Again conversation has been halted with Instinct Control. Could it be some sort of cosmic coincidence (or paranormal protectionism) that my bevvy of electronic and digital recorders failed, that Instinct Control’s phone also died, and all on the day that marked the beginning of the end of analog television?
Could be. Nonetheless, we’ll chalk it up to unknown paranormal mechanisms and re-group. What secrets of the genus magnetic are being protected, if inadvertently? The suspense is killing me.
Today is the day that analog broadcasts were slated to cease and indeed upwards of 700 stations will terminate such transmissions.
The total shutdown of this technocultural juggernaut will take place on June 12th, we are told, and let’s cross our fingers that is so. Giving pause to the possibilities still latent, on this most monumental occasion of forced obsolescence, for this is the beginning of the end of analog tv.
With the end of analog broadcasts, there will be a better chance of getting ghosts. More broadly, access to the means of electronic cultural production will be enhanced with the innundation of abruptly obsolete television recievers in second-hand flows. Swells of VCRs, recievers and other transmission devices will fall into dis-use, to be retrieved and re-purposed and re-imagined by artists, anomalists and analog aficianados of all stripes.
Gravely, these utopian twinkles do not so much as tickle the tentacles of the unfathomable and labyrinthine global e-waste market, nor intend to be an endorsement of such shadowy and devestating affairs. Still, in hopes of countering the perceived obsolescence, sure to ensue, then an advocacy of new uses is to be amplified.
Until June, a ghost of a chance for ghosts as such activities are still relegated to the margins by (the soon fleeing) commerical broadcasts. Not much longer for these high-power signals, currently clogging the airwaves, to interfere with communiques from other worlds.
Indicator species provide a character sketch of an ecosystem’s overall bill of health. An acute demonstration of key characteristics at play in the environment at hand.
Within the media environment a species from the genus magnetic, namely mixtapes, are one such example. The ability to mix, to customize and personalize a sonic trajectory derived from mass media fragments with consumer electronics speaks volumes for the possibilities of this technosphere as a whole.
“I have found that you could make all kinds of great noises with just your tape recorder and the buttons on it” reports one informant in Don Stacy’s audio-cultural exploration All Mixed Up. The informant continues, “right when it gets to that…guitar crescendo, you could press the pause button, and you get this ‘EEEERWEB!” And it totally ends the song”
Canaries in coal mines, indicator species from the genus magnetic seem to be pointing towards impending extinction. With the rise of mp3s and other invasive species, there is a perceived obsolescence of cassette technologies. The diminishing call of the mixtape—the garbles, the clicks, the presence of blank space—gives weight to the theory that forced migration is in effect.
Research now suggests that this is, at least potentially, an adaptive camouflage. Rather than a plunge into sedentarization, the exodus of analog is more likely a nomadic impulse or oppositional gesture. Competing with new media buzz, staking a claim in overlooked locales, the tape deck and its songs still exist. Much like many insects that have had to shift frequencies so as to elude the electronic smog of ringtones and sonic emissions, evidence of vernacular technoculture may require a conscious shift in attention.
In many cases, a permanent vacation from imposed cycles and the lemming-like misinformation surrounding the fate of technologies is recommended.
“‘Living fossils’ are best defined as stationary species” writes cryptozoological pioneer Bernard Heuvelmans in his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals.
Similarly, all technologies are already fossils (in waiting). The production of obsolescence, as Michelle Henning has described, is essential to the perpetuity of new media and new technology. Obsolesced entities do not (typically) exile themselves into the depths of the Hollow Earth, instead they accumulate in lesser subterranean locales. Basements, in some cases.
With media technology, the classification, praise and official acceptance occurs at the beginning of the species’ presence. Unlike cryptids, techno-anomalies are inactive initially. They migrate in somnambulistic fashion into realms of the hidden, unknown, folkloric and fantastic after being invented, classified and known. They become scoffed at, subject of skeptical dismissal and willful ignorance after being first accepted and heralded as legitimate technological entities—if not salves to technocultural crises of the moment.
