Frame-Leveled

On Loren Coleman's Cryptozoo News blog last February the question "Why frame 352?" was posted. Frame #352 being the lone frame out of nearly a thousand in the Patterson-Gimlin 16mm filmstrip that has become widely recognized as a central cultural signifier associated with Bigfoot (and Fortean activity generally!)

One commenter to the aforementioned post suggests "Frame 352 displays a classic and recognizable human form. As humans we tend to extrapolate and describe things we cannot explain into anthropomorphic terms, making them less frightening to our psyches." (drshoop) Likewise, the appearance of friendly paperclips, smiling computers, avatars and emoticons, dwelling in computer interfaces everywhere are an attempt to familiarize the unknown. "We imagine we have more control because the icons seem to notice us," writes Norman M. Klein in an essay included in The Sharpest Point anthology, "but with each user-friendly step, we move farther from the programming itself." (Klein, p.27)

Frame 352 is of course a result of veiled "programming" as well. Beyond the film itself, this particular image was selected by some newspaper office, then reprinted, propagated and multiplied through the mediasphere. Culturally hacked to hype all manner of consumer schlock (see this post for more on these exploits) What makes the Bigfoot so fascinatingly photogenic at this frame may also be tied to human beings' narcissistic response when looking at animals in general. In his 1977 essay "Why Look At Animals," John Berger writes:

"The eyes of an animal when they consider man are atttentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal's look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look." ( Berger, p.4-5)

The theories surrounding Bigfoot as "missing link" speak to this want of familiar (family?) traces.

The level of engagement surrounding seemingly familiar faces bring me back to a previous post--the Fantastic encounter rendered as kinesthetic experience --the potential of this first-hand sort of experience design has been demonstrated, par excellence, by contemporary media artists. The performance duo GRANULAR~SYNTHESIS for example, operate by effectively weaponizing the process of anthropomorphization and amplifying the period of hesitation associated with the Fantastic.

Using custom built computer software for live performance, split-frames of audio-video information are extracted from pre-prepared digital recordings of human performers and then resequenced in real-time into kinetically unfathomable new formations. Media theorist Tom Sherman has written at length about these artists and describes their project as the assembly of "a technical apparatus, a machine, an instrument for processing recordings of human appearance and behaviour into something post-human, something we have never seen before." ( GRANULAR~SYNTHESIS : The story so far...by Tom Sherman) There is a reversal here of the usual anthropomorphic gesture, a moving away from human characteristics. "Granular Synthesis turns people into machines," (Sherman) any familiar traces are fleeting and glimpsed only in the interstices of "the essential characteristics of machineness (speed, precision, unnatural control)" (Sherman) . This audio-visual encounter is typically augmented through multiple floor-to-ceiling projections, surround sound and sub-audio that physically affects its live audience.

"There is no time for reflection or anticipation. No time. The perpetual moment machine scrambles and destroys narratives before they ever get started. The audience is carried through the work in the present tense. Clock or machine-time mean nothing to the audience during exposure to the work. As the model's presence is refreshed, rewritten, renewed, instantly/endlessly updated--so it is we are there for the moment and the moment only. Perpetually." (Sherman)

Like a first-hand encounter with an unknown animal, the (Techno)Fantastic realm opened up by GRANUAR~SYNTHESIS unfolds in real-time. The duration of uncertainty and anxiety is extended indefinitly by these kinetic engineers who unleash familiar, yet captivatingly other and unknown animations --terrifying and fascinating onlookers.

Fantastic Accidents

“So perfect a monster is Bigfoot that he has become one of the three great popular mysteries of our time, sharing this distinction with the Loch Ness Monster and the UFO, or flying saucer. Other popular mysteries materialize from time to time but usually prove transient in their appeal.” (Sam G. Riley, A Search for the Cultural Bigfoot: Folklore or Fakelore?)

Riley's claim was made in '76, but I'd imagine these three are still title holders. These three entities are sustained both as "zoological entities" and "cultural phenomena." I'd like to consider the possibilites of the zoological cryptid with Lippit's theories in Electric Animal:

"the cinema developed, indeed embodied animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife...The medium provided an alternative to the natural environment that had been destroyed and a supplement to the discursive space that had never opened an ontology of the animal" (Lippit,p.197)

I've previously been hinting at the lack of straight-up "experience," the shivering sensations of some...thing...awry--and this is not specific to Bigfeet/Nessies/UFOs in your midst, but can be initiated by all manner of unknown, unexpected occurrences. The literature of the Fantastic comes to mind, prompting "that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event." (Todorov, p.15) This sudden real-time rupture of the of the world at hand, (an absorbing text or the here-and-now) throws everything asunder, if temporarily, as one grapples to make sense of the occurence. Blurry photos, shaky footage and otherwise poor documentation of cryptids suggest accidental, or chance encounters with the unknown. "Accidents...demonstrate that we have a speed of thought," notes video artist Bill Viola, a certain delay in making sense out of external stimuli, in a sudden change of events. Viola extends this logic to rites of passage and rituals which he describes as staged accidents, "designed to bring the organism to a life-threatening crisis state." (Viola, p.88)

There is of course a rich legacy of audio-visual experimentalists who have explored the possibility spaces made accessible through staged accidents, deliberate ruptures, and other engagements with the Techno-Fantastic realms. Here I'm thinking of the Expanded Cinema movement and what Erik Davis calls Experience Design, more so than dramatic narratives with supernatural plot twists. Although, the elaborately shocking stunt devised by movie producer William Castle for theatrical screenings of his 1959 film The Tingler elevated schlock cinema, for promotional ends, into the realm of the Fantastic, too.

