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(Photo by Morgan Carpenter)

How Fauxists Disorganize Monumentality

Regrette Etcetera & Regrette Etcetera

at the ISGD (Intersex, Sex and/or Gender Diverse) rally,

May 11, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia.

(Photos by Huckleberry Spin)

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For a full list of the demands & memorandums presented by the rally,

click HERE.

For press coverage, HERE, HERE

How Fauxists Advertise/Fuck

Regrette Etcetera

Photographed in mini-exhibition of Regrette’s entries for 

Interstitial BestiariesMagazine

at “Slut Shame”, 7/5/2011, Sydney.

Animatronic Amputees in Mock-Afghanistanian Mud: Military Simulation-Urbanism, Performance & the Future of Global Warfare.

Part 1 of 2

(Forming part of the Fauxist ‘Military Cryptogeographies’, ‘Anthropology of Telepresence’ and ‘Speculative  Architecture’ projects).

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CONTENTS:

The Sim World

- The rise of Sim Villages: MOUT Facilities

- The Future is Slum Wars

- “Architectural ornament as target criteria”: The Arab City in Orientalist Imaginary

- Global War-Games: Meta-MOUT’s & Urban Inter-penetrations

The ‘Populations’

- Employing Diasporas in Diplomacy: Role Players & Avatars in Sim-War

- ‘Amputees in Action’: Playing death daily.

Digital War/Urbanisms

- “The PlayStation to beat all PlayStations”: Telepresence & Digi-cartography

- The City as Digital Impedence

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The rise of Sim Villages: MOUT Facilities

In his New Left Review article “War and the City”, Stephen Graham takes us on a tour of the surreal – and more often than not, all-too-real – hybrid geographies of the Pentagon’s warfare-simulation industrial-complex that is gearing up American soldiers for an indeterminate future-long battle in the world’s urban centers.  “A hidden archipelago of mini-cities is now being constructed across the U.S. sunbelt,” he writes, “presenting a jarring contrast to the surrounding stripmall suburbia” where entire urban replications of Third World cityscapes are also rising out of the deserts of Kuwait and Israel, the downs of Southern England, the plains of Germany and the islands of Singapore.

“Unmarked on maps, and largely unnoticed by urban-design, architecture and planning communities, these sites constitute a kind of shadow global-city system. They are capsules of space designed to mimic the strategic environment of the ‘feral city’, as one U.S. military theorist has called it—now seen as a critical arena for future wars.”

Such ‘Middle-Eastern cities’ have sprouted at military bases in the US over the last few years, although in the assessment of the 2006 RAND Report these remain inadequate; casualty rates in urban combat for untrained soldiers are around 25–30 per cent. To address future ‘Military Operations on Urban Terrain’ training needs, theRAND team recommendations include the construction of four new ‘cities’, with more than 300 structures each. By 2012, the Pentagon plans to have over seventy MOUT training zones around the world. While some will be little more than air-portable sets of containers, others will be extensive sites that mimic whole city districts, with ‘airports’ or surrounding ‘countryside’. (For work on enforcement and emergency sim architectures, see Our article “ Temporal Slip in Crystal Architectures: Meth Museums, Meth Labs in Space, & The Meth-Architecture-Organism“.)

The biggest U.S. urban-warfare complex thus far is the continually expanding Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. “Eighteen mock-Iraqi villages are being constructed in this 100,000-acre site.” Another is “Chicago”, the $14 million mock-Arab city constructed at Israel’s Tze’elim base in the Negev desert. The site was explicitly built to generalize the lessons of Israeli incursions into Palestinian cities and refugee camps. The ‘town’ is split into four quarters, with apartment buildings, a marketplace, shops, a mosque and a refugee camp. It is wired up with the latest surveillance equipment to monitor the trainee Israeli soldiers as they practise blasting their way into Palestinian homes.

In what follows, We trace some of the currents of this ‘hidden archipelago’ through architectural/urban theory, and draw out some recent typologies of performance, focusing on military urbanisms, telepresence and diaspora.

