Polterzeitgeist Descends

This Saturday, May 15th at the DIVA gallery of Eugene, Oregon, it’s The Polterzeitgeist:   An audio-visual exposé on a spectral populace looming betwixt and between today’s networked cosmos!
 
Led by yours truly in collaboration with my colleague Irving Bleak. Preceded by an illuminating lecture by Kristen Gallerneaux, curator of the Revenant Archives exhibit currently on display at DIVA gallery.

“The Revenant Archives is an institution concerned with the visual and material culture of the paranormal.  Consisting of artifacts, documents, ephemera, works on paper, and reconstructions, it uses folkloristic, parapsychological, and scientific means to offer new interpretations of ambiguous situations and to investigate the conflicts and byproducts of belief in society.”

Saturday May 15th, 8pm @ DIVA gallery in Eugene.  FREE!

View Larger Map

Glocal Anesthesia

Prefixating on the Paranormal there is a retrieval, via para, that includes: “alongside,” “beside,” “contrary to,” “near,” and so on. Paranormal events could be understood as phenomological anaglyphs, offset iterations of everyday occurrences, staged accidents that temporarily (and temporally) numb awareness, amplify puzzlement, and advocate wonderment. In a variant of Metcalfe’s Law, an isolated event is anomalous at best. Safe for potential aggregation of attention via network realist avenues, it is a lone haunter.

Two paranormal events can generate one link, as evidenced in the Fox household some time ago, when teenage girls and a deceased peddler engaged in an exchange of information by way of (presumably) two Spiritual Telegraphs.   Harnessing network effects, otherworldly innovation is heightened–five events can make 10 links, and twelve can make 66 links, and so on towards a tangled web of paranormality. Such a looming sensation of  voluminously other dimensions provocates a glocal anesthesia, i.e., a paralgorithmic process or set of “side effects” shadowing  everyday media life.

The image of a network with nodes and links forming a mesh, is counter-balanced by the absent modules or zones of empty space.  This omission defines the presence of the network. Between this black-and-white reduction there is the liminal libation of atmospheric perspective, a counter-environment emergent in shades of grey. An enticing escape from continous partial attention, perjoratively described elsewhere in relation to “repetition blindness,” “attentional blink,” and “temporal masking.”