Speculative Genealogy of the Blobsquatch (Part I)

This familial mapping project is proving a bit unwieldy, so I will sign off 2007 with the following findings. Metaphortean readers can anticipate an addendum sometime early in the new year.“

Reminiscent of confronting a vast and perplexing database, the sight of so many conflicting wonders arouses a desire to enter the labyrinth and try to navigate the elegant maze” (Barbara Stafford, Good Looking)

Unexpected Correspondences: “Most, if not all, paranormal phenomena were preconceived hoaxes,” writes Karl Schoonover in his essay Ectoplasm, Evanescence and Photography. “To disguise this fact and meet the expectations of an increasingly science-savvy public, twentieth-century spirit photographs needed both to reference contemporary science and to mimic its methods of investigation and data collection.” Originally manifesting in the 1860s, the phenomenon known as “Spirit Photography” dramatically transformed in the early 20th century, reflecting changes in technoculture at large. With the advent of Eastman Kodak’s Brownie (introduced in 1900) and the subsequent waves of amateur photographers tinkering with the craft; initial notions of the camera as a haunted medium had given up their ghosts. The presence of shutterbugs was on the rise and, spirit photographers notwithstanding, there was much excitement about the capabilities of this mechanical instrument. This is not to say that belief in spirits, ghosts and the supernatural had been extinguished. Physical signs of supernatural activity, namely the abject excretions known as ectoplasm, emerged in response to growing public scrutiny of photographic processes and heightened awareness of photo-fakery. A paradigm shift.

Exemplifying what McLuhan would later refer to as the reversal of an over-heated medium, the shift towards documentation of ectoplasm, “so excessively indulges a corporeal spectacle that it endangers the plausibility of the very phenomenon of spirit photography,” notes Schoonover. This photo-cultural turn is interestingly echoed a century later within the cryptozoological community. Cryptozoology, the study of unknown animals, famously includes: Bigfeet, Lake Monsters, Chupacabras and UFOs. Cryptozoology, is well known for believing firmly in creatures that are not supposed to exist. Facing on-going mockery from established science, cryptozoologists continue their quests for unknown animals armed with ambiguous photo-documents. Rampant Photoshopping is the obvious hoaxer at this threshold, but growing allusions to scientific methodologies amongst cryptozoologists have taken aim at issues of image clarity too, as I’ll recount momentarily. Nonetheless, unknown animals have thus far eluded physical capture. Like ectoplasm they are ensnared only as indexical traces.

In 1967, in what would seem to be the apotheosis of sasquatch sightings, frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip inscribed its indelible mark. Today, with increased accessibility of high-definition cameras and high-end digital imaging options, prosumers are on the rise and, cryptozoologists notwithstanding, there is much excitement about the capabilities of these digital instruments. These days, sasquatch sightings must provide explicit information about the unknown. Mystery apes must adhere to the guidelines laid out by the Patterson-Gimlin model. Panopticonfident, today’s conscientious cryptozoologist is prone to dismiss “any photo requiring equal parts interpretation and imagination,” as Sasquatch researcher Alton Higgins asserts in Evaluating Purported Sasquatch Photographic Evidence.

Reversal of an over-heated Sasquatch. The Blobsquatch emerged but nobody paid attention because this paradigm wasn’t shifting along a linear path. A personification of noise, of blurriness, of what writer Svetlana Boym calls “broken-tech.” In Boym’s Off-Modern Manifesto she describes broken-tech as “Not Luditte but ludic…it challenges destruction with play.” The Blobsquatch toys with the Sasquatch hunters expectations, erring on the side of audacity, opening up a new territory, one that is off the beaten path. The Blobsquatch’s stomping ground is the margin of error, the duration of uncertainty that confabulates (or condemns). “[This] margin of error is our margin of freedom. It’s a choice beyond the multiple choices programmed for us…The error is a chance encounter between us and the machines in which we surprise each other.” (Boym)

Trails Blazed by Errors

Battling insomnia with a return to Kodwo Eshun’s Adventures in Sonic Fiction, I find myself plugged into his prose with renewed signal-to-noise ratios. I’ll assume the culprit is my sleep-deprived mind following “the trails blazed by errors.” Of errors and errant behavior, of wandering and wondering in the possibility spaces outside of the operating systems at hand.

Turntable Consciousness. More than just an awareness of the turntable’s potential to escape the trappings of a playback device, Eshun situates Turntable Consciousness as a fully enveloped state of mind, informed via “fingertip perception.” This intuitive tactile relationship with a turntable’s inner sanctum would seem to extend to a general Analog Consciousness. A heightened sensitivity to the creative possibilities inherent in experimenting with all analog devices. Eshun’s attention to “conscientious desecration” points to avenues for uncovering hidden opportunities for expresssion in analog systems. Digital systems, if engaged via analog consciousness-informed procedures, can also work. Think of desire lines that lead the circuit-bender off the demarcated pathways and the irrational exuberance emmanating out of a bent circuit. As Svetlana Boym remarks of related “broken-tech” endeavors, in her oft cited Off-Modern Manifesto, its “not Luddite but ludic. It challenges the destruction with play.” The record player was the first analog device to travel from staged accident to center stage, rupturing the consumer-capitalist continuum of structured obsolescence.

