A Way To Be Used

Obsolescence, etymologically, entails  Ob – “Away” + Solere – “To Be Used.” Planned, or Forced, Obsolescence is a design delimiting the duration of use, or the time span over which something is pushed away.  It is the mapping out of precipices over which something  falls into disuse.

“[W]hat is ideological is often confused with what is natural,” writes Trinh T. Minh-ha of filmmaking practice in her essay Questions of Images and Politics, insight that could be coupled with the production of obsolescence as well.  Such occurrences of an item falling into disuse conjures up a scene akin to Wile E. Coyote’s delayed recognition of gravity.  Shocks of the arriving new medium are concealed via processes of Remediation, the new form adopting stylistic traits of the old to ease the transition. Is this also transiency without progress?

Retrograde Remediation, prevalent formally but perhaps best evidenced in relation to eco-ethical initiatives, of e-stewardship and takeback campaigns. Guardians of the house, “E” associated as much with electronics as with ecology, not metaphorically, as in “media ecology,” but etymologically as in the Greek oikos or “house, dwelling, habitation.”

“When a technology is suddenly eclipsed by its own obsolescence…it releases a memory of [its utopian promise] “ (R.Kraus remediating W.Benjamin in discussion of W.Kentridge’s animation)

Unlike Planned Obsolescence, Future Influence is a design strategy that introduces an out of place artifact, a something that falls into use, engaging its user conceptually–a theory object– if not becoming part of one’s material practice proper! Deploying “paramediation,” instead, a process perhaps more aloof than retrograde.  This offset iteration embarks on a detour in the outskirts of established mediation processes,  an anaglyphic avenue for failing colliders, falling stars, fallen angels…

Mediologist Regis Debray probes the “untamed anthropology” of angelic activity in Transmitting Cultures in relation to mediological modes of inquiry.  Angels as “go-betweens” for messaging and massaging Christian faith, negotiating access to higher authorities, generally keeping the spirit alive. The act of fortification via cultural transmission operates not unlike network realism, as has been experimentally applied to other cultural conduits previously.   Discontinued futures of angelic/demonic courier services have been retrieved in second-hand belief systems, remediated in the form of hi-tech craft, providing “just the right technological veneer to make them palatable to modern man,” (Carrie Lee Rothhab in her summary of C. Jung’s Flying Saucer analysis)

Paramediation suggests an unidentified object that  remains between rather than serving as a “go-between,” or mediator interfacing worlds.  Pluralistic in use-value, this paranormal mechanism does not necessarily adhere to linear shuttles between old and new, past and future, but displaces that which it is beholden to much like a mirage.

A hovercraft as much as any other craft, a matter of ghost authorship rather than a particular mediumship /airship, per se.  I will pause here, noting that ambiguous occurrences compel a “strategy of suspending judgment for as long as possible,” (TRD) and that the slow-moving feature/future bloat may be encrypted anamorphically, requiring views further askew.

Celestial Body Count

Keen on commandeering the future with astronomical interfaces, portent-deprived apocalypticists queried the starry expanse in hopes of honing in on a nascent futures market.

The void that was to devour the gadget era began to whet its appetite aeons ago “If the planets were gods, did they not influence, or even predict, human affairs?” quipped would-be prophets and/or priests of yore (AIP).

Conspiracy theory is the poor person’s cognitive map, writes Jameson, a means of makeshift mapping of an ever more unfathomable world.  Meanwhile cognitive mapping is short-changed by the Google map, the interface for oracular queries of the god-like, all seeing satellites, themselves short-changing the creature features of old-school astronomy.

In other words, the gadget era, nay, the “append-age” is upon us.  This is old news, but older news still whisps through the air, perhaps only audible on the same frequency to which so-many  insects have fled.

Older News: Obsolesced from existence was the fate of a particular catchpiece of sky-flung navigation, in everyday parlance it might be understood as an anemic iPhone, while in its own time known as an astronomical instrument, an eye-piece for “phoning” the Universe.

In an age where one feels naked without cellphone or camera, such an unwieldy and antiquated means of traveling the space ways as Tycho Brahe’s 16th century”Great Mural Quadrant,” (seen above) is unlikely to earn many votes of confidence.  A snapshot of the heavens intercepted by motion-detection wetware, a sensory organ trained on a tiny opening in a sky-ward wall.  From here varied coordinates were relayed to data assistants manning time counters and transcription apparatuses.  Alchemical labs at the ready, this harvesting of data-points and precision calculations was to transmaterialize into a means of controlling the future.

Amongst his mottoes, “by looking up I see downward,” proclaimed Brahe, and indeed his own instrument made its descent into the annals of old media, as did its homage in the sky, two centuries later.  Of the outmoded constellation known as Quadrans Muralis, a star-pattern discontinued in the face of competing astrologies, obsolesced for want of grid-friendly regions rather than a celestial body count. Survived it is, nonetheless, by the portentous aerial phenomena of the Quadrantid meteor shower.

More over, the ruins of this naked-eye astronomy and its collegial constellation provided a step up towards the next plunge.

