As a nocturnal predator myself, the vampire is no stranger to me. Stranger, if I do say so myself, is that vampling would be dissociated from everything (not) under-the-sun. If vampling, or “video sampling” is grasped within one talon as a model of real-time edits, audio attached, a living shadow of the Jawa Edit, a hyperactive iteration of QWERTYcore and a cine-molecular manufracturing, the other claw is reserved for its surrogate meaning in the realm of the undead.

Vampling, in certain quarters, is an affectionate term for infant vampires, too. These little ones, as Wikipedia notes are “born of the unions of mortals and vampires, which only happens when a spell is placed on the vampire.” Again, attention to the spell, or more precisely, the spelling out with keystrokes, the cyborg variant of the late, great Lettrist Isidore Isou shot through with vampiric yearnings.  This is our first hint.

Such synthesis is second nature for a nocturnal predator like myself, wikipedians, and truly the webmaster of vampler.net who does relate the undead to dead media in an admission that vampling is “a young art and it does have a tendency to feed from its own likenesses”

Our embedded journalist recently aligned Weird Fiction with the tropes of Cosmic Terror. Following this formulation one wonders if the vample, the “video sample” itself, is another node in a vast numinous system, a key component of some hideous cultural interface. The vampler, then,  as an operative in somewhat of a Eshunian alien abduction scenario.  The vampler (video sampler and/or vampire youth) possessing its onlooker with an amped up version of Dracula’s spellbinding trance.  Aided by unidentified craft, and resultant in much more explicit forms of captivity than mere hypnosis.

Close encounters with these children of the night are likely underwritten by unfathomable Cosmic hosts, these occurrences augment the efforts of the mental transmission schemes so dear to the Great Old Ones.  Cosmic Terror aside, vamplers operate essentially like any old vampires.  vidsonic nutrients ripped out of original context–what beautiful music they make!–and then it’s night of the living dead media all over again.

A curious and increasingly frequent “second wave” of vampling has been gaining ground, an adaptive strategy against read-only cultural forces.  The vampler is already a prosumer (producer-consumer) but reports of ruptured consciousness amongst everyday media users suggests an evolved species is, and has long been, hovering overhead.

An artist in the information environment, Tom Sherman, early on tuned into this, explaining it as a psychological condition in his theory of “blanking,”:

“There is a new psychological phenomenon emerging in this era of hyper- telemedia, information abundance and overload. People of all ages and walks of life are ‘blanking’_______that is, they are shutting down or experiencing momentary ruptures of consciousness…People…gather data from multiple sources simultaneously. Instead of simply listening to the radio or watching TV, [they] read a newspaper, magazine or book while listening and/or watching while [they]have something to eat and [they] have a conversation on the phone…they choose to compose [their] immediate information environment from multiple sources, mixing [their] multi-layered reality on the spot.”

Picnolepsy is a similar condition discussed by Paul Virilio and tellingly pieced apart in Ryan Dirks’ dispatch “Interrupting the Future.”  Weird Fiction opts for alternative readings as well, namely a vampire infused echo of previous revelations: time-travelers may already walk among us!

A second-wave vampler, with prosumer (proffesional consumer) gear is operating on the innards of future minds.  This sort of vampler arrives from the past to nourish itself on future likenesses.  Harvesting the cluttered consciousnesses, that are loaded down with so many incoming signals, euphemistically we could call this time-shifting.  Hypermediated minds ruptured, a psychological condition and, or,  a sign that second wave vampling is afoot!

With the public domain diminishing rapidly, new resources are sought to replenish the dwindling storehouses of likenesses, so vital to the vamplers existence. Equipped with time travel devices, the second wave vampler shifts from grave-robbing to mind-jacking, snatching images from the future, straight from the multitasking mind, pre-mediated.  Creative Commons liscenses are immediately attached to these intellectual properties as a reverse-engineered subterfuge redolent of other such activities that fly in face of the (copy)rites of passage required to re-animate present day dead media images.

Vampling is Dead, Long Live the Vampling!