Marked with an aleatory zeal that echoes that of any number of run-ins with unknown animals, a later process of unnatural selection unfolds in second hand shops and other liminal zones. For better and worse this activity is accompanied by faint memories of yesterday’s marketing campaigns. As with cryptozoology, this thrifting can be concurrent with romanticized pursuits and nostalgic agendas.
Even so—revelation of more curious characteristics, activation of formally dormant possibilities emerges in both zoological and technological encounters. Technocultural claims could involve, for example, circuit-bending an old casio, re-programming a nintendo, or coming across an acreage of discarded data tapes in a mid-western liquidation center. The sound of found medical data, it turns out, is comprised of an astounding array of aural complexities. That is, if said data were played through an audio cassette deck rather than a data tape reader. Together Tapes’ Nohio release is testament to this anomalous action, but more on Together Tapes after field recordings are transcribed.
Until then, the above video by Youtube user CassetteMaster will appease eager Metaphortean researchers with a similar outing of techno-anomaly.
“A man who is equipped like a territory is no longer an inhabitant; he becomes a habitat.” – Virilio ( Crepuscular Dawn)
Tape recorders are not people, except in particular cases, but I suspect that the deck is in fact a living organism in that (metaphortean) manner that tapes themselves are. Tape species are most often in a mutual or at least commensal symbiotic relationship with tape decks. Thus contrary to previous theories that the tape deck was some sort of world, we can instead think of it as a partner. An environment loosely speaking, a territory inhabited by cassettes as the rhinoceros’ hide is a territory ‘inhabited’ by tick birds. The cassette provides signals and the deck amplifies and processes —garbles, scratches, and of course the recorded sound on the magnetic tape.
This feeling is mutable, of course, but Metaphortean Space has co-mingled with some existing examples already.
Instinct Control has offered glimpses of the ’songs’ of the tape deck itself, NonHorse has shared knowledge on a plethora of tape species. Mix tapes as indicator species needs further analysis, but the techno-lycanthrope, or shapeshifting semantics of data tape, will be met with close encounters later this evening!
“Network realism” prefaces our encounter with reality these days. As much and more is to be included in an upcoming research programme by the Virtual Knowledge Studio. Seeking “to understand how mediation and knowledge production are entwined in the use of databases of images“ The notion of network realism, of an architecture of information swirling around actual entities, inspires me to re-trace my thoughts on networks, images and associational structures in relation to the Fortean. Proposed Network Realism research is focused on the factual. Following Fort I’ll take the factual as a nuanced hue in a shifting continuum between known and unknown phenomena.
While the goblin universe has persisted in peripheral visions for millenia, nothing’s quiet on the Western front. A (percieved) rise of Fortean pursuits, including exhibits in New York, Maine, Maryland, also pop culture, hoaxes, sightings in both mass and amateur media seem to be gaining critical mass. These occurrences may be understood as provocations linked to an accelerating, mass societal shift towards the acceptance/preference/convenience of free-floating images, text and associations as being indistinguishable from the represented physical counter parts.
For some the response to this is a matter of Baudrillardian hyper-reality, the pursuit of the cryptid is “a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.” The goblin universe is more tangible than the ghost world of networked space, or at least the possibilities of close encounters hold that promise. There is likely a link to surveillance as well and thus the allure of the “unknown animal.” Cryptids exist only as hypothetical realities, once captured, classified–they cease being cryptids. Once classified as legitimate animals they move from the speculative non-fiction of legend and folklore to the speculative non-fiction of network realism. They are digitally photographed with cameras on tripods, saved as high resolution data products, then tagged. Over time, the search engineering shifts associations away from Fortean claims. Eventually even forest giraffes, for example, are capable of generating links far removed from bigfeet, nessies and other, perhaps stealthier, cryptids.
Gray areas persist.
