Gray Areas Persist

My camera has face detection ability so  I point at the clouds and wait for glitches to become craft.  Humorous phases of funny faces, assorted atmospheric beasts mug for this algorithmic assist.  Elsewhere this might be called glitchcraft, or, a variant on cloud computing wherein one is engaged in the querying of a database imaginary.

Prying open a can of worms is accomplished in reflecting on the tinny containment of fishes, or of fishy formal concerns for tinplate residuals.  One might, in other words, go about wandering and wondering in the shadow of salmon canneries specifically, future influence generally.  All this upon encountering an anomalous form protruding from watery depths on an otherwise unassuming summer evening in western Washington.

To call the causal agent  in this scenario a “design object,” is inappropriate, but still a by-product of industrial design processes, it is.  As pictured above, a hardened blobject in Bellingham’s South Bay, meteoric in appearance, and so swathed in an inaudible hum of suggestive correspondences including any number of fast-approaching conflagrations and otherworldly imaginings.

Future influence employs the curious mechanics of  backwards causation, or, in layman’s terms: effects occurring before their causes.  This is not easy data to parse,  redolent of reverse-engineering fiascoes, remediation at its limit stages, a cargo cult in waiting?  This anomalous meteoric thing was asserted by a local historian to be an excessive accumulation of scrap tin, a pile-up dating back to the heyday of the fish canneries in western Washington over a century ago.

Today, a retrocasuality of retrocausality it is, in effect.  Uncanny, and of canneries.  Gray areas Persist.

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

The Aegis of Bigfoot

Free-style geohacking promises new forms of optical anomaly, blobsquatch 2.0 and assorted celestial disturbances.  Meanwhile, low tech drug subs dodge the authorities under the aegis of Bigfoot, if not sea-dwelling cryptids proper!

A typology of objects unseen and in transit is circulating impatiently, hovering outside of declassified docs, Hubble hubris, and off-world claims. UFOs to the wayside, an accounting for unidentified submerged objects (USOs) entertaining oceanic metaphors so as to annex with etheric flows.

The Caleuche, ghost ship surfacing and submerged, piloted by partying dead, frequented by sorcerers, capable of hiding itself in form of driftwood.

Echoes and mirror-forms: Flying Dutchmen, Fata Morgana and, or polar mirages occupying surface sightings.

See also: artifacts on a Google map, anomalies in screen worlds.  Information that wants to be aloof– the cliched camoflage claim in the Metaphortean milieu.

The belated, still mysterious, bloop, not to discount UFOs that crash land at sea, hydrospheric disturbances.

Derelict Dirigibles

Victorian airships provided precursors to the saucer craze, but these elder statesmen of anomaly are flying dutchmen nowadays, technoculturally obsolete, nowhere to land.

UFOs have a propensity for mooching mind space, if not other sites, on which they can crash. Adaptive strategies echoed awkwardly by NASA lunacy in recent months.   In his book Virtual Realism, cybertheorist Michael Heim frames extra-terrestrials as fully technologized versions of our selves.  Far off, future versions of us returned to present day Earth. Are these future selves terrorizing today with tomorrow’s tech-failures, depositing futuristic forms of obsolescence outside of their own world?

Derelict dirigibles, abandoned trajectories, discontinued futures idling like so many orphaned works. Orphaned works are denied free status, persisting peripherally, out of grasp, their authors ambiguous or unknown. Unidentified, flying or otherwise moving objects are seldom more obliging, but circulate impressively as ideas, rumors, myths. Writes Thomas Jefferson two centuries back: “The moment [an idea] is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one.”  Ethnographic research continues elsewhere on Network Realism,  an amplification of vernacular knowledge structures, a followup to folklore in an age of pervasive computing.

Terrestrial agents, meanwhile, have made wild-eyed claims on ideas, that intellectual property is no different than physical property. Much more pronounced forms of possession have afflicted alien abductees. Conspiracy theory may be the shadow side of Network Realism, or perhaps conspiracy theory is what the network realist does at night?

Transiency Without Progress

The Uncanny encompasses a spatial dimension, a form of dis-placement, a doubling, dopplegangers and ghost images. Nostalgia takes on the temporal, aligned with time, history, memory. Rifts in the space-time continuum might be considered in concentrated form as rifts in a continuum between the Uncanny and the Nostalgic.

It has been understood that rifts of this caliber host frequent fliers in the form of saucers and other such unidentified craft. Advanced forms of outmoded dreck continually crash land on present day Earth, relentlessly reviving the novelty of close encounters? A thrill strange, yet familiar. A familiarity yearned for but inaccessible, or inoperable. Projections, projectiles, a field of debris. Flight number four floats onward, obsolescence is thwarted by reasonable maintenance, a nebulous destiny all told.

Roswell Residue

Aimed now at residuals Roswellian or otherwise alienated, future influence tested against orchestrated obsolescence—Metaphortean Research is, of course, a junk science.  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke famously formulated.  Relatedly, any efficiently advertised technology is distinguished in its ability to make magical thinking palatable.  Smoke and mirrors vanish obsolesced acts, disbelief suspended, and, or other clouds of confabulation might concern  Mogul Flight #4.

