybrids, too. For instance database cinema, wherein computerization highlights valuable insight for the cinematic (in the hands of visionary cranks) Cinema subject to an identity crisis, realizing it is, and has always been, a database form– albeit one that has adhered to a stringent algorithm (or script). This hypermediacy in opposition to the dominant drive towards immediacy and efficiency in/of image production. Valid, convenient, these imperatives are— but denying so many parallel worlds and hybrid moments.

Exploded view diagrams isolate and arrest. A techno-taxidermy that sizes up perceived pathways for understanding of the complexities of so many mechanisms. A camera enters bullet time but does not reach escape velocity. Floating here, camera as carcass, a frozen fillet suspended for further analysis.

Weird Fiction operates on the innards of cinema, exploding narratives. A process not a product per se. Exploding narratives, then rummaging in real-time through the flotsam and flightpaths of hurtling audio-visual world/views. This is not guaranteed to produce novel forms of coherency or complexity but, as Irving Bleak claims “arational systems hold value,” too.

Imagine the mix as a live process of instantiating the cutting room floor, a perverse re-enactment of the discarding and refusal of data. Imagine any unnamed archivo-futurists, foraging this floor, thinking through their hands, piecing together dissociated knowledge. In any live milieu, ficto-quizzical or otherwise, music allows for more abstract associations while spoken words will fight for stubbornly literal visual returns. Words are not tied to their literal imaged counterparts, parallel worlds do exist! One can open up worlds by embracing the exploding view not as a finite map of known forms, of knowledge inventoried and complete. Instead as just that but also always a crisis ripe for re-viewing, an exploding ad infinitum, a gateway or nodal nook for z-access into on-going parallel processes. The logic of the loop, or stream of consciousness. At any rate, another procession of the damned

Puzzling the Ficto-Quizzical

Making haste on the offer to produce a field report on the emergent phenomenon, Weird Fiction, I will put audacity before caution and spell out this tedious tome! Puzzling out this motley crew of the self-proclaimed “ficto-quizzical”, I offer up some jig-saw pieces, albeit floating in mild confusion:

Weird Fiction are multivisionaries, and I offer this term at once for its obsolescent and optimistic capacities. Multivision was at one point a term for high end multi-projection audiovisual presentations produced with an armada of slide projectors. Today, multitude (the network) is an everyday occurrence, audio-visual phantasms are commonplace as Powerpoints and iPhone apps. Multivision (via analog electronics) is obsolete, and the technologies disappeared to storehouses and second-hand shops. Gone…but not forgotten, as outfits diverse as the Antiques Roadshow and Weird Fiction are a testament to! Yes, there are more uses than one for obsolete tech, more fates than e-waste, more possibilities than linear progressions, more weirdness in truth than fiction— as any follower of Metaphortean Space might sheepishly admit!

In tasking the Lovecraftian canon of nebulous sky-spawn and ancient curses, of forgotten cities and other dimensional entities a nerve is pinched techno-culturally. Weird Fiction tune in to telling tinglers:

Hertzian forces and Dead Media. Hertzian forces are intangible yet real, bombarding us always with information in the broadest sense…terrifying us with the promise that there is a weird world swirling just outside of human sensory awareness. Making one grateful for the sensory limitations of the human apparatus while, nonetheless, these limitations are continually reversed by way of new media!

Hertzian space is forgotten –but not gone! Taken for granted, lurking everywhere but out of sight. The premise of probing a poetics of Hertzian space, is put forward in Anthony Dunnes’ Hertzian Tales circa 1999. Antecedents of both the “hertzian” and the “tale” are of course ample three quarters of century before with wireless radio and the debut of the publication Weird Tales. As noted in Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, “most media historians designate 1922 as the year radio exploded into national sensation” (p.93)

Weird Tales, of course, was a less mass phenomenon yet authors including notably H.P. Lovecraft and oddly enough Tennessee Williams made literary appearances in this magazine that launched in 1923. Point is these tales were often punctuated with Hertzian horrors, or what scholar Manuel Aguirre terms “Cosmic Terror”