Before We backtrack a little to explore some of the military theorizing behind the rise of the sim-MOUT world, We leave you with the trailer for the popular 2008 documentary “Full battle rattle” (below) based in the National Training complex at Fort Irwin, outside LA, California, which consists of 13 villages in the simulation-complex, and 300 Iraqi American role players to populate these villages. Army Brigades (approximately 3000 soldiers) travel through the simulation nearly every month. And a military city of 15,000 – Fort Irwin itself- exists to support the operation of the simulation.

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The Future is Slum Wars

“The future is not the son of Desert Storm, but the stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya.” General Charles Krulak – Commandant – USMC

“They are . . . the post-modern equivalent of jungles and mountains – citadels of the dispossessed and irreconcilable. A military unprepared for urban operations across a broad spectrum is unprepared for tomorrow.” LtCol. Ralph Peters

“Some people say to me that Iraqis are not the Vietnamese! They have no jungles of swamps to hide in. I reply, “Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings be our jungles”. Tariq Aziz, Iraqi Foreign Minister, Oct. 2002

Urban areas are to be the future battlefield, according to globalsecurity.org, and “combat in urban areas now cannot be avoided”. Historically, Western military strategy was long premised on the avoidance of urban combat, with air strikes the preferred method of subduing large conurbations, and cities were seen as targets, not battlefields. In other words, strategies of attacking urban life have become slightly more sophisticated than the mass, total annihilation that characterized the 20^th century.

Today, the cityscapes of the global South have emerged as paradigmatic conflict zones. Since the end of the Cold War, America’s militarized thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia has focused Pentagon planners’ attention on the burgeoning Arab and Third World cities that are now deemed de-facto sites of current and future warfare for US forces, due largely to the increasing polarizing forces of Neoliberal globalization, restructuring, “structural adjustment” (IMO, WTF, World Bank), economic re-regulation, informatization, etc.

Whatever the causes, the military deigns to presume that high-tech military dominance directly influences the urbanization of resistance. As the long-term trend in ‘open-area combat’ is toward overhead dominance by US forces, in which battlefield awareness may prove so complete, and precision weapons so effective that “enemy ground-based combat systems will not be able to survive in the deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so many of history’s main battles” (Ralph Peters, US military commentator). As part of this misguided erasure of global economic and social shifts, the US military seems to see global urbanization as a dastardly plan to thwart the US military gaining the full benefit of the complex, expensive high-tech weapons the MI-complex has spent decades developing. (We return to this subject in the “Cities as Digital Impedence” section below)

Thus, while the ‘revolution in military affairs’ that had previously emphasized overhead dominance, the losing battle for the streets of Iraq has sharpened the Pentagon’s focus on battles within the micro-geographies of slums, favelas, industrial districts and casbahs, as well as on globe-spanning stealth and surveillance technologies. Indeed, as explored above, MOUT sites like NTC have superseded Los Alamos and the Nevada Test Site (nuclear weapons) to become the premier production set for the ‘next gen’ of US strategic superiority. (See for example: specialoperations.com’s extensive MOUT theory listings, with articles like “Urban Renewal: Military Style”)

MOUT, indeed, is “the future of warfare,” according to the United States Army War College. As part of the US military’s rhetorical framing of our combat-prone, global future, the battlefield of future hostilities, as stated by the War College’s own journal, “‘lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.’” Broken cities: Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Fallujah, Slough. (For a scary, in-depth exploration of the operational planning and rhetoric of these futures, see the Joint Operations 2009 Urban Warfare-Strategy Outline)

In fact, as Mike Davis writes, MOUT – or the military’s pursuit of urban design by other means – is indispensable to “Washington’s ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the ‘key battlespace of the future’ – the Third World city”. Third World city apparently offers only one true lesson: how to attack, and thus this is “the Pentagon as global slumlord”. The First World military, Davis continues, is “unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World. As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions.”

