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."