Puzzling the Ficto-Quizzical II

On track of the unknown neologism.  Looking for leads on the “ficto-quizzical,” origins of this species, possibility spaces and the like.

Bullshit detectors typically topple from an acute inability to read between the lines and, or,  when in the vicinity of the (((WFT))) hypercentre.

Nonetheless there are established fields worth wandering and wondering into, naked facts to jostle loose implied allegations of whimsy or hoaxcraft.

Ficto-quizzicism is a neologistic attractor, calling forth a small brigade of other such portmanteau.  We can ascribe it as a flotsomnambulant variation on ficto-criticism.  Flotsomambulance itself a more technical term for space-time transience.

Most noticeably ficto-quizzicism is mere shades apart from the term “ficto-critical”. Rosslyn Prosser citing Amanda Nettlebeck’s notes on ficto-critical conduct in Processing Fictocriticism describes this expanse as one of: “self reflexivity, the fragment, intertextuality, the bending of narrative boundaries, crossing of genres, the capacity to adapt literary forms, hybridized writing, moving between fiction (invention/speculation) and criticism (deduction/explication) of subjectivity (interiority) and objectivity (exteriority)”–

In the Weird Fiction milieu, these puzzle pieces are generated from likely enough sources.  The Weird Tales of Lovecraft, Blackwood, Shaver, Serling, Eshun and other such twisty pretzels.  New media, residual media, emergent media, dead media and their kin. Information environments overrun by conceptual kudzu.  Hi Fidelity Concepts: Sci-Fi, Weird-Fi, Sonic-Fi, even occasionally Anartic-Fi exploded in ad hoc amalgamations with lo-fi videographic techniques, glitchcraft, expanded cinema, networked performance and other audio-visual agendas.

Like so many accelerations to facilitate collidoscopic views of that elusive Higgs Boson, this is a collaborative operation spanning many nodes and perhaps infiltrated even now by future influences.  Simultaneous Blogs beget vlogs beget vamples and short docs. Live performance begets networked writing begets research and development of concepts, costumes, camera-assists, bookworks, occasional artspeak and then repeat gestures unravel again.

Detonation sidesteps denotations, exciting confused connotations and an aesthetic of complexity.  Associational structures coalesce from the debris that survives impact:  mingling, mutating and meandering into new forms.

As letter forms go, ficto is not far removed from salvo.   Accept this lexiconspiracy, at least momentarily, and curious correspondences in such a firing of arms (to strike a target or simply to salute ) offer up another puzzle piece–one that does…not…quite…fit…

Apologies dear readers: This  ficto-quizzical is a strange bird- a paraform that even the fleshy mind of this lone mammal can only calculate so quickly!

Creeping Futurism

My neuroaesthetically inclined cohorts in the ficto-quizzical milieu of Weird Fiction have recently regurgitated their theories of cine-molecular sabotage; aligning these to quantum claims of scientists pursuing the cryptid-like Higgs Boson particle.  As (((WFT))) explodes the space-time of material memories, physicists continue to agree that saving your ancestors from fated collisions  is no cause for alarm, paradoxically speaking.  In other words, as Denis Overbye relays in his recent NYTimes article The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate, “In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.”

Arguably, the possibilities bandied about concerning “future influence” on the Large Hadron collider could also be construed as an anomolous extreme of planned obsolescence.  Planned, or structured obsolescence operates by building in a limited time frame of usefulness for a product, ensuring the need for consumers to continually dispose the old and buy again a familiar but newer model. The reverse engineering manifest in creeping featurism reaches its logical limits with the time-travel theories concerning the LHC. Not unlike an adventure safari into the Jurassic that obsolesces various futures with every haphazard step away from the presented path.

Relatedly, we read all instances of obsolescence as actions of future operatives, butterfly effects orchestrated in advance to endanger would be stationary species. From beta decks to tasmanian tigers each extinction at once opening up an alternative universe focused on the future and marooning the residuals in lost worlds, memory holes and the shadowy spaces of network culture.

