Zero Crossing

Following Fort, “one measures a circle starting anywhere.” Ecliptical conditions caution, and request further query, on the prospects of forwards compatibility.

Metaphortean Research has conjured an indefinitely scaling Bézier curve, circles measured everywhere and continuously concentrickling forth.  A generative algorithm for the rapid proto-typing of some Hollow Earth.

Intermediately upcycling Forteana and downcycling obsolescence, The Metaphortean Researcher has wallowed long in this murk, slowly disclosing, or perhaps (and this is the point, the zero point) foreclosing an ulterior hyperbolic geometry. Of circuitously bent rhetorical devices, implicit perpendicular possibilities, the servo-mechanization of uncertain thought-forms is lurking on the threshold.

Putting caution before audacity, call this a zero crossing, a sabbatical, a call for resolve in another clime. Indeed, in other words, a retrograde remediation will at once be afoot. Big, this footing will be, as the annals of Metaphortean Space are dredged and optimized for future affluence in the outer reaches of the Gutenberg galaxy.

Tetraditional Economy

New media hype for smart phones and data devices enhances the hospitality of the outboard brain.  However, the outlandish claims can get quickly cranked up to the point of distortion.  Utopian promise, pushed to its limit, reverses. Hype becomes a z-grade maniacal rant, straight out of the mad science milieu.  

Relatedly, extra-terrestrials with over-sized crania, no longer the shape of things to come, have become obsolesced. Living fossils at best, they are stationary artifacts from a discontinued future.  The insight to be retrieved in this occurrence echoes the doom of the alien brainiacs. That is to say: New Media Died Yesterday.  Today’s e-waste is only as novel as tomorrow’s tech failures.

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.

Forever Paleontology

Retrograde remediation could be applied to the processes and possibilities of Network Realism, in the pursuing of a sousrealist agenda.  Sousrealism seems an apt term, traces of that vigilance from below that so many phantom limbed panopticonfidants engage in.  Forever publishing images, forever tracking, being found, and being present all the time with no end, information piles up, burying yesterday’s findings incessantly.  Living fossils are really just stationary species, to paraphrase zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.   Onward, following researcher Nold Egenter’s use of  “sous-realism” to differentiate Magritte from his typical surrealist milieu, stressing the artist’s attention to sub-terranean phenomena.   “With deep reflections and intensity [Magritte] reconstructs very precisely lost structures of the past, conditions which are no more conscious to us,” (Magritte the Archtecturologist), like a paleontologist puzzling out a prehistoric form.

Surrealism retro-fit through a digging up of clues,  out from under the real rather than from some lofty heights beyond it.  Entangled between fact and fiction, betwixt tangible reality and the mediated variants that are now so mundanely informing operations in everyday life.  Not quite liminal, maybe liminoid, a twilight expanding.  The apparitions now wandering about in the landscape of our distributed minds are searching for material memories, geo-spatial fossils and dredged up dinosaur technology.

Close encounters with alien visitors offer the promise of immediacy so absent in network culture.  Eye-witness interaction with advanced technology, a heterotopian space idling in the gaps of network coverage.   While even still,  the lifeworld of extra-terrestrial phenomena is beholden to the generative mechanisms of theory objects, if there is any hope of a lasting impression. Tech support for failed utopias in the timbre of twilight.

Retrograde Remediations

Data tapes are retrograde remediations of consumers’ faith in intelligently designed music.  Thus some unwitting consumers, upon purchasing and listening to a data tape, might well conclude that the avant-garde is alive and well.

This suspension of disbelief would undoubtedly waver should said data take shape as code-like patterns, leading said consumers to puzzle out the presumed borderline between science and art, between calculated compositions and derelict troves salvaged from the Super Sargasso Sea.

As much could be considered the impetus for the extraterrestrial dx fishing in 1924, that had many hopeful ears attuned to noise but hearing faint whispers of the red planet’s salutations still. “One measures a circle beginning anywhere,” quipped Mr. Fort,  and we can follow the speculative pathways encircling tape species, too.  That the aural abstractions on a data tape encountered when sent careening through speakers, towards ears pricked up, should carry also the counter-narratives of intentional information is a splintered echo of the Martian symphathizers.

This, however, does not discount the immense and perverse joy in experiencing a dynamic noise peformance, captivating for its own abstract, damaged and often non-linear aesthetics.  Tele-memetically, actively listening to “unwanted sound,” can open up borderline phenomena at the alleged barriers between signal and noise.   Temporary constellations of coherency, adventures in sonic fiction, access is linked to perception.  Oppositional or otherwise, the mobilization of discarded media detritus through retrograde remediations facilitates both faint whispers and salutations.

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.