New Lands!

Paranormal Mechanisms has been re-located (archived posts and all) to a new site in hopes of embracing new lands within the (meta)fortean ecology....not to mention the spoils of wordpress widgetry!!...

So, set your sites on this: Metaphortean Space

Out of Place Artifacts

We live in active acres of signs, bridging connections, forging pathways, voyaging far. Is this not the metaphortean pursuit? Following linguist R. Jakobson, there's metonymy and metaphor, the two opposing poles of discourse. On one extreme--the literal and contiguous. The other end decidedly figurative...an abstract mode of thought. "Metaphor does not conform to neat rules and does not follow rational paths," writes Raymond Gozzi, Jr in The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, it breaks away from literal linkage.

Phantoms of the (Metaphoric) Pole. Hard facts dematerialized into phantoms, into particles, free-floating pieces, slippery slopes. Bridged in semionautical explorations. Do the poles exist? Or are there instead previously imperceptible portals and passageways? Oceanic metaphors enveloped the early wireless world, but what lies beneath... in the depths? Strange creatures evolved to operate in otherworldly conditions. Some Hollow Earth Insiders speculate that a geological crack on the floor of Scotland's Loch Ness is a node within an elaborate network of tunnels. An exit strategy for an over-exposed pleisosaur.

There is much to be learned from subterranean activities, media archeology and neogeographic queries. The glitch, if not stylistic agendas, ushers in obsolescent status for an object oriented towards specific function. The glitch reveals the outer limits of media and technology "the world is hollow, for I have touched the sky". Beyond the glitch, access to points unknown? Is this not the metaphortean pursuit? Bring it up to Earth: Glitch as animation: out-of-place artifacts off-sprung from an implied crypto-zoetrope (another philosophical toy). Glitch as post-gremlin. An animal interstitially ambling outside of a machine's presumed range.

Speculative trajectory: timecraft-spacecraft-glitchcraft-lovecraft.

The Old Crypto-Zoetropical Pursuit

Cryptozoology, the study of unknown, hidden, or mystery animals is a marginal scientific discipline operating outside of traditional zoological practice. Believing firmly in things that are not supposed to exist, cryptozoologists counter dominant ideologies with alternative theories and new taxonomic models. The Bigfoot, shuffling by in Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin’s home movie from October 20th 1967, is Cryptozoology’s most moving image.

Over the years, skeptics and believers alike have poured over the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip in attempts to understand the hairy homonid. Experts from both camps have broken down the sequence into discrete parts in hopes of either exposing the hoax or proving the existence of Bigfoot as a living animal. From animals to animation (that other illusion)-- unknown, hidden and mysterious experiences are engaging because they activate and agitate the human capacity for wonder and curiosity

The Bigfoot experience begins and is sustained as data: rumor, report, filmic capture, reproduced images, video capture, digitized images, and so on. Communication and participation in this network is as fundamental to the cryptozoological encounter, as technology is crucial to suspend disbelief in moving image experiences. The actual living, breathing thing is an [optical] allusion. These entities are facilitated by cultural and technological apparatuses.

In deconstructing the animal’s movement, the proto-cinematic motion studies of Eadward Muybridge come to mind.

From animals to animation, movement is broken down, the wonderment surrounding both phenomena, both illusions, is halted. Returned to science, removed from fiction, a serious attempt to wrangle in the anomalous, smooth over glitches and return to business as usual.

Rather than breaking down and halting the cryptozoological pursuit, what might emerge from a breaking up? Break-up occurs in communication, a signal is interrupted by noise. Supposing there are Bigfeet in our midst, what sorts of animations exist outside of traditional practice? Animation rules screen-based technocultural experience--from computer desktops to web sites, billboards, special fx and entertainment. What remains to be seen?

What is the potential "thing that isn't supposed to exist" in terms of animation? One animator's perspective on the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage brings a stamp of authority regarding anomalous movement. Beyond moving images convincingly showing an anomalous animal, what about anomalous animation revealing previously imperceptible moving image art? All this and more will be approached in the upcoming events at Rererato gallery in portland and LumpWest gallery in eugene: The Crypto-Zoetropical Pursuit and other adventures into the technocultural unknown!. To be held on the 40th anniversary weekend of that most famous filmic Bigfoot's inauguration into the cultural imagination!

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

Applied Blobsquatchery

Crypto-Zoetropicalism, that strange survival from the B.B. (Before Blobsquatch) era, returns in the vidsonic saga Hidden Animals. Following theories that from animals to animation, if there are hidden animals like bigfeet, there are also hidden animations. These anomalous entities would surely consist of animation outside of traditional sequencing, inside of experimental practices.... including but not limited to: vjing, staged accidents, kinetic modification, scratch film and other ideas.

Hidden Animals: A Search For The Crypto-Zoetropical Yonder is a testament to the anomoulous audio-visual pursuits unfurled in this arena by yours truly in cahoots with sound artist Padna last year.

Test-run this Saturday at DIVA in company of grayscale slo-mo glitch hoppers INCITE of Hamburg, Germany! For the Official premiere, in Padna country, look forward to Thursday August 2nd at Monkeytown in Brooklyn, NY

In this instant replay of initial inquiries, and/or considering what we now know about the Blobsquatch, Crypto-Zoetropicalism might be better understood as Applied Blobsquatchery. We could break this down further into nooks and crannies of intent...