Damned Data-Mine

Birds of a Feather

Summer is arrived with a wave of brain addling heat –and so I will keep this post necessarily brief.  Brief and necessary, compelled by unknown mechanisms.  Truly,  I find myself pestered both passively and aggressively into continuing my reports on the ficto-quizzical agents of the Weird Fiction milieu.  So I’ll dredge up some tidbits now on the creature known as This Owl.

This Owl is purported to be omniscient, panopticonscious, densely networked and, at times, creepy as all hell. Rarely materialized into “humanoid” form at Weird Fiction event-scenes, yet always quick with reviews and anecdotes of any particular evening’s occurrences. Some audiences have reported hearing a faint fluttering of wings, incessant ringing of phones and other anomalous sounds.

While shy of a confirmed link, or two, there is reason enough to consider the “Mothman,” or “Bird man”  as an adjunct operative.  Zoological authorities will always laugh off any cryptid by pointing to a commonplace look-a-like.  In presence of Mothmania circa 1966 and various points onwards, many experts have cited the barn owl to quell anxious denizens of the West Virginian countryside.   Truly, the colossal corpus and red glaring eyes don’t compute with typical taxonomies of owls but the point here is not merely Fortean formulations on intermediacy.   Owls, especially the species inhabiting info-ecosystems, are most curious and perhaps paranormal creatures, to be wary of…period!

Visual associations aside, This Owl, like the Mothman (and so many other monstrous creatures) is also a sort of portent or omen of impending crises.  Alas, as noted, the heat is close at hand and my Metaphortean diagostics are greatly incapacitated  presently.  I will have to end here, taking cover in shadier climes for a spell.

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

Puzzling the Ficto-Quizzical

Making haste on the offer to produce a field report on the emergent phenomenon, Weird Fiction, I will put audacity before caution and spell out this tedious tome! Puzzling out this motley crew of the self-proclaimed “ficto-quizzical”, I offer up some jig-saw pieces, albeit floating in mild confusion:

Weird Fiction are multivisionaries, and I offer this term at once for its obsolescent and optimistic capacities. Multivision was at one point a term for high end multi-projection audiovisual presentations produced with an armada of slide projectors. Today, multitude (the network) is an everyday occurrence, audio-visual phantasms are commonplace as Powerpoints and iPhone apps. Multivision (via analog electronics) is obsolete, and the technologies disappeared to storehouses and second-hand shops. Gone…but not forgotten, as outfits diverse as the Antiques Roadshow and Weird Fiction are a testament to! Yes, there are more uses than one for obsolete tech, more fates than e-waste, more possibilities than linear progressions, more weirdness in truth than fiction— as any follower of Metaphortean Space might sheepishly admit!

In tasking the Lovecraftian canon of nebulous sky-spawn and ancient curses, of forgotten cities and other dimensional entities a nerve is pinched techno-culturally. Weird Fiction tune in to telling tinglers:

Hertzian forces and Dead Media. Hertzian forces are intangible yet real, bombarding us always with information in the broadest sense…terrifying us with the promise that there is a weird world swirling just outside of human sensory awareness. Making one grateful for the sensory limitations of the human apparatus while, nonetheless, these limitations are continually reversed by way of new media!

Hertzian space is forgotten –but not gone! Taken for granted, lurking everywhere but out of sight. The premise of probing a poetics of Hertzian space, is put forward in Anthony Dunnes’ Hertzian Tales circa 1999. Antecedents of both the “hertzian” and the “tale” are of course ample three quarters of century before with wireless radio and the debut of the publication Weird Tales. As noted in Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, “most media historians designate 1922 as the year radio exploded into national sensation” (p.93)

Weird Tales, of course, was a less mass phenomenon yet authors including notably H.P. Lovecraft and oddly enough Tennessee Williams made literary appearances in this magazine that launched in 1923. Point is these tales were often punctuated with Hertzian horrors, or what scholar Manuel Aguirre terms “Cosmic Terror”

In The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism Aquirre trails a history of haunters, with “Cosmic Terror” as a reflection not of an isolated haunter but a systemic presence. Writes Aguirre of this terror:

“We do not have singular confrontations with our own personal Doubles, but glimpses of the near-impossible, of a something so vast as to be incomprehensible: not our individual mirror-images, but a mirror-image of the human world itself, an image which…the basic laws of nature are flaunted while new monstrous laws emanating from the mirror begin to bear upon its presumed original” (p.160)

Weird Fiction’s propensity towards the glitch, the visual noises, poor transmissions and malfunction, these murky intermixed components (details ascribed to the impish familiars –the space-time transients) constitute monstrous iterations of original source signals.