Producing so-called “realistic third-world conditions,” naturally requires constructing the decoy villages on rural U.S. military bases we have been discussing, and just what these realistic conditions are considered to be is made obvious with only the most shallow perusal of MOUT sites’ commissioned reviews. Evaluating existing MOUT sites for the features deemed most challenging in undertaking military operations within large, global-South cities, RAND researchers awarded the highest points to those with ‘clutter, debris, filth’, ‘slums, shanty towns, walled compounds’, ‘subterranean complexes’ and simulated ‘government, hospital, prison, asylum structures (such as the Marines’ Twentynine Palms facility in California).

Such urban-war simulations serve to demonstrate the shifts in US military doctrine in much more explicit form. Pentagon theorists no longer concentrate so exclusively on a planetary battlespace, over which the networked power of US air and space platforms rules supreme: instead, they have turned their attention to the spaces of the global South, on the street-level, the domestic and interpersonal. In addition, as Eyal Weizman has emphasized, both Israeli and Western military planners now stress the need not just to occupy, but physically to reorganizethe space of colonized cities, so that high-tech weapons and surveillance systems can work to their best advantage. Weizman calls this ‘design by destruction’. As he puts it: ‘contemporary urban warfare plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization and subversion of space’. Areas deemed to be too dense and complex to be penetrated by the gaze of drones, satellites and aerial targeting can be physically bulldozed, as was Jenin in 2002. (Again, see “Cities as Digital Impedence” below).

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“Architectural ornament as target criteria”: The Arab City in Orientalist Imaginary

“You can imagine the military wanting to practice blowing up a building full of insurgents in downtown Baghdad. That’s not something you can easily practice live.”  Perme

A generalized ontological insecurity now haunts and structures Western urbanity, and would seem to be part of a larger reversal of the historical association of cities with safety (from barbarism). Under the ‘insecurity state’, terror replaces the nuclear target criteria as marking urban space as threatened. The imaginary of the western city is penetrated by a multiplying array of invisible and boundary transgressing forces- bioterror, ‘dirty’ (radiation) bombs, terror- which form a continuum with to the car bombs, snipers, IED’s of the west’s war ‘theatres’, and constantly feed back into growing trends of architectural-social bunkering, capsularization- from gated communities, (those ’Green Zones at home’) to SUV’s- weaponisation,  and architectural/urban ‘hardening’.

The infinitely plastic discourse of the “War on Terror” is often justified by recourse to indiscriminate Orientalist categorizations, and this language of the “new barbarism” works by separating the ‘civilized world’ from threat-exuding ‘dark forces’ such as ‘the axis of evil’, namely an undifferentiated, always potentially terroristic, Other. In this ascendant network of displaced urbanisms- the city conceived as target criteria, as surveillance capability, as ruins- an architectural-urban manifestation of such typologies is concretized.

In other words, as a form of urbanism that is at once speculative and reiterative, we can read a lot about the ‘Arab’ or ‘global south’ city, and indeed ‘Arab Urbanism’ as imagined (feared/desired) in the Western mind. The extent of the geopolitical and aesthetic power of the production of the military’s ‘realistic’ architectural ‘elsewheres’ currently proliferating around the world has led Geoff Manaugh to joke that we may call it the “new International Style, or perhaps Military Arabesque” (as evidenced in the photographs below).

Most obviously, We must ask what are the long term psycho-urban implications of training thousands of soldiers in certain mimic environments like these? Even though these places purportedly provide “immersive cultural training” and ways of interfacing with foreign places and people, how do these arenas for war-play also actually condition to some extent ‘our’ military’s racial perception of the ‘Other’? How do these spaces naturalize conflations of urbanism and ‘race’, geopolitical power, and certain urban forms/geographies as spaces of threat, chaos and destabilization of the Subject?

To pose such questions in another form, We ask what inherent racism exists in the fabricated architectures of mock Iraqi villages set out as mere objects of war across the innocuous flatness of the Mojave desert? Are these the disposable architectures of a new racialized landscape; the subliminal artifice of geopolitical brainwash; are they the ultimate spatial commodities of a new MOUT marketplace? Indeed, what is being sold, reinforced, advertised here?

