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.

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.

Sounding Fishy

Sounding fishy, like a data tape played back through speakers, like a VHS tape on the fritz, the coelacanths are my current call sign for curious cassette activity.  A living fossil from the genus magnetic.  If logic follows from Monster on the Campus,  a coelacanth exposed to gamma rays will reverse-engineer the evolution of those who imbibe its blood.  Highly speculative, but perhaps in the parallel dementia of Metaphortean space this damned data could be cast as the reversal of an over-heated medium.  That McLuhan endorsed moment when a medium pushed to its extremes collapses.  Revealing in this implosion a previously imperceptible purpose, direction, and/or possibility space.  The rise of cassette jockeying, for example.

Strange Survivals

“I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” exclaimed Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer on December 23rd 1938.

There was a time when the slimy shimmering coelacanth populated portions of the world unbeknownst to mainstream zoologists, and (amongst other reasons) was thus considered to be some 80 million years extinct. Lauded as a living fossil upon its discovery  in 1938, it has retained a certain subterranean cred.

“Coelacanths are certainly not as rare as we first thought…rather they’re living in a part of the world, a habitat that is so very difficult to sample…if you were lucky enough to hook one, you probably wouldn’t be able to bring it to the surface.” (Dr. John McCosker, Senior Scientist and Chair, Aquatic Biology)

Likewise audio cassettes are difficult to dredge up in the main streams.  Second-hand habitats are essential places to look, such as the legendary “Bins” on the outskirts of Portland proper.  Here you can cast a wide net, with yields of marvelous electronic has-beens, schools of eclectic cassettes and an active junk culture.  Like fish, your finds are sold to you by the pound!  Still others, like McCosker, make the case that  “The best way to sample for coelacanths now is not to fish for them but to talk to native fishermen…they say ‘oh I know that fish,’ they’ve caught them.” For many Indonesian fishing communities, the coelacanth was never really a fossil.

Never really an obsolete form.  Many in DIY music communities have never perceived a break in the cassette continuum, including younger generations who have “grown up digital,” yet turned out as advocates of an allegedly outmoded format.  Issues of access, opposition, Fortean logic?

Onto the more curious audio-life forms, the species of tape that reveal the potential of all tapes, of all tech, that lurks at the interface of malfunction.  Mix tapes act as sort of indicator species for an ecosystem of curious cassette activity.  As much was suggested in recent conversation with G.Lucas Crane about mixtapes as a sort of first glimpse at the hands-on potentialities encrypted in these consumer forms.