Missing Links

Above is an overview of the sasquatchery and related phenomena witnessed last weekend. The Crypto-Zoetropical Pursuit was held at Rererato Art Space in Portland on Friday Oct. 19th, 7pm, and at LumpWest, Eugene on Saturday Oct.20th, 8pm, in an anniversary celebration of the infamous Bigfoot image and the menagerie of associated mysteries….

…there may be interest to further pursue the artists involved with this adventure! so here are the missing links:

Screening includes a variety of crypto-zoetropicalists, such as:
LoVid (NYC),
Daniel Heila (EUG),
Stephen Slappe (PDX),
Gretchen Hogue(PDX),
Carl Diehl (PDX),
Eric Ostrowski (SEATTLE),
Jesse England (EUG),
MAck Mcfarland (PDX),
Gijs Gieskes(Netherlands),
Phil Stearns (LA),
noteNdo (BALTIMORE)

BONUS SIGHTINGS:
(Friday night only) Portland’s Pulse Emitter uses eclectic electronic synthesis to uncover the unseen sound of saucer/sasquatch sightings!

Then Universe will present the poetry and possibilities of sasquatch-UFO interdimensional collaborations!

(On Saturday only) Eugene’s Don Haugen synthesizes field recordings using home-made apparatuses, circuit-bent instruments and a belief that the Bigfoot exists.

(Both Nights)
Performance by Portland’s Instinct Control…using the all but forgotten technology of cassette tape to re-mix the evening’s audio, and pushing the tape deck’s own fortean impulses further afield via the electronic art of circuit-bendiing!

Son of Sasquatch performance by Jason Jones, of Eugene. Unusual, but now well substantiated, the infamous Bigfoot is believed to have been one of the thousands of young dreamers who flocked to the San Francisco Bay Area during the Summer of Love. Unknowingly siring an offspring–the Son of Sasquatch! What does this new era hold for us and the Son of Sasquatch?

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

Within the Sasquatch research community, there is general belief that the Bigfoot is a “missing link” between humans and subspecies of the primate persuasion. Other researchers, such as Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis, have suggested that humans themselves are the missing links between sasquatches and a cosmic race of advanced intelligent beings.

How does this reflect/refract with regards to the Blobsquatch? There is a speculative family tree branch, a retrograde remediation of errors to be eked out. A lineage seems too limited, but a rhizomatic outgrowth of neologistic trajectories metaphorically engaged with species evolution might work. This includes Ghazala’s Bio-Electronic Audiosapien (BEASape) the Blobsquatch and the so-called “Meanderthal.” In his essay Urban Meanderthals and the City of “Desire Lines”, researcher Matthew Tiessen describes the Meanderthal:

“A sort of human-variant, the Meanderthal could also be described as a Cyborg Spin-Off, exhibiting not only the machinic prosthetic appendages (e.g. cell-phone, Blackberry) required of cyborg flesh, but also the sort of behaviour — i.e. confusion, aimlessness, disorientation, self-absorption — that inevitably results when an all-too-human human attempts to navigate an overly mechanized and technologically-mediated environment.“

Meanderthals are a product of human error amplified and extended through technology. Their techno-somambulism calls attention to the limits of the city’s infrastructure through unconscious encounters. Meanderthals “are dangerous because they are oblivious to their surroundings,” observes reporter Jack Brubaker (from WordSpy) Inevitably, one wonders if the Meanderthal is involved in a sort of “macro-blobsquatchery,” gumming up the works of metropolitan systems.

The city, as G.Lucas Crane has described previously, is “like a colossal machine for organizing human sociality.” Meanderthals are numb to their surroundings, they disable their own sensory awareness. Indeed, they embody malfunction—but only at the behest of properly functioning personal digital assistants! Unlike Meanderthals, Blobsquatches are not oblivious to their environment but instead particularly sensitive to the revelatory potential lurking at the interface of malfunction. Blobsquatches are catayltic converters of malfunction, activating informed deviations, revealing previously imperceptible avenues of understanding. The BEASape’s primal howl is unleashed when a circuit-bender uses his/her body as a conduit, connecting new points on an electronic circuit board. This electronic dérive opens a plethora of desirable line-networks, to be activated intuitively via applied blobsquatchery, an evolutionary step encapsulated by the BEAsape.

Meanwhile, meandering haphazardly within their own mobilized Gorham’s Cave, meanderthals seem destined for a swift extinction. “We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies,” warns McLuhan in War and Peace in the Global Village. Considering the rise of Meanderthals what might the next desperado detour be? What next in the post-human, post-rational evolution of humankind?

Feedback Loops

“If there is any chance of finding really extraordinary animals on earth, it will be in those very places where we have not looked—not exactly ‘lost worlds,’ but in those worlds almost all over the earth, which we have not yet found or not thouroughly searched,”
-Bernard Heuvelmanns, On The Track of Unknown Animals, 1955

As with most other videomakers, I stumbled across the fractal fantasies lurking in video feedback accidentally, early on in my audio-visual career. This mesmerizing technique was coupled with low-fi/high concept science fiction plots to signify time-travel, the paranormal or altered states of mind. Used in concert with deliberate mis-use of video switchers available through cable access facilities, these curious gestures of malfunction were gleefully appropriated in creating short narratives as a teenager. Ridiculous attempts to suspend disbelief functioned like Frankenstein’s monster…the stitches proudly shown, the project clunked forward and ultimately: self-destruction.

By the time I earned my BFA in Art Video in dawn of the 21st c., deck-to-deck editing was on it’s way out. My education (dramatically speaking) had been rendered obsolete. Video was the last new medium before computers conquered all and activated their own exclusive feedback loop. Like video, computers have been around since the 1960s. They’re hardly new media despite market ploys to position them as such. Jonathan Sterne relays these facts in his essay Out With The Trash, emphasizing the”weird, recursive way new media are ‘new’ primarily in reference to themselves.” (cited in Residual Media) Please stay on the line, this message repeats. In perpetual loop, digital media never gets old. Obsolescence is produced in tandem with the latest digital product, providing a sparkling tech-utopian tease shot through with a forecast, and fast-moving, descent into techno-trash.

Deck-to-deck editing employs the thrill of the hunt. Careening through a VHS, hi-8 or 3/4″ tape, punching in edits, tapes roll back. patience, patience, patience. Digital, non-linear editing is closer to vidsonic surgery. Diving in from above, clean cuts, loops and lack of degeneration. render, render, render. An efficient tool for database compilations and articulating research.

To a post-digital world of suspended disbelief, noise and novel trajectories! The call of the crypto-zoetropical, the blobsquatch and the metaphortean yonder beckons us from beyond and beneath the claims of obsolescence/extinction. Across wounded galaxies of almost broken electronics, video folklore and residual media. The products of obsolescence sitting on shelves are just resting, waiting for new life to come! Not exactly lost worlds, just tucked away and forgotten worlds. These worlds have not been thouroughly searched. There are whole ecologies of the extraordinary meandering in our midst.

Coming Sooooon!