One effect is to naturalize Arab and global-South cities as little but physical battlespace, populated, when peopled at all, by dehumanized and racialized ‘terrorists’ that must—necessity is one of the rules of the game—be erased by Western, or Israeli, military intervention. At the same time, the militaristic gloss and relentless sanitization serve to produce an ideological reinforcement and subliminal legitimation of US foreign-policy imperatives.

Urban-Architectural Destruction comes full circle

The essence of MOUT would appear to be that it prepares one for the conditions of an elsewhere; it is an active (and actively surreal) ghost town this way empowering its subjects to descend on cities the other side the world and enact their will wherever they see fit. It is another manifestation of this military urbanism’s contemporary elasticity; it is the capability of bringing the complexities of a foreign city home in order to practice the art of conquering it there first.

In the various sections of this work we focus on both reproduction and simulation. But, as we will explore further below, building a training base architecturally (or digitally) ‘in-specific’ enough to be used for numerous cities of the Global South (for the future of global warfare, see the subsequent section on slum wars), and creating an architectural and simulation ‘database’ of real cities to run games and endlessly rehearse their destruction and occupation, is another key element of MOUT development and use. For example, Strategic Operations mobile MOUT facilities (discussed further below) feature:

“lightweight composite structures (movable by four people or a forklift), interchangeable facades (Iraq today, Afghanistan next week, or any other place in the world the following week)”

This in-specificity shares geo-temporal complicity with the digital-cartographic realm, linking place to sim in an ever tightening loop. One example of such a linkage is the increasingly instantaneous incorporation of urban weaponry and concealment tactics from urban theatres into the sim MOUT realm. Thus descriptions of new bomb-making, operation and concealment tactics from Afghanistan- to keep apace with the constant evolutionary staccato of roadside bombs and “Improvised Explosive Devices’s” (IED’s)- are fed back from ‘theatres’ into training facilities and scenarios “in minutes”, according to army promotion.

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Diaspora: Diplomacy & Role Play

“Understanding Afghan culture is seen as more important than ever in keeping Afghan villagers onside… Because US military operations are increasingly about not just guns and gung-ho, but also building bridges and nations”    Kaplan

A new function of this future ‘urban warfare’ is that there are of course more citizens than ‘soldiers’ on the ‘battlefield’. In his strategic review of the war effort, leaked this summer, Gen. Stanley McChrystal sounded desperate for more nonmilitary help, writing: “ISAF cannot succeed without a corresponding cadre of civilian experts to support the change in strategy and capitalize on the expansion and acceleration of counterinsurgency efforts,” including “immediate and rapid expansion into newly secured areas.” To that end, the United States expects a surge of civilians in Afghanistan. In a traditionally human-resources take on colonization and control, it is expected that such civilians will have a “force multiplier” effect, both by improving military efforts in restive villages and by hiring and training Afghans. Moving from the private-security-military and media arena to all levels of the societal structure. “We’re focusing on a whole-of-government approach,” he said. “And the feedback loop is what we missed before”.

Thus the civilian-military ‘feedback loop’, like that of IED’s, has become an increasing focus of the MOUT. Since 2008, the military and State Department have also been sending  ’civilians’ and non-military through MOUT training to interact with the spaces, aesthetics and custums/practices of the occupied zone, amounts to a multi-faceted HR force to be deployed & populate the society at all levels. (For more on this “partnering with the civilian surge” see for example “Joint Civilian-Military Training at MUTC makes The Army Better”)

"Vignettes are designed to realistically create events which they may find themselves a part of in Afghanistan"

As we have seen, much of the rhetoric behind the sim-war cities is one of diplomacy and experientially-based cultural sensitivity- these apparently new factors of urban warfare and contemporary colonialism/imperialism. And thus with an ostensibly older architectural/urban reproductive realism, comes an increasing focus on that of population/cultural/behavioural realism. While  PSYOPS/PSYWAR engaged with the ‘enemy mind’ and mass psychology, (leaflet drops and propaganda through to the structural torture psychologies and practices used in Iraq- See Our work on Music Torture for example), the range of PSY-technique has been expanded and brought to the level of the individual soldier, who is then psychologically responsible for representing the diplomatic intent of a gift-wrapped invasion/occupation.

