March 27th, 2010

watch log #1

Standing watch at the dematerializedpelton
Gates of dawn,
me spotted cogified cosmonauts
constipated and command less. With branded barrels of JP-5 by their side,
star lust, Mars or bust, spare a brother a dime; beaming from mutant dimensional eyes
acquired from over exposure on underfunded flybys.
More members of Precariat class
Compounding a conundrum
these abandoned astronauts,
angry and ample, ascended upon my perched place
poised as protectorate.
Pausing, passing simulations over situations,
Summarizing summations,
“could anarchist astronauts gather before the ephemeral door while it whirled and twirled
and bore no resemblance to analog cyborgs?”
They so craved to lore into a post utopia all night convenient store.
Rolling snow dust hills separate us in distance,
while This Owl malignant magic codifies confidence within mind crust.
Raising voice to join in over-heard, overhead, over-stated choir…

March 27th, 2010

Cyborg Planet: where the clouds twitter and the forests all have facebook

Apparently a shadowy someone over at The Lab for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology has taken the cryptic correspondence course on writing weirdly from the Weird Fiction Policy Institute.

To wit:

“The first step to a better process is to get comfortable with our postnatural relationship with Gaia. We’re all grown up now and need to take care of ourselves- we can no longer expect mother Earth to take care of us. On the contrary, we need to take care of her in her old age. No more free ride. This is the Anthropocene.

Next, we’ll need to make nature more human than ever and a central part of our daily lives. Cyborg planet doesn’t keep people out: it brings nature in. Machines are already keeping us in touch with each other. Now we need the clouds to twitter and the forests to join us on facebook (Earthbook?) and all of Earth streaming towards us on youtube (if Gore’s satellite ever flies). We’ll need a wired nature, as connected as we are. When nature can interact with all of us in our own languages, we’ll be better able to understand her and feel for her and help her. “

Read the whole feedfoward for future minds here.

March 19th, 2010

Disruptive Innovation

Now that a networked self is no longer the onus of anonymous amoebae, microbial magistrates are on the rise, inter-mingling publicly (not just internally) with once individualized humanoids in the conquest of time and space. Contends K.Varnelis in a recent revelation: “we are made up of multiple micro-publics, inhabiting simultaneously overlapping telecocoons.”  Call it disruptive innovation, if you will, primordial ooze has returned to claim its rightful throne in the networked cosmos. slime_mold_1-660x501Schizogeographic positioning systems, indeed, are afoot as urban planners down size design overhead by querying glorified bags of cytoplasm! In one instance, network engineers puzzling out rail systems in Tokyo exploited the economy of  brainless slime mold that “first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned.”  Not so long ago, gelatinous agents were marked as shills for Communism, today their amorphous agility and socialistic experience is lauded.

Blood_Falls_wiki01_Medium_Res_photolibrary.usap.gov But not all microneers are so willing to be entangled in the advances of the wired-up humanoid regime. Hardcore microbial Luddites inhabiting a massive glacial safe house in the Antarctic yonder have remained content in cold darkness without oxygen, let alone wi-fi access, for millenia!  Cosmically indifferent about appearances, these old school extremophiles travel in blood red torrents, a fashion statement at once hideous and care-free.  Such isolated populations constitute  obliterariums au naturale and they are gaining new respect–or at least temporary trackbacks–from portent deprived apocalypticists! In a world where continuous partial attention holds sway, nostalgic impulses travel laterally groping for google trends, such anomalous geologic phenomena  achieve sublime temporality, temporarily. Unfathomable and feared at least as long as a passing comet’s visibility spans thru the sky , or news of such events is sustained in a bout of tweets (which ever comes first)
Tapestry_of_bayeux10
March 10th, 2010

The Append Age

space_junk_2The Append Age is upon us.   As much is revealed in reverse on occasions wherein appendages are equipped upon unexpected sense organs of humble humanoids! Be they perhaps few and far between occasions,  such as having one’s maw fine-tuned by men of science, these operating theaters are laden with instrumentation!  I digress. Point is: any time-consuming surgery will lock you down in space, may well affix odd endodontic bric-a-brac, crucially it will numb certain senses and thus amplify attention elsewhere.endodontics

That ready-at-hand swill of distraction, the glocal anesthesia that humanoidal eyes/ears consume so rabidly in the always-on information environment is vanished in this netherworld of alien appendages. Imprisoned, locked down in space one is amplified temporally,  freedom found in the fourth dimension, as the late, great Augusto Boal would argue.  Great swathes of epiphany, insight and illumination– sensory experience typically drowned out by the loud hum, and correctional facility of contemporary iDolatry.  Clamoring will commence undoutedly for meditation, focus, a sense of spiritual balance to achieve such clarity of mind.  To those ideas I say humbug! Unless there is some techno-appendage to amplify or amputate sense ratios, earbuds or eye-phones, muscle stimulants or hands-free devices, it DOES NOT COMPUTE in the Append Age!

Som(e)ambulant, gadget equipped denizens of this “small planet held in suspension in the electronic ether of our modern means of telecommunication,” —as that canny Paul Virilio has described such phantom limbo—find themselves locked down temporally, prisoner to the duration of devices, macro/micro, teleprescent/teleprescient.

WEIRD FICTION : Invading Mankind's Information Ecosystems