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.

Unnatural Selection

“‘Living fossils’ are best defined as stationary species” writes cryptozoological pioneer Bernard Heuvelmans in his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

Similarly, all technologies are already fossils (in waiting). The production of obsolescence, as Michelle Henning has described, is essential to the perpetuity of new media and new technology. Obsolesced entities do not (typically) exile themselves into the depths of the Hollow Earth, instead they accumulate in lesser subterranean locales. Basements, in some cases.

With media technology, the classification, praise and official acceptance occurs at the beginning of the species’ presence. Unlike cryptids, techno-anomalies are inactive initially. They migrate in somnambulistic fashion into realms of the hidden, unknown, folkloric and fantastic after being invented, classified and known. They become scoffed at, subject of skeptical dismissal and willful ignorance after being first accepted and heralded as legitimate technological entities—if not salves to technocultural crises of the moment.

Marked with an aleatory zeal that echoes that of any number of run-ins with unknown animals, a later process of unnatural selection unfolds in second hand shops and other liminal zones. For better and worse this activity is accompanied by faint memories of yesterday’s marketing campaigns. As with cryptozoology, this thrifting can be concurrent with romanticized pursuits and nostalgic agendas.

Even so—revelation of more curious characteristics, activation of formally dormant possibilities emerges in both zoological and technological encounters. Technocultural claims could involve, for example, circuit-bending an old casio, re-programming a nintendo, or coming across an acreage of discarded data tapes in a mid-western liquidation center. The sound of found medical data, it turns out, is comprised of an astounding array of aural complexities. That is, if said data were played through an audio cassette deck rather than a data tape reader. Together Tapes’ Nohio release is testament to this anomalous action, but more on Together Tapes after field recordings are transcribed.

Until then, the above video by Youtube user CassetteMaster will appease eager Metaphortean researchers with a similar outing of techno-anomaly.

Gray Areas Persist

“Network realism” prefaces our encounter with reality these days.  As much and more is to be included in an upcoming research programme by the Virtual Knowledge Studio.  Seeking “to understand how mediation and knowledge production are entwined in the use of databases of images“ The notion of network realism, of an architecture of information swirling around actual entities, inspires me to re-trace my thoughts on networks, images and associational structures in relation to the Fortean.  Proposed Network Realism research is focused on the factual. Following Fort I’ll take the factual as a nuanced hue in a shifting continuum between known and unknown phenomena.

While the goblin universe has persisted in peripheral visions for millenia, nothing’s quiet on the Western front.  A (percieved) rise  of Fortean pursuits, including exhibits in New York, Maine, Maryland, also pop culture, hoaxes, sightings in both mass and amateur media seem to be gaining critical mass.  These occurrences may be understood as provocations linked to an accelerating, mass societal shift towards the acceptance/preference/convenience of free-floating images, text and associations as being indistinguishable from the represented physical counter parts.

For some the response to this is a matter of Baudrillardian hyper-reality, the pursuit of the cryptid is “a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.” The goblin universe is more tangible than the ghost world of networked space, or at least the possibilities of close encounters hold that promise.  There is likely a link to surveillance as well and thus the allure of the “unknown animal.”  Cryptids exist only as hypothetical realities, once captured, classified–they cease being cryptids. Once classified as legitimate animals they move from the speculative non-fiction of legend and folklore to the speculative non-fiction of network realism.  They are digitally photographed with cameras on tripods, saved as high resolution data products, then tagged.  Over time, the search engineering shifts associations away from Fortean claims.  Eventually even  forest giraffes, for example, are capable of generating links far removed from bigfeet, nessies and other, perhaps stealthier, cryptids.

Gray areas persist.