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?