Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

When metaphors come crashing. Oceanic metaphors, as Jefferey Sconce details in his book Haunted Media, were prevalent in the early days of wireless telecommunications. Allusions to etheric depths and electromagnetic waves, in high science and pulp fiction alike, submerged many inhabitants in frightful visions of being lost at sea.

These days, finding one’s self lost in the North Pacific gyre, “a swirling vortex of ocean currents,”(wikipedia), refuge might be sought in refuse! Acres of shopping bags, bottlecaps, and other scattered plasticity float in an area nearly as big as Texas, as lead explorer of this polymer plateau, Charles Moore, has described. Oceanic metaphors for technological phenomena collide with literal perils “progressively” polluting the sea.

With the rising tide of electronic waste, all those obsolescent and discarded tvs, cellphones, computers, etc… there is great concern about a coming e-waste tsunami. An abrupt and devastating environmental catastrophe caused by the sudden casting away of electronic detritus. An accelerating situation with forecast mass extinction of analog TVs set for February 2009.

In H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of unfathomable and hideous creatures, the mighty Cthulhu resides in an underwater abode where it issues psychic transmissions of apocalyptic vistas. In the wake of tsunamis, the nebulous thing is want to rise out of its watery lair, fulfilling doom for all humanity! Written in the height of the early wireless craze, perhaps there is a contemporary electronic allegory calling from Lovecraft’s Cthuhlu, waiting to be dredged up.

Cthulhu’s coordinates (47°9 S, 126°43 W) anchor the creature in the Pacific Ocean, south of Moore’s plastic island. Curiously, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found an ultra-low frequency underwater sound emanating from 50° S 100° W, a “mysterious bloop” from an unknown animal. Aethan French and Bazil Nichols have kept up impressive correlations and research at: Bloopwatch: Where Mythos Meets Reality.

Betwixt and between conspiracies of creatures, at the other side of the spectrum from the Lovecraftian, there are “fictional radio-species” confabulated recently by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas as part of her book of invisible beings, “fictional visualisations of the ways in which radio waves inhabit space. These are creative expressions based as much on personal creativity as on technical or scientific data like range and signal strength. Six contemporary radio technologies were visualised: Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi and Zigbee,” reports Timo Arnall.

Thomas’s micro-organisms seem to be a relatively jolly lot, perhaps close cousins of the metaphortean milieu! Still, certain similarities with the extra-dimensional jelly-fish things in From Beyond, the parallels generally with Lovecraftian monstrosities inspire me to call upon Cthulhu (again) I’m curious to eke out an extended metaphortean romp into the darker dimensions of the technocultural depths. I suspect unfathomable, tentacled networks of the shadowy sort.

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

Within the Sasquatch research community, there is general belief that the Bigfoot is a “missing link” between humans and subspecies of the primate persuasion. Other researchers, such as Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis, have suggested that humans themselves are the missing links between sasquatches and a cosmic race of advanced intelligent beings.

How does this reflect/refract with regards to the Blobsquatch? There is a speculative family tree branch, a retrograde remediation of errors to be eked out. A lineage seems too limited, but a rhizomatic outgrowth of neologistic trajectories metaphorically engaged with species evolution might work. This includes Ghazala’s Bio-Electronic Audiosapien (BEASape) the Blobsquatch and the so-called “Meanderthal.” In his essay Urban Meanderthals and the City of “Desire Lines”, researcher Matthew Tiessen describes the Meanderthal:

“A sort of human-variant, the Meanderthal could also be described as a Cyborg Spin-Off, exhibiting not only the machinic prosthetic appendages (e.g. cell-phone, Blackberry) required of cyborg flesh, but also the sort of behaviour — i.e. confusion, aimlessness, disorientation, self-absorption — that inevitably results when an all-too-human human attempts to navigate an overly mechanized and technologically-mediated environment.“

Meanderthals are a product of human error amplified and extended through technology. Their techno-somambulism calls attention to the limits of the city’s infrastructure through unconscious encounters. Meanderthals “are dangerous because they are oblivious to their surroundings,” observes reporter Jack Brubaker (from WordSpy) Inevitably, one wonders if the Meanderthal is involved in a sort of “macro-blobsquatchery,” gumming up the works of metropolitan systems.

The city, as G.Lucas Crane has described previously, is “like a colossal machine for organizing human sociality.” Meanderthals are numb to their surroundings, they disable their own sensory awareness. Indeed, they embody malfunction—but only at the behest of properly functioning personal digital assistants! Unlike Meanderthals, Blobsquatches are not oblivious to their environment but instead particularly sensitive to the revelatory potential lurking at the interface of malfunction. Blobsquatches are catayltic converters of malfunction, activating informed deviations, revealing previously imperceptible avenues of understanding. The BEASape’s primal howl is unleashed when a circuit-bender uses his/her body as a conduit, connecting new points on an electronic circuit board. This electronic dérive opens a plethora of desirable line-networks, to be activated intuitively via applied blobsquatchery, an evolutionary step encapsulated by the BEAsape.

Meanwhile, meandering haphazardly within their own mobilized Gorham’s Cave, meanderthals seem destined for a swift extinction. “We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies,” warns McLuhan in War and Peace in the Global Village. Considering the rise of Meanderthals what might the next desperado detour be? What next in the post-human, post-rational evolution of humankind?

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has noted that “the reaction to any one specific blobsquatch remains in the eye of the beholder,” (cryptomundo.com ), suggesting a slippery slope of perceptual possibilities as one tries to determine the (un)reality of any occurence. Look around you! The metaphortean wing of the cryptozoo is lurking in the margins of error in most all media, technologies and machines. Deploying a variety of vernacular probes and processes in retort to any number of errata will only increase the likelihood of an encounter with the technocultural unknown. I’ve discussed psychogeographical drifting in the context of the information environment before and have alluded previously to circuit-bending as a form of electronic derive. Likewise, we can imagine that cities might be “circuit-bent.”

How does a city work, what is its’ intended function? An intricate system of residential, industrial and commercial areas, “a city is like a colossal machine for organizing human sociality. Doing anything other than walking on a sidewalk. Doing anything other than buying a coffee…It’s immediately obvious that you access a strange place…things will stand out,” proclaims urbanite G.Lucas Crane. Bending the city to access a strange place means shifting perception in one’s everyday itinerary. Looking again, as the anamorphic adventuring of Plugfinder suggests. Plugfinder bends a city by first bending down and looking around at all the extraneous outlets that lurk in alleyways and on sides of buildings. Once catalogued by means of semi-conscious drifting, these sights can become activated as sites for electrified cultural production. One can only begin to imagine the meta-fortean potential of, for example, bending electricity from a city’s marginal/liminal zones into the amplifcation of a device being electronically derived in the traditional circuit-bending sense of re-navigating a casio’s circuitry to access strangeness!

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.