Progression of the Damned

Shadow figures occupy the margin of foresight and may in fact be closer than they appear.  UFOs,  airships, orbs, angels and other ominous aerial phenomena have flanked the borderlines of technoculture and the imagination for centuries, obscuring access to an over-burdened future as part of protocol in their line of guardianship.

Remediating themselves stylistically to stave off obsolescence, they struggle to remain buoyed between the recent past and immediate future, while incessantly messaging the mess-age with sage advice on eco-ethics and modes of reasonable maintenance.  In most cases they are jettisoned back to the dubiously unforseeable future by visionary cranks, while behind the scenes their craft are apprehended, reverse engineered and hardened into commodity-forms. As evidenced, claim some, in the emergence of the transistor following the Roswell incident, economic value is generated on account of startling novelty as much as innovative impact.

Turn around is fairplay and abductions may well be explained in relation, ala the energy web schemes of Immortality, Inc, potentially.  But furthermore it is worth noting that there is a healthy grey market that concerns the coming and goings of these otherworldly apparitions. Determined to mitigate the radical monopoly on catastrophic form that is captained by the storm of Progress, the assorted angels of history have formed uneasy alliances in the informal sector, remembering that an elastic defense is essential in an era of flexible accumulation.

Detrimental robots, holed up in the hollow of the Earth have experienced a boon in recycling of e-waste associated with negligent Titans and, in some cases, Atlantans.  This has led to assorted disturbances on the surface, on the other hand.  Elsewhere, redolent of a winking prank, millions of discarded copies of Atari’s “E.T.” game cartridge were buried outside of Roswell, NM.

Like Flying Dutchmen, the angels of history are going nowhere fast while doing their best to proffer pertinent portents of doom. Hidden in plain foresight, a progression of wreckage is blinded by future influence?

Murmurs of Dearth

“Wherever streams of consciousness and electrons converge in the cultural imagination, there lies a potential conduit to an electronic elsewhere” -J.Sconce, Haunted Media

Ethereal power streams with confluent tributaries of revenue and waste are not uncommon flows within the Metaphortean morass.  Within this marsh-like expanse, a dredging up tomorrow’s tech failures, as so curiously dramatized in the sinking of  “progress“, a de-orbited space vessel bloated with garbage plunged into the Pacific off the coast of Christmas island circa 2007. A perverse mode of allegory, all told!

Cargo cultivation may yet materialize around any manner of orbital debris as the pinball wizardry of Kessler’s Syndrome runs its course.  Hardcore archivo-futurists drool over dramaturgies latent in the Voyager Golden Record, an alienated artifact, and a speculative example of future influence, to be discussed presently.

Of interstellar recordings, preparations, shakedown and maiden flight within the Voyager probe, circa 1977 much could be discussed. Of particular import is this project’s encounter with a retrocausal kernel of influence, or, in etymological terms: a streaming ethereal power from the stars that acted upon it’s character (etymonline)

Effect: last minute delays are encountered in task of acquiring clearances for copyrighted images. Murmurs of dearth, of information impoverishment and other ostensibly “ghosted” queries emergent on tips of tongues tied up over then recently codified acts including, but not limited to, fair use.

Cause: a retro-active emanation from the future invention of Creative Commons licenses which, in the long run (40,000 years +/-), aims to prevent any number of orphaned works or other proprietary issues in the outer reaches of our solar system, and beyond!

It is not inconceivable that this always already outmoded offering will be but an anomalous blip in some off-world above ground mining campaign. An out-of-place artifact amidst cellphone circuitry and other gold-laden electronic waste; its contents of secondary concern to local eScrap initiatives.

Gray Areas Persist

My camera has face detection ability so  I point at the clouds and wait for glitches to become craft.  Humorous phases of funny faces, assorted atmospheric beasts mug for this algorithmic assist.  Elsewhere this might be called glitchcraft, or, a variant on cloud computing wherein one is engaged in the querying of a database imaginary.

Prying open a can of worms is accomplished in reflecting on the tinny containment of fishes, or of fishy formal concerns for tinplate residuals.  One might, in other words, go about wandering and wondering in the shadow of salmon canneries specifically, future influence generally.  All this upon encountering an anomalous form protruding from watery depths on an otherwise unassuming summer evening in western Washington.

To call the causal agent  in this scenario a “design object,” is inappropriate, but still a by-product of industrial design processes, it is.  As pictured above, a hardened blobject in Bellingham’s South Bay, meteoric in appearance, and so swathed in an inaudible hum of suggestive correspondences including any number of fast-approaching conflagrations and otherworldly imaginings.

Future influence employs the curious mechanics of  backwards causation, or, in layman’s terms: effects occurring before their causes.  This is not easy data to parse,  redolent of reverse-engineering fiascoes, remediation at its limit stages, a cargo cult in waiting?  This anomalous meteoric thing was asserted by a local historian to be an excessive accumulation of scrap tin, a pile-up dating back to the heyday of the fish canneries in western Washington over a century ago.

Today, a retrocasuality of retrocausality it is, in effect.  Uncanny, and of canneries.  Gray areas Persist.