Neogeographical Reconnaissance

Neogeography is an umbrella term to tidy up the offshoots of Situationist psychogeography, GPS enabled geo-caching, radical cartography, audio tours and other exploratory pursuits meandering on the outskirts of professional geography.

Perhaps the title Fortean Geography applies, as these vernacular mapquests "don't conform to the protocols of proffessional practice" ( placekraft). Dragons and sea serpents on the maps of yore, the mysterious Terra Australis or incognita generally, there is a rich history of curious confluences of fact and fiction. Not precluding the potential of hollow earth and flat earth theories as neo-geographical in that they speculate on alternate schemes for trotting the globe.

In 1939, composer John Cage presented his score for the first in a series of Imaginary Landscapes. Sonic excursions involving variable speed turntables, radios, and noise. a neogeographical reconnaissance mission, seeking signals in noise. Chance operations involving volume settings, "left many people in the audience displeased...due to the fact that the work was fairly quiet," notes lecturer Guy de Bièvre. Intentional inderminacy produces uncertain results. Silence is a sound, noise is the poetry of machines.

The recent documentary Manufactured Landscapes by Jennifer Baichwai - about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky abounds with an industrial-strength dose of "intentional landscapes." Not that the acres of factory workers in China assembling electronics, mountains of e-waste waiting for recycling, and upheaval of towns in the wake of a massive dam were part of an elaborate blueprint exactly. But more like inderminate new vistas unearthed under the auspices of intention, i.e. rampant industrialization. Silent sublime, Burtynsky's images speak loud and clear

Navigating the manufactured landscapes of China's industrial revolution with the coordinates of imagined audio worlds a la Cage's experiments with noise offers a rather flimsy neogeographical pastiche. Data foraging will pause for further analysis

Blobsquatch Redux

Metaphors are fine operatives for probing possibility spaces and understanding the unknown. But what about the Blobsquatch? Fortean phenomena including Fortean Zoology is a fertile ground for metaphor, but how does the Blobsquatch fit in?

Putting audacity before caution, risking redundancy, a re (intro) duction to the Blobsquatch in the Expanded Field. What is expanding? What is the field? Blobsquatches as personification of optical errors, or the visual noise overcoming visual signal of a Sasquatch. Like gremlins-to-airplanes, Blobsquatches are a minor nuisance. Blobsquatches are good at impeding commercial cultural exploitation of an otherwise iconic mystery animal. A break from official zoology, the Sasquatch breaks science. It is an error, an anomaly, a Fortean figurehead of Other Science and vernacular culture. But Fortean forecasts fumble in the weird "whether or not" precipitation of understanding signals in noise at the level of technological mediation. What is the Blobsquatch if not Meta-Fortean? an anomaly mediating anomaly. What else? Blobsquatch as personifcation of error engendered technologically. A different kind of mystery. Meta-Fortean, media extend human faculties, errors extend human fantasy and/or amplify the human capacity for wonder. Blobsquatch as hetero-crony, as counter-sight to the Sasquatch.

Expanded Field as Other Technology. Other technologies, allegedly obsolete, discarded, deemed out of style, use, relevance. Residual technologies that circulate through second-hand markets. Leftover media and machines, creatures of the outer edge. What of vernacular culture? vernacular technoculture? Blobsquatchery is an active pursuit of Blobsquatches. A search for signals in noise. Circuit-bending is one example, including video-bending --a crypto-zoetropical pursuit par excellance! We can also cite/sight/site: Iron Artist, an annual call-to-arms from Portland's School and Community Reuse Action Project. Opposing teams face off in the realm of residuals. Bound thematically, imagination is activated to stretch the limits of select scraps, to find signals in noise, squatches in blobs. A carrying over of ideas from one realm to another. Like metaphors in action.

So what am I on about? Creative Re-Use of Fortean phenomena. Remediation of Fortean Phenomena. Metaphors from the outer edge. Metaphortean phenomena as a signal in all this noise.

Putting caution before audacity, Blobsquatches might be mitigated by a comparison to the Hitchcockian plot device, the MacGuffin. Although generated here by paranormal mechanisms rather than clever directors--- to complicate and confabulate the spaces between fact/fiction, new media/old media, signal/noise, and so on.

New Probes

In his 1969 book Counterblast, McLuhan in cahoots with designer Harley Parker adventure into non-euclidean typographies and playful prose. Speculating (and demonstrating) the presence of previously imperceptible lifeforms in new media environs.

"Media...can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms, that is, new ways of perception, new probes into the world like new species. Evolution as a process has shifted from biology to technology." (McLuhan) Artists themselves as new species. New mutants arrived from the future to accelerate the evolutionary processes. Kodwo Eshun tuned in to this nearly a decade ago, in his mezmerizing More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction

Technologies are typically situated as remedies for older models of media. Digital cameras incorporate the "click" sound and look of an SLR while simulataneously promoting the convenience of post-chemical processing. This slow-moving remediation buffers the outpouring of ever-new media, gadgets and killer apps that automate and infiltrate one's sense of (extended) self.

Residual media are missing links, unknown species with traces of familiarity. Cryptozoologists deviate from scientific methods into the realm of the imaginary and fantastic. Inversely, the 19th century Modern Spiritualists appropriated electronic jargon to re-frame their mystical beliefs, seances and sightings