Confusion as Nest

In China, “a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb,” is found.  A tomb that “had been undisturbed since it was created during the Ming dynasty four centuries ago” (Fortean Times, June 2009). Out of place artifacts persist in the excavation of ancient cities, while general displacement is rampant in modern metropolises by way of newfangled techno-accessories.

We are familiar with the Meanderthal, that wandering cyborg variant studied closely by Matthew Tiessen. Further analysis suggests the Meanderthal is in fact a megapod. Etymologically it is “large -footed” like its Bigfoot brethren, but emphasis here is on its carbon footprint, the sort sighted increasingly across e-wastelands. Alternately, we view the “pod” as vehicle or craft, the Meanderthal enclosed in the simultaneous environments of the Megapod.  Limited not just to the omnipresent iPod but all manner of other mobile tech…the mega pod/device as multitude become mesh…life in the cocoon.

Network culture by way of the megapod frees one from the immobility of desktop computing while promoting a local anesthesia, a numbness to the immediate world, as well. Worlds within worlds, cities within cities, echoes and splinter forms of Archigram’s insectoid armada and/or Martijn de Waal’s myspace urbanisms.

This is the tele-cocoon, lifeforce of the Meanderthal. Is there a next-level butterfly that will hatch one day? Insert post-human hybrids and signs of the Singularity here. Animals everywhere are drawn to urban environments to make their nests, a form of adaptation in hostile environments. Why should anyone wonder differently about bi-pedal humanoids seeking refuge in continuous partial attention?  Confusion is nest.

Exploding Views

Retrograde Remediation is a mode of moving backwards, or perhaps sideways, often (but not always) in the face of new media provocation. A medium re-framed in another form does not inherently necessitate a linear, forwards motion or mobilize, only, concerns of the market. Conceptual hacking of the remediation process can produce other hybrids, too. For instance database cinema, wherein computerization highlights valuable insight for the cinematic (in the hands of visionary cranks) Cinema subject to an identity crisis, realizing it is, and has always been, a database form– albeit one that has adhered to a stringent algorithm (or script). This hypermediacy in opposition to the dominant drive towards immediacy and efficiency in/of image production. Valid, convenient, these imperatives are— but denying so many parallel worlds and hybrid moments.

Exploded view diagrams isolate and arrest. A techno-taxidermy that sizes up perceived pathways for understanding of the complexities of so many mechanisms. A camera enters bullet time but does not reach escape velocity. Floating here, camera as carcass, a frozen fillet suspended for further analysis.

Weird Fiction operates on the innards of cinema, exploding narratives. A process not a product per se. Exploding narratives, then rummaging in real-time through the flotsam and flightpaths of hurtling audio-visual world/views. This is not guaranteed to produce novel forms of coherency or complexity but, as Irving Bleak claims “arational systems hold value,” too.

Imagine the mix as a live process of instantiating the cutting room floor, a perverse re-enactment of the discarding and refusal of data. Imagine any unnamed archivo-futurists, foraging this floor, thinking through their hands, piecing together dissociated knowledge. In any live milieu, ficto-quizzical or otherwise, music allows for more abstract associations while spoken words will fight for stubbornly literal visual returns. Words are not tied to their literal imaged counterparts, parallel worlds do exist! One can open up worlds by embracing the exploding view not as a finite map of known forms, of knowledge inventoried and complete. Instead as just that but also always a crisis ripe for re-viewing, an exploding ad infinitum, a gateway or nodal nook for z-access into on-going parallel processes. The logic of the loop, or stream of consciousness. At any rate, another procession of the damned