New Media Died Yesterday

Advancing outward into blog space, thus initiating year IV of the Metaphortean pursuit.  Is this the year we make contact?  Careening cautiously towards the nused realm of UFOland, channeling a swirl of thoughts at once speculative and damned.

“Giants, fairies. We accept them of course…Science of today, the superstition of tomorrow.  Science of tomorrow–the superstition of today” — Charles Fort

Mom and Pop seances quieted in the wake of cutting edge craft from outside the atmosphere of our own planet, Spiritualist mediums outmoded, apparently our fully technological selves have created a monopoly which denies access to other mediums.  Or something like that.

The future of all technology is the trash heap, new media died yesterday.  Obsolescence accelerated beyond its already up-tempo death drive might well agitate a paradox: Imagine a new device bedazzled with excessive featuritis, so much so that it is  dead on arrival. Confounding the trajectory of new to old tech, such a device would never transcend the status of vaporware, pre-maturely obsolete.  Entertaining  a marginal chance of nostalgic recuperation internally, amongst engineers, while destined to be an out-of-place artifact if it should be somehow lost to its institution’s memory.

Our future technological selves offer influential instances of their own electronic waste, charming us with the novelties of advanced technology.  Flying saucers, alien implants, various  cargo cult-like deposits are liminal endorsements of a second-hand gift economy fashioned by off-world entrepreneurs.

Cracked Memex

Curiously continuing onward into the outer regions of circuit-bending, or riffing off Voice Crack’s term — cracked everyday electronics.  More so a conceptual hack is what I’m after. Something “cracked” as much for its affiliations with crackpottery and crank-dom, yet still an apparatus, a memex to be precise.  Dr. Vannevar Bush’s marvelous “memory extender,” born obsolete, it never made it past vaporware.  Truly, it inspired hypertext and is oft cited as a direct feed for innovators Englebert, Licklider and Nelson.  It remained too unwieldy in the 1940s tech-scene, a mechanical monstrosity, a premature arrival of the future.

Unlike a typical index, the memex aspired to create an associational webwork of information in a manner akin to the human mind.  My interest is in a bent memex, or rather a cracked memex.  A warped device, eschewed of reason, intended to extend the mental capacities of the conspiratorial mind.  A cybernetic device, the cracked memex augments the internal mechanics of conspiracy logic, an interface of malfunction opened up within the human mind.  Associational structures and temporary salves to information overload, the cracked memex amplifies speculative theories and possibility spaces.

Housed in a retro-fit old desk, cables and cords protruding, embedded screens and electronic synthesis to boot.  An audio patchbay of potential correspondences, and video sequences subjected to Soviet montage theory.  Majic eyes wide shut, this miracle of mad science is finished off with an homage to the Majestic-12.  As you may suspect, this once secret Roswell research committee on E.T. wreckage retrieval included, that’s right, Vannevar Bush!  My working prototype of a cracked memex is currently on display at Portland’s ON gallery.  Part of my collaborative installation with Mack McFarland entitled Being Liminal. Within a fortnight, documentation may well manifest.

Apportland

The term “teleportation” was coined by Charles Fort in an attempt to understand the supernatural shenanigans seen at seances. Such high-tech trickery is also linked to the UFO by way of its interdimensional affairs and propensity towards abduction. The blobsquatch, the glitch (as quantum-mutated gremlin)–these cryptids are related in experience design. Despite discrepancies, it is useful to consider ufologists’ notions of upper division close encounters with extra-terrestrial intelligence in sorting out Metaphorteana. Abduction scenarios, classified CE-4, typically involve teleportation with the alien set. We can shift to the lower-tech notion of telecommunication, i.e. abduction rendered by psychical means, in our discussion of Metaphortean modes of abduction. As nefarious as the nebulous Cthulhu’s transmitted images of nightmare corpse cities, and as everyday as a vividly recognized audio sample that snatches you away—this involuntary mental abduction is as moving as physical apports. The next level of encounter, the CE-5, “are joint, bilateral contact events produced through the conscious, voluntary and proactive human-initiated or cooperative communication.” (wikipedia) These are akin to applied blobsquatchery (in the expanded field).

This synesthetic process was recently dramatized in Blobsquatch: In The Expanded Field Part 3.

Not unrelated, Meta-Fortean phenomena often relies on the insertion of retro-activated continuities between familiar forteana. This process is akin to the creative short-circuit of an electronic device. For best results, this activity should be considered derivative only in a psychogeographical sense. Such that one encounters unexpected occurrences in increasingly electronic everyday affairs brings to mind whiffs of corresponding fantasies from the cultural –sci-fi, weird-fi, the cryptozoo, etc. There is a sense of amplification in a Mcluhanesque manner but routed through a flanger pedal. For example, blobsquatchery and sasquatchery are originally the same signal generated by paranormal mechanisms. Both prompt hesitation about “that thing over there.” But the blobsquatch, in its existence as a medium, inherently impedes immediate perception further. And so the signals are delayed a tiny bit. Gradual changes lead to exciting new formations. There is feedback and modulation, swirling and harmonic effects. Does one wonder that the “flange” effect itself was discovered by accident ? Without a proper exit strategy, I will end this post here… by means of an abrupt apport!