Dada Recovery

Mavens of Metaphorteana may recall reports of the curious ant colonies drifting in the electronic environments outside of Houston, TX. Micronauts in gremlin guise, feared, and perhaps now confirmed, to have set sights on NASA Mission Control.

As much could be concluded readily from the aeronautical assaults of our Moon, for starters. Ascertaining signs of lunacy, a dada recovery program?

Reports of the wayward Galaxy 15 satellite, too. Satellite footprints following those of Guy Debord, echoing on Earth the new trajectories of this precocious debris. Officials seranade the so-called “zombiesat” with swan songs, in hopes that it will give up its ghost. Copycat effects are feared in the orbital vicinity, while proponents of “accidental spontaneous generation of life,” ala Andrew Crosse’s prescient Abiogenesis claims, offer a conspiratorial claptrap for consideration.   A progressive, if nostalgic, response to combustions spontaneously occurring, or colonies curiously collapsing, or any number of insects abandoning audible airspace for the privacy of less ringtone addled frequencies.

Polterzeitgeist Persists

With many thanks to The Electromagnetic Archeologist for the spirit photographies, ’twas a successful engagement with the Polterzeitgeist Outreach Coordinator at the DIVA gallery in Eugene.  After a spirited romp thru the Revenant Archives, ogling evidence of trad telepathies—of séances and clairvoyant horses—Irving Bleak then assisted me in establishing a link with today’s multi-modal phantom presence.  Made manifest by way of all manner of real and imagined technologies, the residual energies of the Polterzeitgeist are loitering near Portland presently, invited to the area’s newest haunt next week!

This Tuesday, May 25th @ the Grand Detour, an exciting new space for “experiments in new media,” The Polterzeitgeist will again be conjured up!  New channels, new modes of thought, this audio-visual exposé will unfold in conjunction with Deep Leap Microcinema’s The Internet is a Terrible Place to Live showcase!

Polterzeitgeist Descends

This Saturday, May 15th at the DIVA gallery of Eugene, Oregon, it’s The Polterzeitgeist:   An audio-visual exposé on a spectral populace looming betwixt and between today’s networked cosmos!
 
Led by yours truly in collaboration with my colleague Irving Bleak. Preceded by an illuminating lecture by Kristen Gallerneaux, curator of the Revenant Archives exhibit currently on display at DIVA gallery.

“The Revenant Archives is an institution concerned with the visual and material culture of the paranormal.  Consisting of artifacts, documents, ephemera, works on paper, and reconstructions, it uses folkloristic, parapsychological, and scientific means to offer new interpretations of ambiguous situations and to investigate the conflicts and byproducts of belief in society.”

Saturday May 15th, 8pm @ DIVA gallery in Eugene.  FREE!

View Larger Map

Glocal Anesthesia

Prefixating on the Paranormal there is a retrieval, via para, that includes: “alongside,” “beside,” “contrary to,” “near,” and so on. Paranormal events could be understood as phenomological anaglyphs, offset iterations of everyday occurrences, staged accidents that temporarily (and temporally) numb awareness, amplify puzzlement, and advocate wonderment. In a variant of Metcalfe’s Law, an isolated event is anomalous at best. Safe for potential aggregation of attention via network realist avenues, it is a lone haunter.

Two paranormal events can generate one link, as evidenced in the Fox household some time ago, when teenage girls and a deceased peddler engaged in an exchange of information by way of (presumably) two Spiritual Telegraphs.   Harnessing network effects, otherworldly innovation is heightened–five events can make 10 links, and twelve can make 66 links, and so on towards a tangled web of paranormality. Such a looming sensation of  voluminously other dimensions provocates a glocal anesthesia, i.e., a paralgorithmic process or set of “side effects” shadowing  everyday media life.

The image of a network with nodes and links forming a mesh, is counter-balanced by the absent modules or zones of empty space.  This omission defines the presence of the network. Between this black-and-white reduction there is the liminal libation of atmospheric perspective, a counter-environment emergent in shades of grey. An enticing escape from continous partial attention, perjoratively described elsewhere in relation to “repetition blindness,” “attentional blink,” and “temporal masking.”