In The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism Aquirre trails a history of haunters, with “Cosmic Terror” as a reflection not of an isolated haunter but a systemic presence. Writes Aguirre of this terror:

“We do not have singular confrontations with our own personal Doubles, but glimpses of the near-impossible, of a something so vast as to be incomprehensible: not our individual mirror-images, but a mirror-image of the human world itself, an image which…the basic laws of nature are flaunted while new monstrous laws emanating from the mirror begin to bear upon its presumed original” (p.160)

Weird Fiction’s propensity towards the glitch, the visual noises, poor transmissions and malfunction, these murky intermixed components (details ascribed to the impish familiars –the space-time transients) constitute monstrous iterations of original source signals.

At once signifying unseen guests from some hideous “Other domain in our cosmos, lurking behind every gateway, seeking entrance into our world” (Aguirre, p163) and literally revealing the limitations of media technology (the extended human apparatus)

Weird Fiction is perhaps a database cinema, too, answering Manovich’s concern that “today we have too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together.” (Language of New Media, p217.) With variants of Charles Fort’s “damned data” a link that no doubt my Metaphortean readers will understand having incessantly been referred to Fort’s Book of the Damned

Weird Fiction’s perverse reply emerges as a handful of dark, irreverent, labyrinthine and, yes, metaphorical spatial environments. A minor-league mythos, with virtual plateaus populated, at times, with more recognizable haunters and “things that go bump in the night.”

In this regard, cinematic fiction like Monster Squad and sitcoms like The Munsters could also be argued as databases of the damned, yet it is what Manovich would call the “algorithms”, here– the nebulous and scattered plasticity— the “quizzical” not just the “ficto” that is a key distinction.

Synesthesia is not always a utopian vision, anesthesia is not always a numbing wasteland. The heterotopian haunting is a better title for the “ficto-quizzical milieu” embracing and prolonging what has been elsewhere bandied about as “picturing ambiguity” (Stafford), “imaging the abject” (King) and “applied blobsquatchery (Diehl)

I will give pause here for another series of analyses at a later date. Weird Fiction is a nutshell indeed, difficult to crack but still its inklings compel me onward towards continued research!

Weird Fiction

As is so often the case, unknown paranormal mechanisms have opened up new possibilities for Metaphortean Space. Presently, with no small thanks to my colleague Irving Bleak, I have made arrangements to conduct occasional field reports on the newly observable set of occurrences called Weird Fiction. This “ficto-quizzical milieu” promises “at times monsters dressed as humanoids,” and is actively operating on the innards of both dead media and the Lovecraftian canon.

Worldview of a Barnacle

If unseen agents of an intertidal continuum, a microcosmic world in miniature, can truly reflect on the increasingly complex realities of a networked cosmos, so be it.   It is perhaps true that wading in ad hoc tide pools alongside of the Super Sargasso Sea,  one may find some speculative theory objects, blogjects and assorted memetic flora and fauna.

Lurking adjacent to this vast aerial ocean of lost, forgotten and obscured ideas only the hardiest of inhabitants will survive.  Regularly, portions of this nodal enclave are covered and uncovered by the advance and retreat of the Super Sargasso. Life forms in this ecological niche must adapt, evolve or otherwise embrace the worldview of the barnacle.   Not necessarily, or literally, the sedentary crustacean clinging on to a fixed spot (the marine equivalent of desktop computing) but an equipped barnacle, a networked thing. Not an absolutely inflexible stubborn barnacle either, but a progressive 21st century barnacle. Barnacle 2.0, the barnacle that blogs.  Like acres of other barnacle species, these variants dwell continually in their shell, in this case a figurative housing represented by a small fleet of networked devices. These wireless appendages: feathery, barbed and information-prone, draw data-plankton in from the hertzian currents which permeate even the murkiest patches of the Super Sargasso Sea.

