Cro-Magnetic Field Research

Plans for the future, Blueprints in Motion, Cro-Magnetic Field Research is a percolating probe to be launched into the realms of cassette culture and living fossils. No longer sights set on such hot topic hominids as the notorious b.i.g.f.o.o.t., but instead following the footsteps of such former fossils found alive and well, such as the intrepid coelencanth. Sticklers will note that this cold-blooded, prehistoric fish has no feet, nor footage so Fortean in what will shortly be counted as its 41st year! But resolve, perseverance, potential. I wonder if wandering outside of the most sensational sorts of cryptid critters will afford a new dimension of research as I make haste towards magnetic curiosities. Not to mention grey markets, shadow exchanges and all the associational detritus to be kicked up there. Keeping it bi-pedal, the cro-mag is (perhaps) an acceptable, if highly speculative, specimen. Not so much missing link, just displaced, outmoded, unsung.

Cracked Memex

Curiously continuing onward into the outer regions of circuit-bending, or riffing off Voice Crack’s term — cracked everyday electronics.  More so a conceptual hack is what I’m after. Something “cracked” as much for its affiliations with crackpottery and crank-dom, yet still an apparatus, a memex to be precise.  Dr. Vannevar Bush’s marvelous “memory extender,” born obsolete, it never made it past vaporware.  Truly, it inspired hypertext and is oft cited as a direct feed for innovators Englebert, Licklider and Nelson.  It remained too unwieldy in the 1940s tech-scene, a mechanical monstrosity, a premature arrival of the future.

Unlike a typical index, the memex aspired to create an associational webwork of information in a manner akin to the human mind.  My interest is in a bent memex, or rather a cracked memex.  A warped device, eschewed of reason, intended to extend the mental capacities of the conspiratorial mind.  A cybernetic device, the cracked memex augments the internal mechanics of conspiracy logic, an interface of malfunction opened up within the human mind.  Associational structures and temporary salves to information overload, the cracked memex amplifies speculative theories and possibility spaces.

Housed in a retro-fit old desk, cables and cords protruding, embedded screens and electronic synthesis to boot.  An audio patchbay of potential correspondences, and video sequences subjected to Soviet montage theory.  Majic eyes wide shut, this miracle of mad science is finished off with an homage to the Majestic-12.  As you may suspect, this once secret Roswell research committee on E.T. wreckage retrieval included, that’s right, Vannevar Bush!  My working prototype of a cracked memex is currently on display at Portland’s ON gallery.  Part of my collaborative installation with Mack McFarland entitled Being Liminal. Within a fortnight, documentation may well manifest.