At once signifying unseen guests from some hideous “Other domain in our cosmos, lurking behind every gateway, seeking entrance into our world” (Aguirre, p163) and literally revealing the limitations of media technology (the extended human apparatus)

Weird Fiction is perhaps a database cinema, too, answering Manovich’s concern that “today we have too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together.” (Language of New Media, p217.) With variants of Charles Fort’s “damned data” a link that no doubt my Metaphortean readers will understand having incessantly been referred to Fort’s Book of the Damned

Weird Fiction’s perverse reply emerges as a handful of dark, irreverent, labyrinthine and, yes, metaphorical spatial environments. A minor-league mythos, with virtual plateaus populated, at times, with more recognizable haunters and “things that go bump in the night.”

In this regard, cinematic fiction like Monster Squad and sitcoms like The Munsters could also be argued as databases of the damned, yet it is what Manovich would call the “algorithms”, here– the nebulous and scattered plasticity— the “quizzical” not just the “ficto” that is a key distinction.

Synesthesia is not always a utopian vision, anesthesia is not always a numbing wasteland. The heterotopian haunting is a better title for the “ficto-quizzical milieu” embracing and prolonging what has been elsewhere bandied about as “picturing ambiguity” (Stafford), “imaging the abject” (King) and “applied blobsquatchery (Diehl)

I will give pause here for another series of analyses at a later date. Weird Fiction is a nutshell indeed, difficult to crack but still its inklings compel me onward towards continued research!

Weird Fiction

As is so often the case, unknown paranormal mechanisms have opened up new possibilities for Metaphortean Space. Presently, with no small thanks to my colleague Irving Bleak, I have made arrangements to conduct occasional field reports on the newly observable set of occurrences called Weird Fiction. This “ficto-quizzical milieu” promises “at times monsters dressed as humanoids,” and is actively operating on the innards of both dead media and the Lovecraftian canon.

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.

Weird Realism

Heterogeneity and density could describe the swirl of ideas around visual representation, emphasis here on the agents associated with the cryptozoological encounter.  The  occurrence of a cryptid, “a creature whose existence has been suggested but not scientifically confirmed,”(wikipedia) involves optical allusions and optical illusions.  Allusion is an obsolete form of metaphor, now generally understood as casual reference.  Encounters with cryptids are not often outright or explicit, but involve varying degrees of image-like glimpses, nuance and reference.

Illusions might involve hoaxcraft, wherein a transmission is intent on deception put forth in a way unbeknownst to the reciever. Stage magic is a variant, a consensual hoax, wherein transmitter/reciever are both in on the illusion whether or not the reciever is aware of the means to that illusion.

Cryptozoological encounters are infamously plagued by the constructed realities of hoaxes, while truly cryptids thrive under the auspices of an emergent form of built environment, namely network realism.  Network Realism, again, is subject of current research by the Virtual Knowledge Studio into mediation and knowledge production in the cultural context of networked databases of images.   In allusion, I’m considering hybrid models and ultimately a neologistic phrasing that captures the constellation of the cryptid (emblematic nerve-cell of the Metaphortean Space).  The (techno)cultural imagination is a seive that filters out memetic nutrients from the bulk of allusions and illusions that emanate around Fortean affairs.  The paranormal mechanism that sustains the cryptid involves a network of networks, robust as it is ambient in its architecture.

Weird fiction is an obsolescent term for science-fiction marked with shades of cosmic horror, antiquated technologies, myth and mad scientists of the deranged, living fossil variety.  Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, please stand up.

Social fiction is on track and Sonic fiction is of course a particularly loved anomaly, but Speculative Non-Fiction is the typical terminology I deploy.  How about Weird Realism?