In this regard, many of the sim-sites hire experienced role players who use action and behavioural scripts developed by returned soldiers, psychologists and theorists. At Fort Polk, Louisiana, for example, trainees also contend with ‘civilians’– up to 1,200 role-players who act as Iraqi mayors, imams, journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and ordinary citizens (necessarily with the “appropriate mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds”). More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for ‘extra realism’. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million.

At Fort Polk, “al-Qaeda terrorists” are based in an off-limits bit of the wood called ‘Pakistan’, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb. The ‘final element of realism’ in the training comes from a gaggle of role-playing media who roam the training area, cover life in the villages and write about the military operations. ‘In-game’ journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. These role-players, some Iraqi and the others local residents with journalism backgrounds, publish a daily newspaper called the Talatha Times as well as radio and television reports, which are broadcast in the villages. The soldiers in charge of the exercise track how many positive and how many negative stories the units in training generate. The coverage was all bad the day after insurgents “kidnapped” four soldiers and a role-playing journalist, who was permitted to witness the mock executions of the troops and then released in time to write a front-page story.

Although the Army’s use of mock villages populated by native speakers dates to Vietnam and included soldiers bound for Bosnia, it was not provided to the troops who most recently invaded Iraq. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, said the expectation that combat troops will conduct nation-building missions in Iraq makes Fort Polk’s training imperative. ”You’re dealing with a foreign people, some of whom are truculent unemployed locals with access to guns,” Peters says. “The military’s training program became very sophisticated to do that.”

Der Derain traces a number of changes in the development, sourcing and relative sophistication of these role-playing populations. Beginning with the earlier “female marines wearing white bedsheets”, and the palm-cards given to marines which sought to remind them of ‘diplomatic skills’- based on a cartoon character mono-cultural version of the ‘other’ that closely resembled the essentialist portrayal of Ralph Petai’s ”Arab Mind” (1983), one of the central texts of US ‘Middle Eastern’ policy/mythology, and reportedly still used to develop torture and interrogation techniques in U.S war-prisons like Abu Ghraib)- to hundreds-strong live-in role-players, participating in scenarios scripted by specialist theorists, investment.sometimes outsourcing internationally.

Increasingly, these role-played locals are temp. agency employees- from firms like the hydra-giant L3. Most are members of the diaspora, people who worked as interpreters for the United States in Afghanistan or Iraq and then immigrated, and nearly all of whom are seeking U.S. citizenship if they do not have it already. Unsurprisingly, in the sim-war world, Iraqi role-players often occupy the bottom of the pecking order on site, and generally receive no health or employment benefits. The opinions they can express to the media are tightly controlled by site media-relations managers, resulting in a generalized picture of hyperbolic, repetitive statements about the ‘nobility’, ‘national responsibility’ of their work, they ‘would do it for free to help US-Other relations’ (an interesting position in proving civic worth and citizenship in an anti-Arab U.S). Many role players have refused to be identified or photographed, citing fears of Taliban retribution against relatives in Afghanistan. Reports of role-player re-traumatization from violent scenarios- notably suicide bombing scenarios- are also played down.

The chronology of the rise of this form of diasporic performance culture is also interesting. Such a seemingly uncanny intermeshing of terror discourse and citizenship-performativity  appears yet stranger considering the post-9/11 rise of militarized discourses of domestic (as in ‘domestic front’) security policy enacting a overall policy of “cracking down on diaspora”- through state surveillance, racial/ethnic profiling, bordering processes, and not to mention massive state violence directed at the supposed ‘sources’ of diasporic threat.

It is unclear how long the MOUT’s will keep their lavish population resources. Since early 2003, every training rotation has been geared to preparing a brigade or battalion for a mission in Iraq or Afghanistan. As America withdraws its troops from Iraq—whenever that will be—non-mission-specific training will resume, and the training budget will be cut.

