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?