Skeptics and believers of the Bigfoot pour over the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip, plaster footprints and the like for indexical proof of "that thing out there," a zoological mystery eluding physical capture. Entertaining Lippit's statement in the company of Robert Smithson's notion of "non-sites" (photos, footage, and other debris collected from site-based works that are understood not as documentation pointing to the artwork but an integral part of the original whole)...I wonder what sort of experience design could be accomplished by staging accidents in the extended forms of the cryptozoological set. Genetic makeup become kinetic makeup and/or memetic engineering settles in. Exploring and experiencing these creatures first hand, in kinesthetic terms, shot through with the holding power of these "perfect monsters."

Tropical Attitudes

Entropical or Ectropical?

Is the redundancy of the bipedal, humanoid (the popular image of Bigfoot) marked with entropy? Is it an example of a predominantly closed system whereby feedback is too predictable and thus a restriction of the Bigfoot's livelihood as cryptozoological creature? Or is this an abundance of evidence as to the Bigfoot's existence as networked social constellation-- an example of "ectropy"? The opposite of entropy, this term was introduced by mathematician/philosopher William V. Quine to signify 'useable' energy. Is the rich information environment in which the popular Bigfoot now resides an open system billowing with ectropic potentialities of signification for the great American monster?

Cultivated memetically for human cultural needs, the domesticated Bigfoot ( as image of bipedal humanoid ) is a potent signifier. Yet, with a menagerie of associations already in tow including T.V. specials and monster trucks, brewfests and tourist attractions, movie and tabloid fodder, the Bigfoot, as "hidden animal," is hardly so. What lies beyond the image, beyond the "art of the footprint," (so to speak)? How does the Bigfoot as mysterious phenomenon, paranormal mechanism, "an apparition walking in the landscape of our minds," as Rod Serling once described it, carry over into the information environment experientially?

"Interestingly, ectropy is also a disease of the eyelid," notes RAQs media collective in their Ectropy Index project description, "...In this disease, the eyelids do not close satisfactorily, leading especially to a slackening of the muscles of the lower eyelid, so that the orbit of the eye comes loose, and portrudes, ectropically, from its socket. Eyes that do not blink, or sleep, or never shut to occasionally 'not see' something, tend towards ectropy. The eye that wants to be all seeing, that wants everything in order, all the time, better beware of ectropy."

Encryptozoology

The infamous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film which depicts the Bigfoot tromping through a Californian forest, has recieved acres of scrutiny over the years. Breaking down the footage into frame-by-frame analysis, skeptics and believers alike debate the nature of the creature's gait. The work of Eadward Muybridge comes to mind, as these motion studies arrest and interrogate the illusion of animation-if only in an attempt to see the illusionary animal for what it 'really' is! The interrogation of moving images in these Bigfoot afficionados' sites seems secondary- the main issue is concerning the discovery (or not) of dubious content.

Contemporary artist Kevin H. Jones has explored this footage using sensors that appear to track the activity of light/dark values on a screen that is displaying the Patterson-Gimlin sequence (see picture above). Jones inverts the subject of inquiry in this media spectacle. He inspects the medium---he looks into, rather than at the image, now electronic, a single point of light flitting speedily across the screen. The "anima" in question is not that of the potential man in a monkey suit, but the flucuation of information patterns. But this is terminal information... It is a loop, both technically and culturally. It has replayed to the point of recognition at the expense of its own exhaustion. Overload equals pattern recognition, and the Patterson-Gimlin film is overloaded, the Bigfoot-as-Image is overexposed. The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot, the Bigfoot-as-Image is no longer "a difference that makes a difference" (Bateson), it has been discovered, exploited for commercial gain. It has been domesticated.

That the Bigfoot has most often eluded encounters, left nothing but fleeting traces, retained a certain autonomous status, manoevered in stealth-suggests that this creature is not so easily ensnared in traditional representational modes. Might the Bigfeet, (and cryptids generally) seek encryption of a sort less aligned with images proper as they come to inhabit and lurk in the augmented environments of information space?

Paranormal Mechanism 2.0

I'm a big fan of technological accidents and malfunctions with audio-visual media because it's at these junctures: a vinyl scratch, a digital glitch, electronic noise overcoming the signal --that the hidden potential of the machine at hand is revealed--- these glimpses, ruptures breaks from official taxonomic structures open up possibility spaces for new kinds of crypto-techno-zoological goings on. In 1921, when a "large upright animal" terrorized a Himalayan expedition, a reporter went digging for clues. In a botched translation of the locals' description the journalist came up with the term "Abominable Snowman." It's believed by many that the well-publicized Abominable Snowman nurtured the Bigfoot's rise in the Pacific Northwest. Born out of an error, a mis-communique and then linked to a growing social web of folkloric debris--personal accounts, anecdotes, fictions and facts. Photographs, filmstrips and shlock tv. As a technologically encrypted animal the Bigfoot surely shuttles betwixt and between the social networks of Web 2.0, a folksonomic constellation of multiple users, and their multiple tagged images, movies, nebulously factual and/or fictional figments and other miscellany in a sprawling, collaboratively sustained vernacularchitecture of information. All assembled from instantaneously available resources to address available theories.

Cryptozoologists Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman describe the workings of a "paranormal mechanism" in their book 'Creatures of the Outer Edge' that they hold responsible for generating appartitions, Bigfoot and UFOs, etc that are then processed through the human brain...what is the bigger blurry picture that is rapidly being conspired by the global brain? and what sort of mechnisms are behind it?