Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Semionautical Almanac (excerpt)

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has noted that "the reaction to any one specific blobsquatch remains in the eye of the beholder," (cryptomundo.com ), suggesting a slippery slope of perceptual possibilities as one tries to determine the (un)reality of any occurence. Look around you! The metaphortean wing of the cryptozoo is lurking in the margins of error in most all media, technologies and machines. Deploying a variety of vernacular probes and processes in retort to any number of errata will only increase the likelihood of an encounter with the technocultural unknown. I've discussed psychogeographical drifting in the context of the information environment before and have alluded previously to circuit-bending as a form of electronic derive. Likewise, we can imagine that cities might be "circuit-bent."

How does a city work, what is its' intended function? An intricate system of residential, industrial and commercial areas, "a city is like a colossal machine for organizing human sociality. Doing anything other than walking on a sidewalk. Doing anything other than buying a coffee...It’s immediately obvious that you access a strange place…things will stand out," proclaims urbanite G.Lucas Crane. Bending the city to access a strange place means shifting perception in one's everyday itinerary. Looking again, as the anamorphic adventuring of Plugfinder suggests. Plugfinder bends a city by first bending down and looking around at all the extraneous outlets that lurk in alleyways and on sides of buildings. Once catalogued by means of semi-conscious drifting, these sights can become activated as sites for electrified cultural production. One can only begin to imagine the meta-fortean potential of, for example, bending electricity from a city's marginal/liminal zones into the amplifcation of a device being electronically derived in the traditional circuit-bending sense of re-navigating a casio's circuitry to access strangeness!

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