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.