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.

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

One doesn’t want to freeze up language to soon. If you freeze language too soon you get stuck with a hypnotic living corpse. A dubious ice-man frozen spectacle, a sideshow or hoax. I wonder if the blobsquatch has done this–frozen my semionautical expedition in its tracks. Conceptual engineering of neologistic frameworks encourages semionautical expeditions into the unknown…i must stay the course! Rather than freezing up, the blobsquatchery lumbers on, glacially drifting. A slow-motion derive. “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” writes Debord in a debrief on the derive (Debord , 1958)

This deviant engagement, which Guy Debord and his Situationist crew termed Psychogeography, sets its sights on the latent potential of urban landscapes, encouraging detours or detournement, of one’s everyday environment. The Situationists understood the derive as a means of excavating “unities of ambiance,” and effects which “”the geographical environment, consciously organized or not,” had on “the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Along with literal geographical impediments, one’s environment may be constricted along socio-economic contours which direct and homogenize one’s experience in a particular space. Terrain is textual in cyberspace, but as with the usual itineraries that move one through a city there exist subtexts, so to speak.

Similarly, the blobsquatch may be understood as an example of what Julian Bleecker calls a theory object, a term relayed by Bruce Sterling as “not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to… A Theory Object is a concept that’s accreting attention, and generating visible, searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention.” (Sterling )

In cyberspace terrain is textual. A derive consists of neologisms. The neologistics of a psychogeographic information system. Neologisms as strategic or accidental misspellings. This is an opportunity to uncover missing links.