Blobsquatch: In the Expanded Field is honored in being one of several in the Video Essay Suite published in the latest issue of Blackbird, an online journal of literature and arts.
In the company of an excellent array of works by artists including: Jessica Bardsley & Penny Lane, John Bresland, Marilyn Freeman, Claudia Rankine & John Lucas, John Scott.
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.”
At the behest of Other Cinema’s captain Craig Baldwin, Blobsquatches enveloped the A.T.A. on the eve of Saturday, 17th of May. Metaphortean and Meta-Fortean philosophies were bandied about by yours truly, blobsquatches exposed and then subsequently afoot–sabotaging the sound system in retaliation for too much information.
Nonetheless, the evening was Fort-ified with anomalous anecdotes on Bigfoot scams from Sam Green, updates on drones from Jeffree Anderson, the Son of Sasquatch (see picture above from bstrand), the NES un-locked by Jeff Donaldson, applied blobsquatchery and Potter-Belmar Labs’ audio-visual oracles.
“the margin of error is our margin of freedom,” – Svetlana Boym
Recoiling and recalling defective vectors of the unknown, the perceived obsolescence of blurry sasquatches returns to the origin of the species (unknown animal), opening up speculation again, perpetuating anomalies, parading the limits of technology as the paradoxical provider of a utopian “unknown.” Blobsquatches represent an imaginable, tangible concept of the unknown. Simultaneously, by the very nature of the ambiguity and uncertainty of the blurry sasquatch, this unknown cannot be grasped. It hovers about waiting for someone/thing to make sense out of it. Distinctly indistinct, knowable but only as an unknown thing. Ever extinguished by reason, ever aloof by the short-circuiting of explanations by anomalous outcomes.
This is Fortean amplified towards a Meta-Fortean pursuit. Meanwhile, metaphortean pursuits, far from being isolated and exclusive, are aimed in a more or less straight-forward map quest. Transposing points from the realm of the cryptozoological to that of adaptive re-use of excess electronics. High-lighting affinities of conviction and excitement between these disparate disciplines, rallying around the possibilities of latent discoveries.
Follow up to Part I
With Blobsquatches identified as unknown “animals” worthy of pursuit, a makeshift map of ancestral origins, missing links and descendants emerges from the margins of error. Through the lens (errors intact) of Blobsquatchery, other facets and realms of contrarian cultural production can be speculatively enfranchised as such. To learn from one’s mistakes and consciously apply Blobsquatchery is to seek signals in noise, to understand error as both wandering and wondering astray.
Applied Blobsquatchery might reach as far back as anamorphosis, a la Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Obfuscation, here directed at perspectival technologies, an interruption of consensus reality in the dominant representational mode (one-point perspective) of the 16th century.
Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and more specificially the visual phenomena associated with Intrumental Transcommunication (ITC) has revealed an electronic species of Blobsquatch. ITC involves setting up a video feedback loop using an analog camcorder point back at it’s receiving monitor. Individual video frames are grabbed from this fray and analyzed further via computers. The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena describes:
“These images are often difficult to make out as anything more than optical noise, so we ask that you look very closely at any pattern you might first notice in the image…Except for a possible few exceptions, we do not know who or what these people shown here are. It is clear that people of many time periods, and possible worlds, are represented. We know how we collected these images, but we do not know how they are imprinted in the video or why. Perhaps the most we can gather from these images is that there is a phenomena, the phenomena is indicative of an intelligent manipulation of video noise and the represented entities exist outside of our known reality. We take from this a certain sense of friendliness and assurance that there is more to reality than meets the eye.“
Oscillating through impersonations of known celebrities, from Rudolph Valentino, Vincent Price to George Orwell, and sometimes known unknowns such as extra-terrestrial aliens! A striking variation on the radical ambiguities inherent in the traditional Blobsquatch, whereby the Patterson-Gimlin Sasquatch is the optical allusion of note.
