Rites of Remediation

The commercial success of any new technology relies on remediation. In a brief discussion of liminal historical periods, by way of Turner and Van Genepp, folklorist Daniel Wojcik outlines the narrative of the “rite of passage”–

“the destruction of the old condition, marginality and transition, and transformative rebirth involving the establishment of a new status or condition.”

Obsolescence, that terminal technological feature, echoes this ritual through its own horrid rites.  Structured, stylistic, meticulously crafted to cover-up the promise of possibility spaces, isolation is the first stage of this transition.  Away with home remedies, remediations or D.I.Y. adaptation. The liminal processes of  recombination and re-use, of errors, uncertainty and experimentation exist in the increasingly hurried twilight time. Rebirth, the new product arrives, fashioned in accordance with the fall colors.

Techno-rites involve deploying heightened attention to the limitations of one medium, thus setting the stage for the premature arrival of the “New.” Memories of the margins, of errors as wanderings and wonderings are obscured.  Marketing savvy works towards smoothing over any fissures of curiosity, the margins of error are obscured as merely nuisance.  This is particularly and perversely played out in the annals of electronic music, as so wryly detailed in Nate Harrison’s video Bassline Baseline. Automation is angled as an alluring feature, but it is the nuances of glitches and personalized modes of play that persevere and deliver the truly ludic interfaces.

New Probes

The cryptozoo is an amorphous force, itself a multi-nodal hub in a greater, more tangled web of Fortean goings-on. A hulking mass of curiosities that unflinchingly belches up entities like the Swedish “blobbogey,” as was reported by Cryptomundo today.

A submarine presence in Sweden’s Storsjön lake… equal parts indistinct mass and unidentified object! My fleshy mammalian brain can only imagine that this gesture is at once commemorating the golden anniversary of Bigfoot reports and condemning the close-minded hoax craft perpetrated in Palo Alto by way of Georgia. This speculative explanation is prone to fly wide open at any moment. I’ll retreat presently towards another tangential realm.

In previous Metaphortean spaces I have discussed the notion of glitchcraft. The blobbogey offers curious correspondences with this phenomena.

Some initial probes: Absence of being airborne in the Storsjön lake monster scenario acknowledged, bogeys are UFOs in waiting. Unidentified but not yet confirmedly associable with the flying saucer set. Glitches as latter day gremlins, favoring transmission rather than transportation tech as sites of intervention. A bogey is craft in the sense of a vehicle or vessel, or at least a thing of flight. A blob is craft in terms of applied art. The art of the creative short-circuit, figuratively or literally, according to context. The familiar folkloric Bogeyman, a shape-shifting fearsome formation, has been associated with green fog in the Pacific Northwest.

Above, a blob. A curious green blob, surfaced on the outskirts of Wizard Isle in Crater Lake circa August 2006. No claim to fame, just amateur anomaly.

Possible Rendezvous

Returned from Southeast Asia without encountering the Malaysian Bigfeet. Still I wonder “How”? How do those hairy hominoids survive and persist in the hot, humid tropics? Putting caution before audacity, I will assume they are holed up in some hollow of the Earth, air-con set to full blast.

Green pigeon species, it turns out, are not so very anomalous in the company of crowned, blue, green/white zone pigeons, in the vicinity of shimmering red birds, and birds with horn-like protrusions, birds that truly represent the dinosaur lineage.

Meanwhile, in Southeastern Texas, an unexplained species of ant is following in the footsteps of senior Situationist Guy Debord. Drifting en masse in the electronic environments outside of Houston, activating new itineraries. Collectively unconscious, these insects meander about all manner of machines– shorting out circuits, ditching their typically disciplined movements–letting themselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (Debord, Theory of the Dérive)

The (psychogeographic) lures for these curious colonies may include “the heat, magnetic fields, or hum and vibrations from electronic machines,” according to reports from the August 2008 issue of Fortean Times.

Houston may have a problem, a possible rendezvous, as these micronauts in gremlin guise set their sights on NASA Mission Control.

Trails Blazed by Errors

Battling insomnia with a return to Kodwo Eshun’s Adventures in Sonic Fiction, I find myself plugged into his prose with renewed signal-to-noise ratios. I’ll assume the culprit is my sleep-deprived mind following “the trails blazed by errors.” Of errors and errant behavior, of wandering and wondering in the possibility spaces outside of the operating systems at hand.

