Possible Rendezvous

Returned from Southeast Asia without encountering the Malaysian Bigfeet. Still I wonder “How”? How do those hairy hominoids survive and persist in the hot, humid tropics? Putting caution before audacity, I will assume they are holed up in some hollow of the Earth, air-con set to full blast.

Green pigeon species, it turns out, are not so very anomalous in the company of crowned, blue, green/white zone pigeons, in the vicinity of shimmering red birds, and birds with horn-like protrusions, birds that truly represent the dinosaur lineage.

Meanwhile, in Southeastern Texas, an unexplained species of ant is following in the footsteps of senior Situationist Guy Debord. Drifting en masse in the electronic environments outside of Houston, activating new itineraries. Collectively unconscious, these insects meander about all manner of machines– shorting out circuits, ditching their typically disciplined movements–letting themselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Debord, Theory of the Dérive)

The (psychogeographic) lures for these curious colonies may include “the heat, magnetic fields, or hum and vibrations from electronic machines,” according to reports from the August 2008 issue of Fortean Times.

Houston may have a problem, a possible rendezvous, as these micronauts in gremlin guise set their sights on NASA Mission Control.

Crypto-Tourism

It’s been a long pause for Metaphortean Space, and there are many reports including outings to Ape Cave that deserve further analysis. However, tomorrow I will set forth for Singapore, flying there by way of Vancouver (BC) and Tokyo. Off to this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art to spread the Blobsquatch gospel.

I’m looking forward to the variety of events and activities set to unfold during the ISEA festival, and Singapore itself promises many adventures. Least of which is the possibility of spotting some of the many cryptids purported to roam these parts. Sure, there’s reports of the so-called “Malaysian Bigfoot,” but I’m particularly intrigued by the anomalous green pigeon species sighted in Singapore circa December ‘07. I will be keeping a (soon to be activated) travel blog with Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Art, and so I will return to these pages (and Portland) soon after August 6th.

Tape Species

In anticipation of my long belated interview with sound artist Instinct Control, I am replaying immaterial memories of “Tape Species” in my head. Cassette classification systems are curious, but audio anomalist G.Lucas Crane did not hesitate to speculate on species of tape when we spoke last year. “Computer tapes,” halloween soundtracks,” “answering machine,” and other such recordings from the world of audiotape point towards the more or less vernacular variety available via these consumer electronics. Metaphors from zoological quests rather than archeological digs seem more appropriate for this sort of discovery channeling.

As with cryptozoological pioneer Bernard Heuvelmans’ dossiers on hidden animals, the aggregation of diverse claims– including anecdotal, folklore and legend amidst the methods of official science makes for a healthy exploration of the unknown audio(visual) specimen.

Perhaps archeological digs are metaphors reserved for found film footage and vinyl records, archives of official pop culture. Vinyl selection is more or less musical, turntables have been interfaced and have enveloped malfunction, remediating scratches as advanced modes of play. The authenticity embodied in the scratch, vinyl or filmic, is no accident in the emulation biz. The limitations of audio-visual technology tend to be re-activated by subconscious addiction for far-gone flaws, a desire so strong that an imitation, a bonafide hoax, is accepted as the genuine article. Will the real Cardiff Giant please stand up?

Obsolescence knocks on the cassette deck’s door but the door is already propped wide open. The hiss, the pops, the spinning parts! The garbled sounds and sped up voices! Drooling devotees of this new sound welcome the abundance and access made manifest in the waves of unwanted tech produced by obsolescence.

A “hands-free” philosophy guides the long-running research of the EVP enthusiast who listens closely for paranormal signals in tape playback. The circuit-bender, another ilk of electronic anomalist uses bare hands (and feet) directly engaged with circuitry to solicit sonic heralds from other worlds. By “other worlds,” I mean imaginaries opened up at the Interface of Malfunction. This interface emerges in the ruins of the intended mode of exchange. Breakdown, or malfunction of interface invokes a liminal space from which the Interface of Malfunction can potentially rise. This shift in cognition might be otherwise described as the “curiosity” or “wonder” that compels one to venture forward in understanding novel sound-forms or an unknown species (of tape).

Interface and Malfunction

An interface is typically designed to make the new domain easier for a “user” to comprehend. When this remediation works, the user is fairly oblivious to the crossing-over that is going on. On the contrary, malfunction typically calls attention to the collision of worlds, maintaining itself as burden on presumed purposes.

