Hole Earth Reviews

"We send probes into deep space to listen to alien worlds. But alien worlds aren't always that far away." —Reed Ghazala, father of circuit-bending

Circuit-bending, a practice born in that hallmark cryptozoological year of 1967, embarks on expeditions into the electronic unknown. The coordinates of technological breakdown (y) and communications breakup (x) give way to breakthrough, a z-axis into previously imperceptible realms. Like William Burroughing, seismically shifting, cut-up (and down) along the circuit... " The machine pushes the music into inhuman directions," writes Kodwo Eshun on the related realm of sonic fiction, "the producer follows the trail blazed by the error, breeds it into a new sonic lifeform." These entities may be uncovered by pure chance or through intuitive exploration as one is "drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there" (Debord)

There is some speculation that the Bigfeet retreat to the caverns of the Hollow Earth when pressure is on from the topside parapaparazzi. Subterranean hideaways for hominids include the majestic Mount Shasta, situated as it is in the Bigfoot stomping grounds of Northern Cali.

The Hollow Earth has echoed through cultural imagination for centuries, as David Standish details in his recent book The Hollow Earth .Declared John Cleves Symmes in 1818:

"TO ALL THE WORLD! I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking."

Such cavernous thoughts re-surface in Pierre Huyghe's 2006The Journey That Wasn't, an Antarctic expedition and associated art(ifacts) with allusions to the Hollow Earth by way of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Strange Story of Arthur Gordon Pym from Nantucket" (1838). Poe, excavated the literature of Symmes for his polar prose. Huyghe folds the shocking facts of melting ice caps and global warming into his hunt for icy unknowns.

With Sir Edmund Halley's concentric fantasies of the Hollow Earth in mind (see above), could there be another layer above us, buffered by the infosphere? The Earth revealed to be "a small planet held in suspension in the electronic ether of telecommunications," as Virilio has observed (The Information Bomb), are we merely the innermost core? If a network is defined as much by its gaps as by its links, as Margaret Morse has suggested, what is waiting to be discovered in the hollow of these error 404 zones?

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.

Spimal Tap

In an illuminating lecture on RFIDs, theory objects, the internet of things, and related matters at the Emerging Technology Conference 2006 , writer Bruce Sterling discussed the role of language in shaping (for better and worse) emerging technologies. Sterling describes a need for neologisms to break away from the archeologisms that have anchored ideas about technology in stagnant waters (like the quest for Artificial Intelligence that has obscured the real potential of computers to file, sort, link info). The lecture is also about Sterling's recent speculative theory manifesto (Shaping Things) about everyday objects that are supported by an active network of information (so that you could 'google' your keys on-line to find out where they are physically hidden, for example). Sterling's word for this is "spime"-- an object trackable in space and time. "Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system," writes Sterling. "Spimes begin and end as data. They're virtual objects first and actual objects second." (Sterling)

This is interesting to think about in relation to the cryptozoological. Cryptids are (possibly) confabulated entities sustained by extensive and dense informational support facilitated by active participants and believers. They begin and end as data. Sightings and reports lead to investigations for the physical creature--it eludes physical capture--but is caught by a camera. The Patterson-Gimlin 16mm film, as Sasquatch researcher Alton Higgins contends is "a gold standard against which other pictures must be compared.” (Higgins) It exists (as all moving images do) virtually. We do not see 24 frames per second of celluloid (or video scan lines for that matter) but comprehend the imperceptiblly singular instances as an animated whole mentally in the virtual space of memory.

Of course, cryptids feature spimal cord injury missing links between virtual identities. Their instantiative stance obscured by a lack of physical traces

Panopticonfidence Medley

Big Brother. The Panopticon. The All Watching Eye. In a society increasingly saturated with surveillance, information environmentalist Zack Denfeld has come up with the term panopticonfidence. Speculating that a side effect of an Orwellian world could be more thoughtful, conscious and expressive actions and gestures on the part of the overexposed citizen.

On the other hand, there is the counter-presence of sousveillance--a term from Steve Mann to describe "watchful vigilance from underneath." Many a man, woman and child operating cameras and all manner of mobile imaging devices propagated over the networks--a dispersed and inversed surveillance. Once activated by a network, chance sousveillance acts like The Zapruder film, Rodney King video and more recently the Michael Richards incident--these unplanned documents become weaponized information. Mann describes an applied set of sousveillance activism in Issue Three of the journal Surveillance and Society , describing his strategies of shooting back as a model for "[problematizing] social interactions and factors of contemporary life...with the goal of social engagement and dialogue." There is still, as Mann admits, the risk of sousveillance acts effectively strengthening and expanding the coverage of dominant control mechanisms. Mann suggests in a more recent article in Ctheory that the tactic of inverting/subverting a dominant ideology or structure to critique it is no longer effective. Double detournement is upon us-- "is there really an inverse?" --asks Mann.

Outside of an arms race type cross-fire of cameras escalating with over exposure of personal information for everyone...the end scenario of this inversion (whether engaged citizens emerge or not)--there are other ideas that work zig-zag and sideways, drifting outside, or rather in between sur/sous, us/them, binary oppositions. Zack Denfeld, in regard to his Blue Puddle project, writes "Instead of users giving up information about themselves and their daily activities to be data-mined by multi-nationals or worse, Blue Puddle actively encourages citizens to track resources that are undocumented and to modify their local built environments." Users post and tag images of their own derives...collaboratively creating a map that relates back to their everyday environment. A hybrid space of real/virtual social networks--- dialogue encouraged in less confrontational manner than some of Mann's agit-prop.

So, panopticonfidence could also mean more thoughtful, conscious and expressive image construction on the part of the over-equipped citizen. Such as an exposé of free power sources in one's physical neighborhood...which may or may not lead to a more engaged sense of place/place for engagements. But works towards empowering (so to speak) without putting one's personal info on(the)line. "Literacy is not just the ability to sort out and digest media information, it is also learning how and when to author messages, so one can...actually alter the nature of the immediate media environment" suggests Tom Sherman in AFTER THE I-BOMB. Moving towards an "object hyperlinking" hybrid world of networked RFID'd objects and places, Sherman's words ring more literally than figuratively in regards to projects like Blue Puddle.

Panopticonfident compositions that exhibit strong design and potent imagery will also make memorable impressions on the tagging hordes. Check out Carnegie Mellon's ESP Game for an exercise in parsing image potency and refining the ultimate search engineering. What word resonates most informatively? Amongst thousands, what word sheds such descriptive light that it transduces into that one image?

In the blindingly bright, free of shadows, everything exposed light of all this, a figure like the Bigfoot may be pursued for possible apprenticeships as it is a creature well versed in stealth manouevers and strategic (in)visibility in spite of on-going scrutiny. It knows how and when to author messages. It seems telling that the belief in cryptozoological animals constitutes a break from official hierarchies of knowledge with figuratively blurry evidence and theories. This mystery is what attracts speculation. The architecture of participation in this mystery is what the Bigfoot thrives on. Panoptic pleas for less blurry evidence (real/virtual) seem counterintuitive to the Bigfoot's symbolic power as an alternative figure of power and knowledge that is neither totally exposed or totally covert. Instances of blobsquatchery, while discounted by many Sasquatch researchers as optically aided errors of judgement, may in fact be an implosion (not inversion) of the panopticonfident belief that total exposure is the key. What do the cryptids represent in a surveillance society? What of an aesthetics of confusion? Hovering between states of signal/noise, sur/sous, us/them, squatch/blob.