Turntable Consciousness. More than just an awareness of the turntable’s potential to escape the trappings of a playback device, Eshun situates Turntable Consciousness as a fully enveloped state of mind, informed via “fingertip perception.” This intuitive tactile relationship with a turntable’s inner sanctum would seem to extend to a general Analog Consciousness. A heightened sensitivity to the creative possibilities inherent in experimenting with all analog devices. Eshun’s attention to “conscientious desecration” points to avenues for uncovering hidden opportunities for expresssion in analog systems. Digital systems, if engaged via analog consciousness-informed procedures, can also work. Think of desire lines that lead the circuit-bender off the demarcated pathways and the irrational exuberance emmanating out of a bent circuit. As Svetlana Boym remarks of related “broken-tech” endeavors, in her oft cited Off-Modern Manifesto, its “not Luddite but ludic. It challenges the destruction with play.” The record player was the first analog device to travel from staged accident to center stage, rupturing the consumer-capitalist continuum of structured obsolescence.

Marketing of of a/v entertainment systems emphasize the ways in which new technologies will bring things down to earth, pluck heavenly virtues like convenience from the skies, promising ease of use and ultimate sound. In the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s, betwixt and between the throngs of consumers tossing out turntables in favor of tape decks and cd players, there were adventurers opening up nth-dimensional possibilities for the humble victorian “sound writers.” Discarded in liminal zones, fated for nostalgic valleys or audio alchemists’ labs, the last several years have suggested an overheated medium, with turntablism retro-actively locked up in pro-gear and pro-attitudes. As mp3 players flood the mainstream market today, the next wave of newly obsolescent tech is re-enchanted by “cassette jockeys” and glitchcrafters looking for ways to venture off-world via creative re-purposing of leftover media. Of z-axes and desire lines, wandering and wondering what can be found if one ventures off.

Glitchcraft

Bewitched by neologistics, I turn to my dictionary because it is chock full of spells. I wanted to explore the trajectories (real and imagined) latent in ‘glitch’. Beyond slippage which is the essence of glitch…I want to slide further afield, to probe the alledged associations with the US space program.

Glitchcraft is crafty for all its possible lines of flight. A neologism hovering betwixt ‘n’ between meanings, a proto-theory object with trails of attention glimpsed in a simple google search. Despite some alluring leads from google, I will attempt to lead glitchcraft further astray. The gremlin, if we recall (how could we forget?) is a mischievious cryptid infamous for erring aeroplanes in WWII. Today the gremlin can be retrofit with the title of blobsquatch in the expanded field. The gremlin is adept at crafting glitches for all manner of vehicle or vessel used for transportation. In other words, the gremlin is good at glitching craft–aircraft, spacecraft, timecraft. Timecraft being a time machine in the sci-fi sense, or time-machine in the VCR sense. Time-based art inherently involves travelling through time. Circuit-bending, or blobsquatchery in the expanded field, is timecraft but also a means of transforming everyday electronics into glitchcraft. Vessels for exploring new worlds. Or, an art of the creative short-circuit. And a process associated with wizardry and witches. Glitches as familiars ready at the glitchcrafter’s side. A muse, a spirit for further beglitching.

Relatedly, “This fall…An underground ring of superconducting magnets, reaching from Switzerland into France, will smash together subatomic particles at incredible force. Physicists say they’re not sure what will emerge from those collisions. They’re hunting a mysterious, hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. It is also possible they will make miniature black holes, or discover new dimensions of space-time.” (Morning Edition, 4/9/07 )

Damned Data

All this talk of blobsquatchery, but “what about the glitchsquatch?” as a colleague queried earlier. Generally speaking, all these technological anomalies may be catalogued under the banner of Metaphorteana, but let us continue now with the conspicuous traits of creatures in this cryptozoo. Etymologically, the term glitch means “to slip,” and is often associated with the U.S. space program’s slippage. In this regard there seems a lineage between gremlins and glitches carried out in the shadows of transportation technologies. Planes give way to spacecraft including UFOs. Perhaps piloted by gremlins in a transanimal phase towards glitchhood, UFOs are famous for interference with both physical and virtual modes of transport–as the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena has detailed. Glitches move from physical transport to disembodied transmissions of data across space and time. Operating in the zone of transmission or retreival of data, glitches collaborate with various paranormal mechanisms to make themselves known. In digital affairs, glitched produce is called data corruption. This is often linked to the notion of data or information loss, suggesting an absence of information. While intended information is often lost, there is also new information to be gained!

