Unplumbed Space and its Discontents
Space Time Transience is a good gig…and certainly in this economy I have no complaints in that regard. Still, as one of many underlings responsible for maintaining a multimedia tapestry at once strange and familiar, I am at odds, at times, over notions of experience design. Is it enough to confuse and bemuse? Is confusion in itself an open or closed system? Is it also prone to solidify into signage for sampling and re-use, or is noise inherently transgressive, end of story? Monstrous new modes of glimpsing the unfathomable are so quickly commodified into ‘noise filters’ and emulators that futilitarianism provides a somewhat alluring outlook. Even the razzle-dazzle of my daily threads could be defused and repackaged as retro-fashion. “Punkrock wears out faster than a leather jacket” quipped M.Garite aeons ago, and in other words, some helpful hints from HP:
“In the true weird tale there must be a hint…of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against assaults of chaos and the daemons from unplumbed space.” (Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927)
Media literacy is paramount these days, and imaging is as uncontrollable as an itch. Networked appendages mobile devices, cellphones, cameras and other such phantom limbs advance in all directions. Immediacy (but not instaneity) is old hat or at least reinterpreted at slowed-down pace. Aligned to the seemingly natural conditions of media-delay. While some humans speak of “kodak courage,” of being emboldened to “go beyond their physical limits” when in front of a camera, I suspect a deeper turbulence more akin to phenomena witnessed in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Isolated instances, amplified by the network into info-mesh, repeated and echoed into visual densities of these many mirrored images constitute an encounter with a mildly dystopic cosmic host. Kodak courage, or deepset Panopticonsciousness? Who owns the mix? And who is that suit schmoozing up those daemons from unplumbed space?
H1N1: Human Non-Human Network Ecology
H1N1 is a subtype of the species affluenza 21K virus. The “H” refers to humanity’s precarious position as a stable keystone species on Spaceship Earth, and the “N” refers to the network of non-human actors who have, up to now, supported our unsustainable lifestyle.
H1N1 has mutated into various strains including American EcoExceptionalism, Mildly Dystopic British Nanny state, and Full-On Fascism (largely extinct in the wild) and various strains found in the brains of most humans sleepwalking their way towards the singularity, ignoring our interdependence on other nation states, and the state of non-human actors.
A variant of H1N1 was responsible for the Easter Island collapse, the maladapted Greenland Norse, and the Polynesians of Pitcarian island’s impermanence. Low pathogenic H1N1 still exist in the wild today, causing roughly half of all unsustainable lifestyles. However, when the Bretton Woods institutions became operational in 1945, H1N1 became a normalized mental virus, and unmeasured flows of capital sloshed around the globe, creating non-linear effects with indeterminate fitness functions and selection mechanisms.
These changes in monetary policy spread into the realm of the non-material, and vectoral intellectual property regimes continue to try to hoard seeds, cures, and standards for the most powerful actors, damaging the prospects of a full return to health for the planet. In 2006 it was noticed by the President that the United States was addicted to oil, and this was identified as one of the major avoidable health risks that was exacerbating the spread of the virus. So far, little has been done in the area of alternative energy, and zero emmision living, to bring the system back to balance.
April 30th @ Dunes, Portland, Earth
DUNES located at:
1909 NE MLK blvd, Portland, Earth:
Weird Fiction will mold the fleshy sounds of mammals into visual impacts,
operating in real-time on the sonic manifestations of: Brother Raven, Pulse Emitter, Sean Ongley, Regosphere
Bigfoot Below the Water
Just below the surface of the sanctioned information economy lies the murky territory of grey market R&D. Semi-submersible vehicles both material and linguistic skim the surface of visibility, avoiding detection through a patchwork of handcrafted leftovers and high end electronic components. Youthful energy, non-linear returns on initial investment and altered states of consciousness cause crazies, cranks and the curious to toil in sub-optimal work conditions while failing faster than the big guys without blowing themselves up. Sometimes all it takes is a good paint job and the authorities are stymied.