Impossible Properties

The ancient ars memoria, navigated by the in-board brain, allowed its users to recall great volumes of data using the elaborate spatial metaphor of the Memory Palace. Real and imaginary structures were employed mentally “so that simulations of actual buildings were infused with impossible properties.” (Davis, Techgnosis, p.198)

Hypothetical influence of the Collyer brothers case not withstanding, vague variants of eminent domain–guised in the cloak of progress–have settled in. If the Memory Palace was visited frequently in its time, today it has been condemned.

With media archeology having left port some time ago on its own metaphorical trajectories the fossil records of Paleontology will be of service in this Metaphortean morass.

Prehistory in the information environment operates rather like a coelacanth, an entity thwarting the rules and regulations of history-in-the-making.  Whether one calls such a phenomenon a living fossil or a stationary species depends on one’s ability to process mass torrents of incoming information!  

Part and parcel of the discipline, the forever paleontologist takes a plunge,  sorting through varied trace fossils, including  images, mp3s, text, videos, links of all kinds and a bevvy of messages. Askewed from a simultaneity of parallel tasks, the dimension of time is obliterated within even the most contingent of faculties in the perpetual process of perusing vertical strata of Facebook and e-mail inboxes.

For numerable, even numerous swathes of time, little bits of our experiences are settled into temporary enclaves of contextually consistent data.  Layer after layer of outered memories are then deposited elsewhere, deleted, or forgotten. These layers are pressed down more and more through time. Encountered in as of yet unknown future scenarios, such layers of sentiment are arguably symptomatic of Weschian context collapse.

The mobile phone is a territory machine, as Kenichi Fujimoto frames it, which suggests, also, that any cell phone, modestly equipped with storage capacities, holds a veritable subterranean trove of fossil evidence.  Such deposits may be gawked in a momentary lapse of network service, or when one is struck with a pang of nostalgia.  Rummaging through the device, such a “dig” reveals to the user a sundry segue of uncanny images: now fully grown kittens, children and perhaps trees.  Last summer’s vacation, weird store fronts, holiday cheer, old friends, and any imaginable menagerie of  megabytes marooned from the stream of lived experience.

Discontinued Futures

While antennae will likely remain fashionable and functional, extra-terrestrials with enormous brains will certainly be an endangered species in near-future network culture.  A strange survival from a discontinued future, an evolution short-circuited by the rise of the outboard brain.

Network realists and assorted green-collar workers will more readily glom onto the fossil fuel of the Frankenstein mythos as a retro-cause célèbre, championing the interchange of brains, recombinant aesthetics and upcycling initiatives found meandering in the nostalgic whimsy of the (Alter)Modern Prometheus.

Forever Paleontology

Retrograde remediation could be applied to the processes and possibilities of Network Realism, in the pursuing of a sousrealist agenda.  Sousrealism seems an apt term, traces of that vigilance from below that so many phantom limbed panopticonfidants engage in.  Forever publishing images, forever tracking, being found, and being present all the time with no end, information piles up, burying yesterday’s findings incessantly.  Living fossils are really just stationary species, to paraphrase zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.   Onward, following researcher Nold Egenter’s use of  “sous-realism” to differentiate Magritte from his typical surrealist milieu, stressing the artist’s attention to sub-terranean phenomena.   “With deep reflections and intensity [Magritte] reconstructs very precisely lost structures of the past, conditions which are no more conscious to us,” (Magritte the Archtecturologist), like a paleontologist puzzling out a prehistoric form.

Surrealism retro-fit through a digging up of clues,  out from under the real rather than from some lofty heights beyond it.  Entangled between fact and fiction, betwixt tangible reality and the mediated variants that are now so mundanely informing operations in everyday life.  Not quite liminal, maybe liminoid, a twilight expanding.  The apparitions now wandering about in the landscape of our distributed minds are searching for material memories, geo-spatial fossils and dredged up dinosaur technology.

Close encounters with alien visitors offer the promise of immediacy so absent in network culture.  Eye-witness interaction with advanced technology, a heterotopian space idling in the gaps of network coverage.   While even still,  the lifeworld of extra-terrestrial phenomena is beholden to the generative mechanisms of theory objects, if there is any hope of a lasting impression. Tech support for failed utopias in the timbre of twilight.

Recent Trawl

The exquisite specimens above are the result of a recent expedition by recreational trawler Jesse England. A long-time advocate of Metaphortean Space, England donated these living fossils for further research. The coelacanth of cassettes is most certainly a dinosaur, making such Mesozoic (or ‘middle animals’) as a data cassette and a sound “filmstrip” particularly relevant to current pursuits of Metaphorteana. There are many suspected inlets to the Super Sargasso Sea across the Pacific Northwest, and this recent trawl points again to that nucleus of damned data and lost miscellany.

The data cassette, defiantly boasting itself as “leader less,” “certified,” and issued by Radio Shack as a “computer product” was marked also with a fictographical ruse in the form of the hand-scrawled statement “blank.” Devoid of aural activities it cleary was not, whether the emanating damned data can suffice as “computer product” is unknown, but its sonic soliloquy was at once strange and arguably electronic. The other tape, marked with striking green and black colorations, issued by Coronet in 1974, and identified as “instructional media” seems to be a variant in the symbiotic scheme witnessed with other species of the genus magnetic. Intended to accompany a filmstrip of images, the Coronet tape is entitled “Our Changing Earth: HOW WE STUDY IT.” Indeed the content comprises a nearly thirteen minute audio-tome on Earth Science, complete with iconic bells, wind sounds, a curious and intermittent bassline.

Endless Coelacanth

Our coelacanth, the Metaphortean variant and/or a sea creature akin to an endless cassette  is already evidenced, at least speculatively, swimming around in the global brain. I’ll sum it up with a poem by Ogden Nash ( as sighted in Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time):

Consider now the Coelacanth,
Our only living fossil,
Persistent as the amaranth,
And status quo apostle.
It jeers at fish unfossilized
As intellectual snobs elite;
Old Coelacanth, so unrevised
It doesn’t know it’s obsolete.

Peale Session

Further research is in order, but after perusing Wikipedia, that most curious cabinet(work), there are some leads leering out for further analysis.  Angling after Charles Wilson Peale, natural history museum maverick, his fondness for Linnaeus’s taxonomic systems, and  particularly binomial nomenclature, one might uncover such orderings as:  Magnetic. tape

That is if one were casting a line into the abyss known as Metaphortean Space.

A cryptic note. No more or less cryptic than many mountains of encryption all told, still this query will do well to wonder and wander into more findings.

Ghost of a Chance

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.

Technocultural Turn Signals

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.

Unnatural Selection

“‘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.

Creatures of Habit

“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!