This sort of dissonance might seem to complicate the credibility of such a thing as “the interface of malfunction.” If there is hesitation…so be it. An experiential and interpretative encounter with this mechanism will give one a better impression of its Fortean flavor! The interface of malfunction exists in that duration of uncertainty that follows an anomalous rift in the linear progression of the everyday. An unexpected occurrence that can be accommodated with provisional explanations or embraced as passageway to new lands. The interface of malfunction is a paranormal mechanism to encourage a dip into the unknown. The unknown may remain aloof, leading the curious onward, or it may be extinguished into a legitimate thing, technique, or new animal… but the process is initially un-known.

The interface of malfunction relies on a rupture in physiological vision and what Norman Bryson refers to as “socialized vision” (in Vision and Visuality) i.e. the mesh of signs that filter/focus one’s point-of-view socioculturally.

Pre-existing knowledge or suspicion of other dimensional worlds, creatures, phenomena factor in to the interfaces of malfunction. These thought-forms operate within vernacular networks of information, the blogosphere notwithstanding. The Sasquatch encounter these days, for example, opens up an interface of malfunction that must contend with the questions of blobsquatchery and answers of blogsquatching. “Blogsquatching,” a term coined by preeminent cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, refers to “the use of web logs to spread information on unknown hairy hominoids such as Sasquatch, Yeti, and Yowie across the internet” (cryptomundo.com).

This age-old collision of experiential and interpretative Sasquatch encounter is amplified through the internet, it remains as always perceptual and conceptual, pulling on individual sensory information and collective forms of speculative interpretation. Malfunction is an Abstract User Interface (AUI).

Speaking of anomalous rifts, age-old collisions, of interface and malfunction and AUIs: The strategic misspelling known as neologism short-circuits known words, leading the meanings into previously neglected peripheries. The collision of prefixes and suffixes offers a short-lived duration of uncertainty wherein malfunction is interfaced and operated on rather succinctly. This perhaps due to the ubiquitous presence of the written word.

New York Giants

In homage to my old stomping grounds of upstate New York, I’d like to muse for a moment on some Fortean phenomena found there. Charles Hoy Fort himself was a native Albanian (NY that is), and the pallid data to be captained in these climes is deep as the region’s winter snow! I typically shy away from outright hoaxes…save for those toe-cracking Fox sisters of Rochester, NY…finding the ambiguities of erroneous capture much more compelling than the intentional deception perpetrated by pranksters. But the Cardiff Giant shenanigans are peculiar, offering up a batty Baudrilliardian event-scene!

A primitive race of giants is purported to be evidenced in a petrified giant man excavated near a farmhouse in Cardiff, NY circa 1869. It was in fact a stone carving that was inconspicuously buried by secret co-conspirators, then “discovered” by the allegedly un-knowing farmer, William C. “Stub” Newell. Much attention was generated, and Newell made a small fortune charging admission for the curious droves eager to ogle this oddity. Experts only sensationalized the demand by declaring the giant a genuine phony.

The famous showman Phineas.T. Barnum made attempts to lease the Cardiff Giant, eager to add this anomalous hulk to his growing menagerie of freaks and curiosities. Failing to acquire the actual giant he had his team model a spin-off, a fake of a fake. And so goes the precession of the (damned) simulacra. Here, in this hyperrealized hoax-craft is where the Fortean aspect creeps in, corrupt as it may be by commercial intentions.

Blobsquatch Fever

At the behest of Other Cinema’s captain Craig Baldwin, Blobsquatches enveloped the A.T.A. on the eve of Saturday, 17th of May. Metaphortean and Meta-Fortean philosophies were bandied about by yours truly, blobsquatches exposed and then subsequently afoot–sabotaging the sound system in retaliation for too much information.

Nonetheless, the evening was Fort-ified with anomalous anecdotes on Bigfoot scams from Sam Green, updates on drones from Jeffree Anderson, the Son of Sasquatch (see picture above from bstrand), the NES un-locked by Jeff Donaldson, applied blobsquatchery and Potter-Belmar Labs’ audio-visual oracles.

