Weird Fiction

Cryogenic keepings of frozen forecasts have been inadvertently thawed, revealing a sort of disheveled map. Within this info-graphic array— the dizzying spell of winged migrations that will befall (((WFT))) in coming weeks–is foretold!  Hurtling this ficto-quizzical milieu will be,  in varied trajectories.  Weird Fiction will be transported to the nethermost craters of the Willamette Valley, i.e., Ditch Project Space in Springfield, OR.  Together with the miasmic machinists, Future Death Toll ,on the eve of 20 February, to accelerate the concurrent Ditch Freeze event into a new dark age.

Come March 6th, in the forestal abysm of Olympia, under the auspices of the Hall of The Woods, still greater swathes of immemorial lunacy will be heralded across the pacific northwest patches of spaceship earth! Witness the Olympia Noise Fest, if you can fathom such an affront!

As winter warbles and spring time creeps in, other avenues, looming now on the outskirts of this sphere, will be more tangibly deciphered and so remain: to be announced!

Some said it never happened, but The Lord knew (((WFT))) was up to its old stratagems within the spot on Portland Earth you call The Dunes. And here is the proof provided by a dedicated disciple.

As 2009 expires, Weird Fiction exhumes a curious collection of GIF animation, curating items conjured up from a year’s worth of trolling in the deep dark dungeons of the internets.

This alongside an emergent compendium of collateral texts, GIF speciation theories and other missives propagated by the (((WFT))) policy institute; who, in an effort to advance their own “ficto-quizzical” mythologies, will facilitate the hoarding of materials on a dedicated electronic storehouse (weird-fiction.net/gifeconomy)

At once an instantiation of the “gift economy” and a call to action within the economy of expression roused by the humble parameters of the Graphic Interchange Format. (in)Appropriated material, both solicited and scavenged, will be intermingled within this labyrinthine technocultural milieu.

Denizens of the World Wide Web are implored to reanimate dead media and revive retrograde knowledge structures; deploying anomalous information and thereby accelerating GIF speciation. The GIF is your passport to the immortal realms of mythology mash-ups and off-modern memes. Remember: overexposure to cine-molecular glitch scapes (GIF animations and their kin) may lead to as of yet unknown climes of panopticonscious surrender.

NOW through December 18th–Send your GIFs to:  weirdfictiongifs@gmail.com

To be deployed live starting December 3rd online and at on site at Tractor gallery in Portland

the following Memetic prompts and file name suggestions culled from existing Weird Fiction mythos, may be used to guide your GIF speciation efforts:

-Ficto-Quizzical
-Obliterati
-Cine-Molecule
-Second-Wave Vampling
-Lorkurer
-Glitchcraft
-Derelict Theory Objects
-Temporary Autonomous Clone
-Obliteratarium
-Panopticonscientious Objector
-Majestic 12
-Polterzeitgeist

Additional prompts will be transmitted to the fleshy minds of mammals by way of twitter.com/cthulhucalling

On track of the unknown neologism.  Looking for leads on the ficto-quizzical, origins of this species, possibility spaces and the like.

Bullshit detectors typically topple from an acute inability to read between the lines and, or, when in the vicinity of the (((WFT))) hypercentre.

Nonetheless there are established fields worth wandering and wondering into, naked facts that will jostle loose implied allegations of whimsy or hoaxcraft.

Ficto-quizzicism is a neologistic attractor, calling forth a small brigade of other such portmanteau. We can align it as a flotsomnambulant variation on ficto-criticism. Flotsomambulance itself a more technical term for space-time transience.

Most noticeably ficto-quizzicism is mere shades apart from the term “ficto-critical”. Rosslyn Prosser citing Amanda Nettlebeck’s notes on ficto-critical conduct in Processing Fictocriticism describes this expanse as one of: “self reflexivity, the fragment, intertextuality, the bending of narrative boundaries, crossing of genres, the capacity to adapt literary forms, hybridized writing, moving between fiction (invention/speculation) and criticism (deduction/explication) of subjectivity (interiority) and objectivity (exteriority)”–

In the Weird Fiction milieu, these puzzle pieces are generated from likely enough sources. The Weird Tales of Lovecraft, Blackwood, Shaver, Serling, Eshun and other such twisty pretzels. New media, residual media, emergent media, dead media and their kin. Information environments overrun by conceptual kudzu. Hi Fidelity Concepts: Sci-Fi, Weird-Fi, Sonic-Fi, even occasionally Anartic-Fi exploded in ad hoc amalgamations with lo-fi videographic techniques, glitchcraft, expanded cinema, networked performance and other audio-visual agendas.

Like so many accelerations to facilitate collidoscopic views of that elusive Higgs Boson, this is a collaborative operation spanning many nodes and perhaps infiltrated even now by future influences. Simultaneous Blogs beget vlogs beget vamples and short docs. Live performance begets networked writing begets research and development of concepts, costumes, camera-assists, bookworks, occasional artspeak and then repeat gestures unravel again.

Detonation sidesteps denotations, exciting confused connotations and an aesthetic of complexity. Associational structures coalesce from the debris that survives impact: mingling, mutating and meandering into new forms.

As letter forms go, ficto is not far removed from salvo. Accept this lexiconspiracy, at least momentarily, and curious correspondences in such a firing of arms (to strike a target or simply to salute ) offer up another puzzle piece–one that does…not…quite…fit…

Apologies dear readers: This  ficto-quizzical is a strange bird- a paraform that the fleshy mind of this lone mammal can only calculate so quickly!