Blobjects, as contemporary design intiatives to elude the straight edges of computer-assisted design and encourage cuddly consumption, are an intriguing link. Here optical, or more generally visual blobbiness is activated in response to stodgy vertical and horizontal planes typically associated with consumer gadgetry. Blobjects vary from VW bugs, to toothbrushes to iMacs, fashion and furniture. A darker variant is a prospective blobject encapsulated in the title of The Gray Goo Problem. Like a malevolent and carnivorous globster, this scenario marks the end stage of end users via molecular technologies gone awry. This hypothetical destruction of life by a self-replicating blob of nanomachines threatens to rapidly break down all organic matter to use as raw materials for replication! Spreading “like blowing pollen, [replicating] swiftly, and [reducing] the biosphere to dust in a matter of days,” as nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler warns in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.
Like their close cousin the Gremlin, albeit for explorations outside of sheer pranksterism, Blobsquatches and agents of Blobsquatchery are more often concerned with minor glitches, quirks and disruptions than full on catastrophic accidents. Looking at blobjects of the personal data assistant variety: Treos to iPhones, Smartphones, Blackberries, etc we witness the wake of “Homo Meanderthalensis.” More commonly known as The Meanderthal, this descendant of the Blobsquatch is described in Urban Meanderthals and the City of “Desire Lines”
by researcher Matthew Tiessen:
“A sort of human-variant, the Meanderthal could also be described as a Cyborg Spin-Off, exhibiting not only the machinic prosthetic appendages (e.g. cell-phone, Blackberry) required of cyborg flesh, but also the sort of behaviour — i.e. confusion, aimlessness, disorientation, self-absorption — that inevitably results when an all-too-human human attempts to navigate an overly mechanized and technologically-mediated environment.“
Meanderthals are a product of human error amplified and extended through technology. Their techno-somambulism calls attention to the limits of the city’s infrastructure through unconscious encounters. Meanderthals “are dangerous because they are oblivious to their surroundings,” observes reporter Jack Brubaker (from WordSpy) The Meanderthal, in gumming up metropolises, exhibits some characteristic traits of Blobsquatchery.
The city, as urban explorer G.Lucas Crane has described previously, is “like a colossal machine for organizing human sociality.” Meanderthals are numb to their surroundings, they disable their own sensory awareness. Indeed, they embody malfunction—but only at the behest of properly functioning personal digital assistants! Unlike Meanderthals, Blobsquatches are not oblivious to their environment but instead particularly sensitive to the revelatory potential lurking at the interface of malfunction. Blobsquatches are conscious conduits of malfunction, activating informed deviations, revealing previously imperceptible avenues of understanding.
The Bio-Electronic Audiosapien, antecedent of the Blobsquatch, is a Species Device identified by “father of circuit-bending” Reed Ghazala. The BEASape is a juggernaut all told, and will be the primary focus (so to speak) of the third installment of this Genealogy.
This familial mapping project is proving a bit unwieldy, so I will sign off 2007 with the following findings. Metaphortean readers can anticipate an addendum sometime early in the new year.“
Reminiscent of confronting a vast and perplexing database, the sight of so many conflicting wonders arouses a desire to enter the labyrinth and try to navigate the elegant maze” (Barbara Stafford, Good Looking)
Unexpected Correspondences: “Most, if not all, paranormal phenomena were preconceived hoaxes,” writes Karl Schoonover in his essay Ectoplasm, Evanescence and Photography. “To disguise this fact and meet the expectations of an increasingly science-savvy public, twentieth-century spirit photographs needed both to reference contemporary science and to mimic its methods of investigation and data collection.” Originally manifesting in the 1860s, the phenomenon known as “Spirit Photography” dramatically transformed in the early 20th century, reflecting changes in technoculture at large. With the advent of Eastman Kodak’s Brownie (introduced in 1900) and the subsequent waves of amateur photographers tinkering with the craft; initial notions of the camera as a haunted medium had given up their ghosts. The presence of shutterbugs was on the rise and, spirit photographers notwithstanding, there was much excitement about the capabilities of this mechanical instrument. This is not to say that belief in spirits, ghosts and the supernatural had been extinguished. Physical signs of supernatural activity, namely the abject excretions known as ectoplasm, emerged in response to growing public scrutiny of photographic processes and heightened awareness of photo-fakery. A paradigm shift.