Barnacles in said shells find solace amongst other transients in the data cloud of the tide pools, the primordial soups of an altermodern ecosystem. This is home to inhabitants tuned in to network culture; rich with a perpetual influx of information and robust infrastructurally with a ceaseless attention to nuanced nodes on which to cling. Mobile, yet clinging on.

Often times these wired barnacles intentionally voyage out into the Super Sargasso, drifting in heterotopian fashion, attaching themselves to the underside of vessels.  These derelict vessels, from discarded media to forgotten theories and interdisciplinary wrecks may be salvaged if sufficiently encrusted with barnacles. Like so many deep sea research submersibles, the blogging barnacle relies on an omnipresence of heterogeneity, an entourage of pingbacks, trackbacks, links and related search engineering.

It is perhaps also true that barnacles do not blog, that periwinkles do not gush that tide pools along the Super Sargasso are as speculative as the migratory patterns of eels circling back to Earth.

Recent Trawl

The exquisite specimens above are the result of a recent expedition by recreational trawler Jesse England. A long-time advocate of Metaphortean Space, England donated these living fossils for further research. The coelacanth of cassettes is most certainly a dinosaur, making such Mesozoic (or ‘middle animals’) as a data cassette and a sound “filmstrip” particularly relevant to current pursuits of Metaphorteana. There are many suspected inlets to the Super Sargasso Sea across the Pacific Northwest, and this recent trawl points again to that nucleus of damned data and lost miscellany.

The data cassette, defiantly boasting itself as “leader less,” “certified,” and issued by Radio Shack as a “computer product” was marked also with a fictographical ruse in the form of the hand-scrawled statement “blank.” Devoid of aural activities it cleary was not, whether the emanating damned data can suffice as “computer product” is unknown, but its sonic soliloquy was at once strange and arguably electronic. The other tape, marked with striking green and black colorations, issued by Coronet in 1974, and identified as “instructional media” seems to be a variant in the symbiotic scheme witnessed with other species of the genus magnetic. Intended to accompany a filmstrip of images, the Coronet tape is entitled “Our Changing Earth: HOW WE STUDY IT.” Indeed the content comprises a nearly thirteen minute audio-tome on Earth Science, complete with iconic bells, wind sounds, a curious and intermittent bassline.

Call of the Blobsquatch

The call of the Blobsquatch bellows out, beckoning and subsequently damning further analysis. Despite efforts to focus elsewhere, an exemplary excerpt from the Tactical Reality Dictionary entry on “Ambiguous Information”:

“The initial exposure to blurred, conflicting or ambiguous stimuli and data creates deep interference with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available. This effect has been demonstrated experimentally with subjects that are exposed to a distorted blurred image. As they develop more confidence in this first and perhaps erroneous impression of ambiguous stimuli this initial impression has more impact on subsequent perceptions. When the picture becomes clearer, new data is assimilated into the previous image but the initial interpretation is maintained and resistance to cognitive change is upheld until the contradiction becomes so strong and apparent that it forces itself upon consciousness.”

Endless Coelacanth

Our coelacanth, the Metaphortean variant and/or a sea creature akin to an endless cassette  is already evidenced, at least speculatively, swimming around in the global brain. I’ll sum it up with a poem by Ogden Nash ( as sighted in Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time):

Consider now the Coelacanth,
Our only living fossil,
Persistent as the amaranth,
And status quo apostle.
It jeers at fish unfossilized
As intellectual snobs elite;
Old Coelacanth, so unrevised
It doesn’t know it’s obsolete.

Peale Session

Further research is in order, but after perusing Wikipedia, that most curious cabinet(work), there are some leads leering out for further analysis.  Angling after Charles Wilson Peale, natural history museum maverick, his fondness for Linnaeus’s taxonomic systems, and  particularly binomial nomenclature, one might uncover such orderings as:  Magnetic. tape

That is if one were casting a line into the abyss known as Metaphortean Space.

A cryptic note. No more or less cryptic than many mountains of encryption all told, still this query will do well to wonder and wander into more findings.