The military has been duly seeking cost-cutting cultural training methodologies, and after having briefly explored this strange diasporic performance genre, We now turn to a new area of cost-conscious diplomatic training- the U.S military’s recent adoption of avatar training. A prominent example is a training environment known as ELECT-BiLAT, in development and testing to soon be used by soldiers being deployed to Iraq. ELECT-BiLAT is a prototype game-based simulation for soldiers to practice ‘conducting bilateral engagements in a cultural context’- in army-speak: “a culturally sensitive negotiations simulator”.

In the development of ELECT-BiLAT, there has been a heavy focus on the avatar’s cultural-racial realism . The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (USC-ICT) in Playa Vista researchers are feeding a detailed analysis of such cultural behavioural differences– the nods and smiles, pauses, eye gazes, and gesticulations that would ostensibly serve to differentiate ‘Cultures’. The emotional believability of a Hollywood avatar, so the thinking goes, should help soldiers “become sensitive to cultural issues in the way they dress, behave and raise delicate subjects”.

While similar animations are increasingly used in popular movies, game designers and film animators still struggle with how to make ‘faces realistic’, considering the sheer amount  that is unknown about facial expressions, behavioural cues and so on. Kaplan details the depth of investment in this military-entertainment industry development and research on animation and behavioural-body modeling technologies to create sim-training avatars. In this area, even the mega-budgets of the big screen are being eclipsed by investment from the military. “Ninety-five per cent of our budget comes from the US Department of Defense,” says Randy Hill director of the USC-ICT, which specialises in avatar design. (USC’s Game Innovation Lab was involved in the game design as well as creating a compelling set of scenarios that would be appropriate for the training objectives identified. USC-ICT also makes PTSD, variously ‘wounded’ and traumatized soldier avatars to train military social workers and psychologists. Video HERE).

Avatar-based diplomatic role-playing has thus far garnered good reviews. “It seems to work. In three hours, the new environment allows soldiers to achieve the same proficiency in cultural interaction as they would achieve from six to eight hours of interaction using traditional methods. At the moment, however, learners must indicate their actions – “I’m taking off my helmet”, “I smile” – through keyboard or mouse inputs. True interactivity requires the avatar itself to recognise such actions and expressions without being told, and react accordingly.” (Kaplan)

And shouldn’t it succeed? Pixelated automatons (in white bedsheets) running trumped up palm-card scripts of programmed diplomacy further remove any association with diaspora, hybridity, and the ‘effects of war’ that the role-players re-present.

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Meta-MOUT?

“We can shoot anything short of nuclear weapons here” (29 Palms)

There are multiple MOUT facilities all over the world, but in addition to two that already exist at Twentynine Palms, there is a brand new site cropping up along the fringes that’s being called CAMOUT, or Combined-Arms Military Operations in Urban Terrain. “K-MOUT” is expected to be the Mecca (*groan* ed.) of the entire MOUT program, spread over a 20-by-20 km area centered around an urban core of 280 acres.

The need for the Meta-MOUT comes arises from a project study determining that urban training facilities, which have been in use for many years by the Marine Corps at its various bases, were too small. Many contained 35 or fewer buildings, which Bryan Robertson (Assistant CAMOUT Project Manager) says is hardly enough to provide the level of training needed to prepare troops to conduct operations in big cities. “Trying to train for urban combat in 35 buildings is like trying to train for jungle warfare in a botanical garden” he said.

And so the idea of a mega-MOUT, one big enough to accommodate a full Marine Air-Ground Task Force — 7,000 troops — was born. In 2004, the Marines began developing the concept and design for CAMOUT. And indeed, what will a quarter of a billion dollars get you? Well, we learn that CAMOUT, if completed as planned, will include 1,560 buildings (some as high as five stories) in seven separate districts: the urban core (as previously described), east and west stadium districts, a hospital district, an ‘old town’ which will actually be modeled on Sadr City (a suburb of Baghdad), and finally an industrial district as well as a diplomatic district (see video below). “A city like no one has ever seen,” it will be “bisected by a river, already in place, that’s up to 80 feet wide in some spots,” even though in reality we are told it will contain absolutely no water. “Some areas will have buildings that have been reduced to rubble and there will be shanty towns around the city” that will almost certainly lend a theme park-like and surreal credence to Mike Davis’ claim, quoted above, that the Pentagon is the world’s largest slumlord.

