Invasive Computing environments are growing quietly and quickly. The architecture for these systems is as ambient as it is robust. Quiet, ambient, networked…these are fantastic descriptions for the data-products shuttling between nodes and networks. Not so fitting, however, for those caught in the tangled webs between real and virtual spaces. The so-called meanderthals act as indicator species for the ubicomplications of emergent network cultures.
Meanderthals are a product of human error amplified and extended through networked technologies. Oblivious to all but the demands of their personal data assistants, these wayward cyborgs call attention to the limits of a city’s infrastructure by way of unconscious collisions.
Tracking their movements across simultaneous environments may require access to schizogeographic information systems, schizogeographic positioning satellites and other such theory objects that have and are presently being hot-wired to contend with the non-euclidean event scenes of these bumbling hordes.
Still, their carbon footprints are readily identifiable, as evidenced in the niche opportunities billowing forth in all shades of grey.
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.
Data-mining the Shaver canon, with particular attention to the Deros, evokes a maligned form of the meanderthal. Mutant and mean-spirited, the deros or “detrimental robots” were allegedly borne of irradiation from e-waste left behind by negligent Titans and, or, Atlans millenia ago. From within the inner-Earth they accumulate attention capital by way of malevolent social networks—sabotaging and disappearing people, places and things on Earth’s surface.
“A man who is equipped like a territory is no longer an inhabitant; he becomes a habitat.” – Paul Virilio, Crepuscular Dawn.
Within Virilio’s critique of techno-accessorizing and auto-colonization is also a possibility space for more mysteries a la Shaver. E-waste as alien implant, a time capsule, an out-of-place artifact from a future imperfect. “History is spatial,” notes Tom Sherman, “there are going to be anachronisms in your neighborhood.” (Before and After the I-Bomb) The shadow economies of electronic refuse remain on the back of our minds, figuratively or literally, depending on how far we push this amazing story.
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.
If unseen agents of an intertidal continuum, a microcosmic world in miniature, can truly reflect on the increasingly complex realities of a networked cosmos, so be it. It is perhaps true that wading in ad hoc tide pools alongside of the Super Sargasso Sea, one may find some speculative theory objects, blogjects and assorted memetic flora and fauna.
Lurking adjacent to this vast aerial ocean of lost, forgotten and obscured ideas only the hardiest of inhabitants will survive. Regularly, portions of this nodal enclave are covered and uncovered by the advance and retreat of the Super Sargasso. Life forms in this ecological niche must adapt, evolve or otherwise embrace the worldview of the barnacle. Not necessarily, or literally, the sedentary crustacean clinging on to a fixed spot (the marine equivalent of desktop computing) but an equipped barnacle, a networked thing. Not an absolutely inflexible stubborn barnacle either, but a progressive 21st century barnacle. Barnacle 2.0, the barnacle that blogs. Like acres of other barnacle species, these variants dwell continually in their shell, in this case a figurative housing represented by a small fleet of networked devices. These wireless appendages: feathery, barbed and information-prone, draw data-plankton in from the hertzian currents which permeate even the murkiest patches of the Super Sargasso Sea.
Barnacles in said shells find solace amongst other transients in the data cloud of the tide pools, the primordial soups of an altermodern ecosystem. This is home to inhabitants tuned in to network culture; rich with a perpetual influx of information and robust infrastructurally with a ceaseless attention to nuanced nodes on which to cling. Mobile, yet clinging on.
Often times these wired barnacles intentionally voyage out into the Super Sargasso, drifting in heterotopian fashion, attaching themselves to the underside of vessels. These derelict vessels, from discarded media to forgotten theories and interdisciplinary wrecks may be salvaged if sufficiently encrusted with barnacles. Like so many deep sea research submersibles, the blogging barnacle relies on an omnipresence of heterogeneity, an entourage of pingbacks, trackbacks, links and related search engineering.
It is perhaps also true that barnacles do not blog, that periwinkles do not gush that tide pools along the Super Sargasso are as speculative as the migratory patterns of eels circling back to Earth.
“A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society—and whatever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations.“ — Charles Fort, Lo! , 1931
Gushes of periwinkles fall on labyrinthine back roads, we paid no mind to this at the time. After Google map guffaws on the cold and windy night, we saw the neon prompts emerge. Parked, we wandered next to behemoths of off-season carnivals, of amusements in hibernation. Incomplete roller coasters, leering carousels, and other mechanical monstrosities. Meanwhile, another anomalous Portland encounter–the Oaks Rink– beckoned us with subtle hypnosis. Neighborly and welcoming with its warm glows and the faint aroma of nacho cheese.
Aesthetics of the bowling alley, shades of a disco, this inviting Americana was tonight peppered with the cool minimalism of contemporary art and artifacts as well. A comfortable match all told. Free skate filled it in for an hour. Free skate functioned despite the fact that this activity unfolded under the shadows of a most curious floating tech relic. A Wurlitzer dramatically lit with wooden vessels galore. Sloping walls with switches and an impressive armada of bells. A decidedly steam punk environment claimed some.
Weird nostalgic twitches took a turn for the surreal as untold numbers of skaters continued to careen around the rink. Tumbling, soaring, peripheral glimpses and grasps, par for the course? Far from it! This old haunt was adrift in a sonic enviros that veered towards the outer limits of its intended function. Attuned and transfixed as one could be in the midst of pedlock on wheels, the cosmic uncanny of Ethan Rose’s live performance was a near Fortean delight.
Perhaps another node in the concern over extra-terrestrial terrorism that Fife Symington and associates discussed in the Fall of 2007, the incoming Obama administration is planning on postponing the transition to digital television. On the surface this of course is framed as a chance to catch consumers up to speed against the lagging distribution and production of converter box vouchers. For electronic anomalists of all stripes, this is also an unfortunate delay in freeing up the analog airwaves to interference-free research.
As outlined in Patrolling the Ether (shown above), there are advantages to the obsolescence of analog broadcasts and great expectations for the new lands, forms and forums to be engaged across the etheric sea.
Dramatic re-enactment of astronomer Percival Lowell’s fin de siècle observations of areas then erroneously interpreted as irrigation systems of the planet Mars. As featured in the installation Being Liminal, by Carl Diehl and Mack McFarland
“There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comets tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus. ” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Meanderthals are a product of human error amplified and extended through networked technologies. Oblivious to all but the demands of their personal data assistants, these wayward cyborgs call attention to the limits of a city’s infrastructure by way of unconscious collisions.
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 
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.
Data-mining the 
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 
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 