Exemplifying what McLuhan would later refer to as the reversal of an over-heated medium, the shift towards documentation of ectoplasm, “so excessively indulges a corporeal spectacle that it endangers the plausibility of the very phenomenon of spirit photography,” notes Schoonover. This photo-cultural turn is interestingly echoed a century later within the cryptozoological community. Cryptozoology, the study of unknown animals, famously includes: Bigfeet, Lake Monsters, Chupacabras and UFOs. Cryptozoology, is well known for believing firmly in creatures that are not supposed to exist. Facing on-going mockery from established science, cryptozoologists continue their quests for unknown animals armed with ambiguous photo-documents. Rampant Photoshopping is the obvious hoaxer at this threshold, but growing allusions to scientific methodologies amongst cryptozoologists have taken aim at issues of image clarity too, as I’ll recount momentarily. Nonetheless, unknown animals have thus far eluded physical capture. Like ectoplasm they are ensnared only as indexical traces.
In 1967, in what would seem to be the apotheosis of sasquatch sightings, frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip inscribed its indelible mark. Today, with increased accessibility of high-definition cameras and high-end digital imaging options, prosumers are on the rise and, cryptozoologists notwithstanding, there is much excitement about the capabilities of these digital instruments. These days, sasquatch sightings must provide explicit information about the unknown. Mystery apes must adhere to the guidelines laid out by the Patterson-Gimlin model. Panopticonfident, today’s conscientious cryptozoologist is prone to dismiss “any photo requiring equal parts interpretation and imagination,” as Sasquatch researcher Alton Higgins asserts in Evaluating Purported Sasquatch Photographic Evidence.
Reversal of an over-heated Sasquatch. The Blobsquatch emerged but nobody paid attention because this paradigm wasn’t shifting along a linear path. A personification of noise, of blurriness, of what writer Svetlana Boym calls “broken-tech.” In Boym’s Off-Modern Manifesto she describes broken-tech as “Not Luditte but ludic…it challenges destruction with play.” The Blobsquatch toys with the Sasquatch hunters expectations, erring on the side of audacity, opening up a new territory, one that is off the beaten path. The Blobsquatch’s stomping ground is the margin of error, the duration of uncertainty that confabulates (or condemns). “[This] margin of error is our margin of freedom. It’s a choice beyond the multiple choices programmed for us…The error is a chance encounter between us and the machines in which we surprise each other.” (Boym)
Metaphors are fine operatives for probing possibility spaces and understanding the unknown. But what about the Blobsquatch? Fortean phenomena including Fortean Zoology is a fertile ground for metaphor, but how does the Blobsquatch fit in?
Putting audacity before caution, risking redundancy, a re (intro) duction to the Blobsquatch in the Expanded Field. What is expanding? What is the field? Blobsquatches as personification of optical errors, or the visual noise overcoming visual signal of a Sasquatch. Like gremlins-to-airplanes, Blobsquatches are a minor nuisance. Blobsquatches are good at impeding commercial cultural exploitation of an otherwise iconic mystery animal. A break from official zoology, the Sasquatch breaks science. It is an error, an anomaly, a Fortean figurehead of Other Science and vernacular culture. But Fortean forecasts fumble in the weird “whether or not” precipitation of understanding signals in noise at the level of technological mediation. What is the Blobsquatch if not Meta-Fortean? an anomaly mediating anomaly. What else? Blobsquatch as personifcation of error engendered technologically. A different kind of mystery. Meta-Fortean, media extend human faculties, errors extend human fantasy and/or amplify the human capacity for wonder. Blobsquatch as hetero-crony, as counter-sight to the Sasquatch.
