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.

Worldview of a Barnacle

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.

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.

Call of the Blobsquatch

The call of the Blobsquatch bellows out, beckoning and subsequently damning further analysis. Despite efforts to focus elsewhere, an exemplary excerpt from the Tactical Reality Dictionary entry on “Ambiguous Information”:

“The initial exposure to blurred, conflicting or ambiguous stimuli and data creates deep interference with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available. This effect has been demonstrated experimentally with subjects that are exposed to a distorted blurred image. As they develop more confidence in this first and perhaps erroneous impression of ambiguous stimuli this initial impression has more impact on subsequent perceptions. When the picture becomes clearer, new data is assimilated into the previous image but the initial interpretation is maintained and resistance to cognitive change is upheld until the contradiction becomes so strong and apparent that it forces itself upon consciousness.”

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?

Close Call

Again conversation has been halted with Instinct Control.  Could it be some sort of cosmic coincidence  (or paranormal protectionism) that my bevvy of electronic and digital recorders failed, that Instinct Control’s phone also died, and all on the day that marked the beginning of the end of analog television?

Could be.  Nonetheless, we’ll chalk it up to unknown paranormal mechanisms and re-group.  What secrets of the genus magnetic are being protected, if inadvertently?  The suspense is killing me.

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.