Noise is also a signal. As circuit-bending pioneer Reed Ghazala recalls in his inaugural encounter with metaphortean phenomena, circa 1967, “I closed the drawer and was immediately in the midst of some of the most unusual sounds I’d ever heard. Why? By pure accident, some unknown metal object had fallen against the exposed circuitry of the amp, shorting-out the electronics…[I thought] if this can happen by means of an accidental short circuit, what might happen by shorting things on purpose?” ( Bending the Headspace of Electronic Design)

The potential of uncovering previously imperceptible modes of understanding.

“A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.” – Charles Fort, The Book of The Damned, 1919

Ghazala and Fort are not alone in the championing of damned data. There is a multitude of metaphortean research in our midst. Circuit-bending aside, some exciting explorations of data corruption include the efforts of Glitch Browser and Recyclism. Above you will find a glitchsquatch made manifest by Glitch Browser’s paranormal processing.

Travelling Through Time With My VCR

Intercepting the datasphere circa feb ‘07: G.Lucas Crane in conversation part one: Beckjordian notions of interdimensionality surface and collide between the lines of sight

L: It’s the difference between The person running the séance tying an invisible fishing line to their finger that triggers a book falling…versus something weird happens and the medium improvises and says “she’s here” it’s the same kind of thing with a record player. The first time someone used it as an art form to access music that came before it…but musically that was a mistake…that was like breaking the record, scratching the record. Doing things you’re not supposed to do with the record Great. Space of mesmerizing strangeness… achieved. You’re totally fucking up that record player, it’s not meant for that. How can we advance our hi-fi technology when you’re destroying that needle and the drive belt of that record player? ….all those analog machines are still around. Turntablism…It’s not a mistake anymore, there’s a tradition of mixing records like that…it’s not anti-doing something else. It’s not about playing record appropriately or not… it’s another way of playing a record

C: It’s like a perceptual shift…

L: It’s a cultural, yeah, perceptual shift, and it’s super deep too. Now, it’s not just the machine, now there’s a whole culture of how you break a record correctly. It’s totally locked up. It’s not experimental anymore…there’s names for hand motions, how you mix, technique names…it’s a whole world

C: Similar to cryptozoological interests. Breaks from official taxonomies become re-absorbed…glitches and electronic or audio anomalies are going in reverse…becoming classified into techniques… wrangled in. Become a known quantity.

L: Right, zoologically is that the same as how the chart would have to evolve if we found a sasquatch is actually proved? That’s like somebody experimenting, sitting in the woods and then finding the sasquatch. Then from that experiment is a drive to completely describe and analyze it. That’s the funny thing about mysteries. The longer it’s a mystery with more people working on it and it stays a mystery. You’d assume there would be a progression and conclusion. So much on science describing the world. But we keep this a mystery…so it can function as it needs to.

C: Supsension of disbelief, or sustaining of belief…

L: Right, sustaining the necessity of sustaining belief, or disbelief…or wait where are we? Yeah sustaining belief. Is it a big deal if we discover if the sasquatch is real or not? Maybe it’s doing more good for the human race as is. That’s why they had to come up with the blobsquatch. To differentiate with types of videotaped strange things.

C: a side effect of digital perfection…the quality of images. “That’s not a strange mysterious animal…because sasquatches are ape-like not blob-like.” Or something like that…

L:What if you had high fidelity photograph of an animal that’s just a blob.?

C: There are cryptids known as globsters…giant blobs washed up on a shore…definitly aquatic but no other characteristics except that they’re unknown blobs of organic mass…possibly a correspondence between blobsquatches and globsters.

L: they’re made to confuse, they’re made to specifically be…

C: perpetual anomaly

L: A situation crafted by whatever set of factors that interlocks exactly with our desire… with our ability to be totally confused by information and our desire to get to the bottom of something. So it’s just enough to keep us going, but not enough to point us in any right direction…

C: It’s like a video switcher that has four input choices, but you push in two at once, so you get a new garbled signal that’s neither one nor the other…perhaps detrimental to the device…but also a new entity

L: But why would you do that? You would need to do that only to access the fucking spirit world.

end transmission

What about the Glitchsquatch?

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.

Virtualization of Transport…Realization of Cryptids

Thinking about things cryptozoological and technological, the gremlin is a crafty cryptid candidate. These mischevious mythical creatures purportedly sabotaged Royal Air Force jets during WWII. Rarely causing major catastrophes– instead ‘nickel and diming’ the pilots with minor glitches, malfunction and other annoyances. Spielberg aside, are there gremlins lurking in the shadows of cinema? Audio-visual media are a variety of transportion device, carrying away the spectator’s attention, travelling it to new vistas. Errors and aberrations (gremlins of the crypto-zoetropical persuasion ) do their darndest to disrupt the official business of this virtual transport.