Metaphortean Phenomena

"An intensification of scrutiny must be met with an amplification of guile" ( RAQs Media Collective ). Under the search engineered panopticonscious data wrangling of our times, the cryptozoological are boldly unknown... searchable but indiscernable. Like virtual Globsters washed up from the depths of the infosphere, identifiable only as unidentified masses. A thought on the tip of your tongue crossfading away into everything else. The beguiling blobsquatch is distinctly indistinct. A known unknown oscillating between representational media forms and the potential of imagination. It cribs notes from H.P. Lovecraft's notoriously nameless, unameable and unfathomable cosmic hordes. Those Things "that cannot be described--there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldtritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order," as Lovecraft's narrator explains in The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Charles Fort, the famous researcher from whence the adjective "Fortean" emerged, was an iconclastic thinker and author of several books on anomalous phenomena. He held that everything exists in an intermediate state, a suspension or flux between extremes. It is in this liminal zone that the blobsquatch reigns supreme. The betwixt 'n' between of borderline phenomena. Intermediate, or perhaps Intermedia to forward Dick Higgins' description for " the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres" (wikipedia). Higgins' diagram above suggests, as Hannah Higgins notes in her appendix to D.Higgin's Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia, "According to a model like this, historic and contemporary experience is diverse, causally flexible and permissive of the as-yet-unknown...It is an open framework that invites play." (H.Higgins)

Synesthesia. Higgins' alludes to this coalescing of sensory stimuli, and one Dr. Hugo associates metaphors with synesthesia in his article "Art and Synesthesia: in search of the synesthetic experience." Hugo describes metaphor as being "like a mental encounter; it can produce a flash of insight. The poetic form of the metaphor allows to counter-balance rational thinking with a creative potential" (Hugo)...bridging seemingly dissimilar concepts and materials. As I've previously mentioned, neologistics (metaphor most definitly included) are sometimes necessary to shift perception, disrupt traditional routes and rhythms of language systems. The poetry of machines, the potential of imagination... Metaphortean Phenomena. Intermedia is the message of Metaphortean phenomena. Generated by paranormal mechanisms, MetaPhortean phenomena are mental encounters emerging at the interface of malfunction. And perhaps sustained only in that duration...as Ghazala suggests in his discussion of the hybrid "Bio-Electronic AudioSapien" ( Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments)emerged at the interface of [sustained] malfunction.

Ghazala explains the news BEAsape species, "As I made sounds by touching the body contacts on the shorted-out mini amp, the electricity of both bodies, myself and the amp, became intertwined......we were one....Yes, the BEAsape's existence is temporary, its existence momentary." (Ghazala,p.17) These encounters are often with residual media, or at least within the margin of error of new media. Carrying forth implicit comparisons within the technocultural imagination, anomalous characteristics are transferred across domains, in a synesthetic process that is at once strange and familiar. Strange because it involves distinct sensations of the supernatural and wildly speculative; familiar because it evokes sense-memories of bygone eras/errors, of structured obsolescence and prescribed patterns of consumer electronics. Blobsquatches (in the expanded field) emerge at the limits of intended functionality of various technologies. They panopticonfidently flirt with signal and noise, intuitively drifting between extremes