Interestingly, the report also looks at garrisoning abandoned sites and structures throughout the US: abandoned factories, strip malls, schools, hospitals and entertainment complexes. There is an old copper-mining town in New Mexico that has apparently been used to perfect the art of the suburban raid, an outfit that even employs the few remaining residents there as actors. A network of ‘low-population’ towns in North Dakota is also being considered for such a role, and the RAND Report recommends further investigation into the use of abandoned factories, offices, strip malls, schools, hospitals and interestingly, entertainment complexes.

We wonder how reconfigurable these simulated cities may actually become in the future. The idea that CAMOUT could one week be fancied into a city based on the exact dimensions of Sadr Cty, and then the next week be converted into a startlingly real carbon copy of Port-au-Prince, or Darfur, smacks of both exciting and sinister potential. Imagine an entirely fake city that is the architectural combination of, say, Rio, Tijuana, and Johanasberg—toy cities, hybrid cities; imagine the Lego cities of anti-western extremism and other counter imperialist pirates coming to life. CAMOUT is a city waiting not only to be destroyed over and over again, but one eager to be remade in the alternating images of Third World cities all over.

Other questions arise. What if these military bases were the vanguard of architecture’s simultaneous progression and regression? What if CAMOUT became a new dismal suburban model of sorts for the future? What is the ultimate architectural trajectory of this program–bases the size of small countries? Will MOUT one day see its infusion somehow into our normal lives, into the fabric of our common society? In other words, will MOUT one day expand to a utilization of real-life western cities? Overseas US bases permeating the cities that surround them?

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Hyper-Realism  & ‘Amputees in Action’

“We sit in a muddy puddle for hours on end, waiting to jump out and scream and shout, cold and miserable – but then you remember these guys are heading for something far worse. Every amputee is vetted and put through specialist training beforehand to see if they are up to the job. For some it is too close to the mark, too realistic. The last thing we want to do is traumatize someone, stymie their rehabilitation.”  John Pickup, of Amputees In Action.

In that Combat sims necessarily implicate ‘violence’ and ‘death’, We now tour another tier of the MOUT-LARP employment pool- the wounded and the wound-makers.

See: Amputees In Action

[bbc= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10314540]

In training medics and soldiers for the realities of war, MOUT facilities employ private contractor and military medical-sim training groups that offer services and scenarios which “have been carefully designed under the guidance of a military and civilian medical advisory counsel, along with military medics on staff who have recently served on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan”, replete with sophisticated MOUT prop-making departments covering all areas of medical-bodily reproduction and simulation.

The blending with the entertainment-complex is present here too. Strategic Operations, the San-Diego based movie studio-cum-training facility (as discussed in the cinematic simulation section) offers a medical simulation capability that “goes well beyond moulage and typical make up techniques”, into an heady area Strategic Operations deigns to calls “Hyper-Realistic^TM“, which employs a host of variously role-players and technician-artists to simulate battlefield wounds and victims. Indeed their literature is worth quoting at length here:

“In a typical scenario… Trainees encounter head wounds, penetrating chest wounds, burns, and shrapnel, and basic life support, including airway management… his very realistic wounds are actually sutured and his vitals stabilized. Hyper-Realistic^TM life support challenges include pneumothorax management, uncontrolled bleeding, burns, blast injuries, and penetrating eye injuries, as well as lacerations and embedded glass… wounds complete with active bleeding that stops when a tourniquet is applied properly… large bags of special effects blood are delivered to the injury via hidden tubes, and air is delivered to a chest injury site, controlled by the role player so air bubbles appear at the chest wound site with each breath. Strategic Operations simulates the effects chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) events with amazing fidelity. Special effects make-up, engineering techniques, and role playing provide Hyper-Realistic^TM simulations of anthrax (cutaneous), with “malignant pustules”; cyanides, with pink skin; nuclear radiation exposure, with epilation, erythema, dry desquamation, and wet desquamation;  plague, with purple skin lesions; smallpox, with macules, papules, vesicles, and pustules; vesicants, with blistering; and vomiting agents, with erythema and edema at the site of dermal contact – just to name a few effects”.[2]

If this level of simulation seems outlandish, consider that medics at the Fort Polk complex practice on a $70,000 mannequin that bleeds, blinks, breathes, and makes five different kinds of bowel sounds.