“the margin of error is our margin of freedom,” - Svetlana Boym

Recoiling and recalling defective vectors of the unknown, the perceived obsolescence of blurry sasquatches returns to the origin of the species (unknown animal), opening up speculation again, perpetuating anomalies, parading the limits of technology as the paradoxical provider of a utopian “unknown.” Blobsquatches represent an imaginable, tangible concept of the unknown. Simultaneously, by the very nature of the ambiguity and uncertainty of the blurry sasquatch, this unknown cannot be grasped. It hovers about waiting for someone/thing to make sense out of it. Distinctly indistinct, knowable but only as an unknown thing. Ever extinguished by reason, ever aloof by the short-circuiting of explanations by anomalous outcomes.

This is Fortean amplified towards a Meta-Fortean pursuit. Meanwhile, metaphortean pursuits, far from being isolated and exclusive, are aimed in a more or less straight-forward map quest. Transposing points from the realm of the cryptozoological to that of adaptive re-use of excess electronics. High-lighting affinities of conviction and excitement between these disparate disciplines, rallying around the possibilities of latent discoveries.

Nebulous Agents

Panopticonfidence or panopticonsciousness are character traits upheld by the perceptually aloof. A royal menagerie including: the Blobsquatch, the globster, Holbein’s Skull and indeed the “gas station ghost.” It’s ghostliness derived via contextual analysis, like the ways in which the woodlands are used in identifying a Blobsquatch. The globster is just a perpetual anomaly, an out-of-place artifact of unknown cosmic origins, end of story. While Holbein’s skull: an act of anamorphosis. Generally speaking, each cryptid provokes acts of associational anamorphosis. Shaping again, puzzling the world, the spectator tries to harness the noise and turn it into a signal. Grasping even for supernatural or paranormal place-holders. Known unknowns seem desperate measures to delimit the wild oscillations of amorphous anomalies

On Earth day, Cryptomundo posted an obituary of Kay Linaker, screenwriter of The Blob. Following this lead-in, I’ve stumbled onto a previously peripheral acreage of amorphous creatures that warrant attention. Globsters not withstanding, myriad visions of viscosity are loitering inconspicuously in the cryptozoo. Star Jelly is an age-old phenomena summed up as cosmic detritus. I’m not referring to man-made space junk here, but star dust– material memories of celestial shape-forms. Fort describes gelatinous falls in his Book of the Damned, Coleman and Clark cite an incident in Montana “huge glob of jellylike substance,” also Edinburgh, Scotland wherein a “vague black shape…moved like a huge caterpillar,” in their late 1970s catalog Creatures of the Outer Edge

Atmospheric Beasts are more curious still. Described as “low density animals native to clouds” by famed cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, these cryptids oscillate opaquely, and “it is said that when atmospheric beasts die, they fall to earth as a gelatinous mass that may resemble a green, purple, gray or iridescent jelly that evaporates into nothing within minutes, hours, or, at the longest, a few days.” (The Cryptid Zoo)

The stealthier amongst these nebulous agents will maintain a presence through obfuscation. Visible, yet unverifiable.

Exercise in Adaptive Re-Use

Sasquatch Realism*

As a full-fledged movement, Sasquatch Realism was kick-started with the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip in the late 1960s in the United States. Sasquatch Realism is predominately made up of cryptozoologists who are not content with metaphorical monsters. Sasquatch Realism was founded in celluloid in October 1967. The Sasquatch Realist acts as follows:

1. The Sasquatch Realist uses the camera and photograph to gather information.
2. The Sasquatch Realist uses oral, print (and now) digital networks as means of discussion and distribution
3. The Sasquatch Realist must strive for image clarity. Avoiding equal parts imagination and interpretation.

Sasquatch Realism cannot exist without the photograph. In Sasquatch Realism, reality must be accurately represented by the camera. Sasquatch Realists gather their imagery and information with the camera and photograph. The Sasquatch Realist style is tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that bears a high level of similarity to Frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin film. This rigorous repetition of likenesses takes the place of (missing) physical evidence of sasquatches. These reference marks become “the very signifer of [Sasquatch] realism” (Barthes)

*(big)footnotes

Fortean Sasquatchery

There is a transference involved with metaphor –understanding one thing in terms of another, and there is an interference characteristic in the Fortean —understanding that all explanation ultimately provokes new questions.