Marketing of of a/v entertainment systems emphasize the ways in which new technologies will bring things down to earth, pluck heavenly virtues like convenience from the skies, promising ease of use and ultimate sound. In the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s, betwixt and between the throngs of consumers tossing out turntables in favor of tape decks and cd players, there were adventurers opening up nth-dimensional possibilities for the humble victorian “sound writers.” Discarded in liminal zones, fated for nostalgic valleys or audio alchemists’ labs, the last several years have suggested an overheated medium, with turntablism retro-actively locked up in pro-gear and pro-attitudes. As mp3 players flood the mainstream market today, the next wave of newly obsolescent tech is re-enchanted by “cassette jockeys” and glitchcrafters looking for ways to venture off-world via creative re-purposing of leftover media. Of z-axes and desire lines, wandering and wondering what can be found if one ventures off.

Nostalgic Valley (prototype)

Musing on Mashuro Mori’s notion of the Uncanny Valley, that twilight zoned for awkward encounters with dolls, 3-D animated characters and androids. Those entities that seem human, safe for a creeping sensation that they are not ! Mori charted the plight of these sorts of things in the diagram below:

Hollywood has trended lately towards (failed) attempts at creating photorealistic humans via 3-d animation and/or elaborate motion capture systems. For all the money spent on these endeavors, the characters that haunt these cinematic productions are a perpetually dead-eyed bunch…bogged down in the depths of that valley so low! The Uncanny, following Freud’s 1919 essay of the same name, is in German “unheimlich,” and is set against the term “heimlich” which means homely. Uncanniness is feeling not at home. I’ll return to this notion of home in just a moment.

On the advantages of obsolescence, Rosalind Kraus re-iterates the thoughts of Walter Benjamin: “at the moment of obsolescence…he wondered whether photography, like other technologies before it, released a fleeting image of the utopian promise it might contain at the moment when it was still an amateur past-time…the moment that is before it became commercialized and hardened into commodity.” Memory traces of utopia are subsequently bottled up and resold in the name of nostalgia, (re)commodifying the radical prospects of such ideas. Returning to the notion of the Uncanny, of “feeling not at home,” I wonder if there isn’t a connection to nostalgic mechanisms. Nostalgia, that longing for a place that no longer exists, was defined prior to 1920 as “severe homesickness,” according to Etymonline.com. Eager to eke out a more explicit correspondence between “feeling not at home,” and “severe homesickness,” I give you wild speculation! Nostalgia for home that is so sick it hurts. “homesick and sick of home,” writes Svetlana Boym in her Off-Modern Manifesto. It hurts to fess up to the fact that the yearned for home very likely never existed as remembered (Boym.) This disconnect between home remembered and the home that actually existed. An uncanny valley, gap or rupture? Home incorporates, in part, an etymological relation to ecology via the Greek oikos “house, dwelling place, habitation.” I’ve revisited Mori’s diagram of the Uncanny Valley–replacing “Uncanny” with “Nostalgia.” Plugging in terminology related to the life cycles of technologies. A speculative exploration of media ecologies. See below:

As media are imagined, re-used, re-purposed, re-invented, the creative possibilities proliferate. Obsolete, residual media sparkle with renewed sense of utopian potential. Desire also increases, only to be short-circuited by nostalgic enterprises. When the accursed “Nostalgic Valley” looms, a plunge into its depths is an imminent threat. In her essay “New Lamps for Old,” writer Michelle Henning cites Evan Watkins who argues, “There’s every reason dominant ideological productions work very hard to endlessly construct itineraries of the obsolete as survival narratives…because obsolescence when reproduced as nostalgic object is no longer dangerous.” Quality reproductions and/or Emulation are retro-active new mediations. They seem authentic, but lack the truly unique characteristics, such as glitches and quirky behaviors that exist outside of intended function. New Media, by way of remediation, involve a slightly refined sort of regurgitation. Using the example of photography, Henning emphasizes the fact that obsolescent status is not a naturally occurring phenomena. “Remediation is…necessary to the production of obsolescence. The digital camera is marketed as an ordinary camera with added value: you can now do without film, view your images immediately, [etc].” New media involve new spin on old facts. Obsolescence is necessitated so that the cycles can repeat, Nostalgia intercepts utopian desire, sabotaging emergent forms of imaginative re-use. The top right of the diagram should perhaps read “vaporware” although this is arguably co-mingled with impossibilities of utopian tech as well.