Follow up to Part I
With Blobsquatches identified as unknown “animals” worthy of pursuit, a makeshift map of ancestral origins, missing links and descendants emerges from the margins of error. Through the lens (errors intact) of Blobsquatchery, other facets and realms of contrarian cultural production can be speculatively enfranchised as such. To learn from one’s mistakes and consciously apply Blobsquatchery is to seek signals in noise, to understand error as both wandering and wondering astray.
Applied Blobsquatchery might reach as far back as anamorphosis, a la Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Obfuscation, here directed at perspectival technologies, an interruption of consensus reality in the dominant representational mode (one-point perspective) of the 16th century.
Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and more specificially the visual phenomena associated with Intrumental Transcommunication (ITC) has revealed an electronic species of Blobsquatch. ITC involves setting up a video feedback loop using an analog camcorder point back at it’s receiving monitor. Individual video frames are grabbed from this fray and analyzed further via computers. The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena describes:
“These images are often difficult to make out as anything more than optical noise, so we ask that you look very closely at any pattern you might first notice in the image…Except for a possible few exceptions, we do not know who or what these people shown here are. It is clear that people of many time periods, and possible worlds, are represented. We know how we collected these images, but we do not know how they are imprinted in the video or why. Perhaps the most we can gather from these images is that there is a phenomena, the phenomena is indicative of an intelligent manipulation of video noise and the represented entities exist outside of our known reality. We take from this a certain sense of friendliness and assurance that there is more to reality than meets the eye.“
Oscillating through impersonations of known celebrities, from Rudolph Valentino, Vincent Price to George Orwell, and sometimes known unknowns such as extra-terrestrial aliens! A striking variation on the radical ambiguities inherent in the traditional Blobsquatch, whereby the Patterson-Gimlin Sasquatch is the optical allusion of note.
Blobjects, as contemporary design intiatives to elude the straight edges of computer-assisted design and encourage cuddly consumption, are an intriguing link. Here optical, or more generally visual blobbiness is activated in response to stodgy vertical and horizontal planes typically associated with consumer gadgetry. Blobjects vary from VW bugs, to toothbrushes to iMacs, fashion and furniture. A darker variant is a prospective blobject encapsulated in the title of The Gray Goo Problem. Like a malevolent and carnivorous globster, this scenario marks the end stage of end users via molecular technologies gone awry. This hypothetical destruction of life by a self-replicating blob of nanomachines threatens to rapidly break down all organic matter to use as raw materials for replication! Spreading “like blowing pollen, [replicating] swiftly, and [reducing] the biosphere to dust in a matter of days,” as nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler warns in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.
Like their close cousin the Gremlin, albeit for explorations outside of sheer pranksterism, Blobsquatches and agents of Blobsquatchery are more often concerned with minor glitches, quirks and disruptions than full on catastrophic accidents. Looking at blobjects of the personal data assistant variety: Treos to iPhones, Smartphones, Blackberries, etc we witness the wake of “Homo Meanderthalensis.” More commonly known as The Meanderthal, this descendant of the Blobsquatch is described in Urban Meanderthals and the City of “Desire Lines”
by researcher Matthew Tiessen:
“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) The Meanderthal, in gumming up metropolises, exhibits some characteristic traits of Blobsquatchery.
The city, as urban explorer 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 conscious conduits of malfunction, activating informed deviations, revealing previously imperceptible avenues of understanding.
The Bio-Electronic Audiosapien, antecedent of the Blobsquatch, is a Species Device identified by “father of circuit-bending” Reed Ghazala. The BEASape is a juggernaut all told, and will be the primary focus (so to speak) of the third installment of this Genealogy.