Expanded Field as Other Technology. Other technologies, allegedly obsolete, discarded, deemed out of style, use, relevance. Residual technologies that circulate through second-hand markets. Leftover media and machines, creatures of the outer edge. What of vernacular culture? vernacular technoculture? Blobsquatchery is an active pursuit of Blobsquatches. A search for signals in noise. Circuit-bending is one example, including video-bending –a crypto-zoetropical pursuit par excellance! We can also cite/sight/site: Iron Artist, an annual call-to-arms from Portland’s School and Community Reuse Action Project. Opposing teams face off in the realm of residuals. Bound thematically, imagination is activated to stretch the limits of select scraps, to find signals in noise, squatches in blobs. A carrying over of ideas from one realm to another. Like metaphors in action.
So what am I on about? Creative Re-Use of Fortean phenomena. Remediation of Fortean Phenomena. Metaphors from the outer edge. Metaphortean phenomena as a signal in all this noise.
Putting caution before audacity, Blobsquatches might be mitigated by a comparison to the Hitchcockian plot device, the MacGuffin. Although generated here by paranormal mechanisms rather than clever directors— to complicate and confabulate the spaces between fact/fiction, new media/old media, signal/noise, and so on.
The Blobsquatch, for my pursuits, is a welcome personification of technological aberration as unknown ‘animal’. The suffix “squatch” serves as a short-cut into acres of associated cryptozoological ideas. “Squatch” operates in a manner similar to the prefix “franken”, a direct line to notions of mad science in modern culture, or the suffix “gate” which transforms anything into a political scandal. Blobsquatch works but Blobfoot doesn’t. Why? “Blobfoot” sounds like some sort of disease or awkward dance. Chupacablob, Blob Ness might be acceptable variants using other known cryptids, but of course Bigfoot/Sasquatch is more memetically charged as an emblem of cryptozoological culture.
Recently, one of my colleagues asked me “What about the Glitchsquatch? Do you know about the Glitchsquatch?” So far as I can tell the term “glitch” is self-sufficient. It doesn’t need the suffix “squatch” to express the idea of technological anomaly. Etymologically, “glitch” is likely derived from Yiddish glitsh “a slip,” from glitshn “to slip,” from Ger. glitschen, and related gleiten “to glide,” as Etymonline.com suggests. Emerged in the early 1960s as technical term associated with electronic engineering it was “popularized and given a broader meaning by U.S. space program.” (Etymonline) I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that the glitch may be close cousins with the gremlin. The conglomeration “Frankenglitch” as a term meaning approximately the “mad science of manufacturing malfunction,” might work out. Mad scientists of malfunction, in my mind are audio-visual artists who seek signals in noise and/or are motivated by a belief/conviction to do so. But then, the term “mad scientist” isn’t synonomous with “cryptozoologist,” (despite what some people might think) and so the use of the prefix “franken” gets entangled in a whole other system of signs.
In its original usage, Blobsquatch refers to the results of an optical error, or lens based blurring of an image. This unintentional illusion (rather than photoshopped hoax) appears, in its blob-like form, to be a Sasquatch (which it may or may not be in actuality.) As stated elsewhere, I’m interested in pursuing the Blobsquatch in the expanded field. In other words I’m interested not just in the blurs, blobs and unknowns specific to botched attempts at documenting Sasquatches, but the holding power of aberrations and curious encounters across the technocultural imagination. Optical, electronic and digital unknowns that are both aesthetically fascinating and foundational to various vernacular belief systems. The Blobsquatch functions for me as a means of interdisciplinary exploration at the intersection of the cryptozoological and technological.