The Metaphortean involves transferring interference from the Fortean context to another (usually technocultural), or vice-versa, and interfering with such transport in a manner akin to the gremlin. The Metaphortean is regularly, if not deliberately, confused with Meta-Fortean phenomena. Fortean phenomena are ruptures, faultlines and anomalous natural occurrences that offset the explanations of mainstream Science. The Fortean researcher finds noise/interference in allegedly objective findings. The Meta-Fortean considers the domain of Fortean Forteana, recursive research into anomalous anomalies.

The “Fortean” namesake is Charles Fort, that iconoclastic collector of curious goings on. As an adjective the meaning is roughly synonymous with “strange and/or unexplainable naturally occurring phenomena.” Damned data, fortean phenomena meddle with the certainty of established facts. A catch-all continuum, “Fortean” operates on the words it accompanies, endorsing an accretion of anomalous acreage . For example, Fortean Zoology involves the “study of animals,” and indeed includes cryptids* –but not exclusively. Fortean Zoology incorporates a diverse menagerie — aberrant animal behaviors, creatures falling from the sky, supernatural beasts, mystery animals and other peripheries of officially demarcated zoologies.

With the advent of digital tech, cryptozoology has (un)certainly hastened proliferation of particular representational regimes for imaging the Sasquatch. Initial outgrowth of Bigfoot lore, memorates, rumors, photographs, sketches, plaster casts, eye-witness reports have accumulated into a layer of anecdotal sediment. Digital prosumerism has imposed on the rogue science of sasquatchery, amplifying the yearnings of scientific “objectivity” over vernacular belief structures and paranormal mechanisms. Sasquatch Realism? The missing but signified bi-pedal hominid (connotation) takes the helm as proof (denotation) of its existence. Traveling here with Barthes’ notion of the reality effect…”notation [becomes] the pure encounter of an object and its expression.” (Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.14

*Cryptids are mysterious animals that have been reported but not yet found and classified. Once classified they relinquish their cryptid status becoming literal things not speculative possibilities. Liminoid place-holders, cryptids hold down the Fort, amassing attention in a manner not too far from the “spime.”

Adaptive re-use of the original ambiguity surrounding unknown occurrences (’blobbiness’) is critical for the sustainability of the Fortean in the post-digital imagination. What is the Blobsquatch if not an example of Fortean Sasquatchery?

Ghost Stories

Applied blobsquatchery interferes with the production of obsolescence by way of an anamorphic perspective. Shaping the debate by losing form. Excess and noise become forms of camoflage, razzle-dazzle and creative prompt. “We can see the outmoded and obsolescent as a means to catch a glimpse of other possible worlds, to imagine how the world might be ‘otherwise,’” writes Michelle Henning in her essay New Lamps for Old: Photography, Obsolescence and Social Change.

Henning, following Evan Watkins’ studies, describes the production of obsolescence as an operation requiring “fields of equivalence.” This marketing maneuver coerces understanding of any given “new media” as the obvious and impending improvement. The DTV transition depends, in part, on conditioning the consumer into perceiving a value shift from analog to digital television systems. Digital television is being ushered in as a remediation of analog TV. Better picture, More selection. The persistent siren songs of home entertainment hype add an extra note: No more ghosts. The visual noise of static interference on analog TV screens, known as ‘ghosting’ — is a combination of neighboring electromagnetic fields and residual traces of cosmic radiation dating back 13 billion years! Ghost stories from the dawn of time, these residual media are denied existence along with the rest.

Metaphortean fields of equivalence stray from predominant linear models. Oscillating between errors inherent in (always already) obsolescent technologies and the new species and lost worlds accessible at interfaces of malfunction.

Fortean electronics including Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), and Electronic Image Phenomena (EIP) rely on analog receivers to facilitate long distance visitations with other entities and worlds. Other electronic anomalists, such as Portland’s Pulse Emitter, are simply fascinated with the itineraries of electrons. Pulse Emitter pursues adventures in sonic fiction by way of modular synthesis. The random fluctuations of tv and radio ‘ghosts’ are a favored compositional element in this artist’s articulation of electronic sound

The end of analog broadcasts ensures the mass exodus of commercial programming to the digital realm, allowing cosmic accounts of the Big Bang to take center stage. In metaphortean circles, analog recievers will become a sort of wildlife preserve. Sanctuaries for research, the rabbit-eared relics will become treasured sites for observation and exploration of an eclectic electronic ecosystem.