To go about catching a Blobsquatch, one must bait the creature’s native habitat–the technocultural realms of the infosphere. Staged accidents concerning analog and digital imaging implemented with intent to attract the truly unknown. For the truly fantastic, it is likely necessary to turn to known Blobsquatch specialists, those who seek ‘squatches’ in ‘blobs’, or signals in noise. The electronic art of circuit-bending and other such adventures should be investigated. Theorist Svetlana Boym alludes to the promise of this sort of creative sabotage in Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto, describing “broken-tech” as art’s new technology. “It cheats both on technological progress and on technological obsolescence.” (Boym) Broken-tech is not nihilistic but hopeful and curious, “not Luddite but ludic. It challenges the destruction with play.” (Boym) I have recently started another on-line think tank, this one dedicated to field recordings and related documents: Blobsquatchery in the Expanded Field.
Following the neologistic trajectories of monstrosities such as Frankenstein and Watergate, the Sasquatch, too, has reached the cultural capitol of portmanteau! The suffix “squatch,” has been broken free from “sas” and re-connected to “blob”.
Blobsquatch. The term itself, according to Cryptomundo.com was coined initially by Vito Quaranta, then propagated online by Ray Randell throughout 2002-03. The ‘squatch,’ of course, refering to sasquatch, bigfoot, manimals–those hairy, hefty, homonids in our midst. ‘blob’ refers to a common characteristic of most all cryptozoological documentation–blurry, grainy, blobby-ness. The shadowy shapes and nebulous forms that just might be something out of the ordinary. This is separate from a hoax, which involves intentional construction of deceptive imagery. In an article entitled Evaluating Purported Sasquatch Photographic Evidence author Alton Higgins notes the rise of Photoshop assisted phoniness in falsified Bigfoot documentation. With Sasquatches or Blobsquatches proper, Higgins contends that “most unbiased observers, including those within the bigfoot research community, would [agree] that any photo requiring equal parts interpretation and imagination…should be discounted.”(Higgins)
This seems a valid way to determine the objectivity of indexical traceroutes back to a physical sasquatch and environment. That is to say if one’s noise-to-signal ratio reads blob-to-squatch, (see figure above fromBigfoot Forums) and is concerned only with that physical thing out in the wildnerness. For my research, into the information environment and anomalies that upset order there, the Blobsquatch is a welcome personification, so to speak, for the technocultural imaginary.
“Wherever streams of consciousness and electrons converge in the cultural imagination,there lies a potential conduit to an electronic elsewhere” (Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media). There has been a historically sustained interest in the intersection of technology and imagination. Particularly prominent is the interpretation of glitches, errors and other technological aberrations as signs of the supernatural. The activities of the Modern Spiritualists come to mind, particularly Spirit Photography. Modern Spiritualists believed that the otherwise imperceptible forces from the spirit world could be captured in the sufficiently sensitive photographic process. Murky multiple-exposures and the gooey gobs of ‘ectoplasm’ can be found in the photodocuments from late 19th century seances. As radio technology was implemented in the early 20th century, the audio-disturbances (now known as sferics) were intially believed to be Alien communiques. Electronic Voice Phenomena and the mysterious bloop are more recent variants on audio-anomalies. In 1970, the “Bayside Apparitions” phenomena began in (originally) Bayside, New York. As Folklorist Daniel Wojcik describes in his book The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America, Veronica Lueken has developed a following of thousands surrounding her direct conveyance of the Virgin Mary’s prophesies. Lueken’s followers, known as ‘Baysiders,’have witnessed and documented miraculous phenomena–most notably with Polaroid cameras. “Said to contain allegorical symbols and…interpreted as divine communication offering insights of prophetic relevance,” (Wojcik,p.81) the Baysiders refer to these photos as “Polaroids from Heaven.” The manifestations on these photos “include streaks and swirls of light…dotted lines and beads of light,” (Wojcik, p.82) all developed near-instantaneously in traditional Polaroid form. Like Spirit Photography, “miracle photography is a form of divination, a technique of interpreting symbolic messages communicated by superantural forces,” (Wojcik, p.83) on par with a technologically involved world.
Gremlins, as discussed in a previous post, are perhaps a missing link between technological and cryptozoological anomalies.