In the quest for visceral (hyper)realism, stunning equivalences- stunning in both their economics and metaphorics- are generated. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. “We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,” he says. (Click HERE For more video examples of MOUT Hyper-realism).

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“The PlayStation to beat all PlayStations”: Telepresence & Digi-Cartography

“In our fear of the real, of anything that is too real, we have created a giant simulator.We prefer the virtual to the catastrophe of the real.” Baudrillard

“Audiovisual speed will be for our interior domestic architecture what automotive speed was for the architecture of the city, for the whole layout of the region”. Virilio

Within a cavernous hanger in Wiltshire sit 140 giant metal containers, an installation named the “Combined Arms Tactical Trainer”. Each externally indistiguishable room of this demountable container city contains a different simulation of an urban space in an international theatre. Enter one and you are in the cockpit of an Apache helicopter above Sangin, another and you are driving a Warrior armoured vehicle through desert terrain, a third and you are manoeuvring an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over Kajaki.

A brigade preparing to take over in Helmand can use simulators that replicate the terrain they will face in Afghanistan. New computer graphics, rendering and digital image gathering on site in Afghanistan will allow “a soldier heading for Musa Qala to drive the very road she will need to negotiate in a few months, past the same mud compounds and mosques…” while officers “issue orders from a mock-up of the headquarters in Lashkar Gah in the next room”. Afterwards, the scenario is played back to observe mistakes made not only in terms of the battle but the consequences of such actions on locals.

According to Armed Forces minister Adam Ingram “It’s a case of Disney World – eat your heart out. But the serious side is that it prepares our people for the realities of combat.”

Increasingly, the military is linking up live training exercises with such virtual simulations and spaces. It also allows them to provide a wider variety of training situations,  and also gives them a chance to peek into the future by introducing weapons and tools that don’t yet exist into their battle scenarios, again exhibiting a deep interlinking with entertainment industry and technologies, as evidenced in the video below.

With such developments in computer sim, media dissimulation, global surveillance and networked warfare, wars are increasingly fought in the same way they are broadcast or represented- real-time surveillance and ‘live feeds’ and databases of target criteria. Like the cartographic tension implicit to such a ‘world’ (i.e territory is not map), these kinds of systems exhibits a combination of environmental (as moral value and as sheer space) erasure and summoning, borne out in another of Adam Ingram’s unwittingly revealing statements: “The army can train under any conditions almost anywhere in the world at the flick of a switch – without environmental impact or the cost of moving men and equipment over long distances.”

The City as Anti-Digital Impedence

“A group which dreams of a miraculous correspondence of the real to their models, and therefore of an absolute manipulation“.  Baudrillard

“A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.”   Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

Thus we may ask, what is the ‘environment’ or terrain of such warfare? How is it constructed and maintained? What appears to lie beneath the surface of such a drive is the deployment of a myriad of digital-cartographer-machines, documenting urban environments to be exported/transcribed into computer spaces. In this, surveillance and mapping inextricably overlap. (Considering the U.S Biometric recording programs in Iraq and Afghanistan in this context forms the basis of an upcoming Fauxist publication.)

See, for instance, “Urban Resolve“: put together back in 2004 to create an unparalleled virtual model of almost the entirety of Iraq, with scaled cities and buildings that boast being within 1 metre of perfect accuracy. The $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. In other words, it’s one part “Risk”, one part “The Sims” and one part raw supercomputing power. “[U]sing concepts borrowed from artificial intelligence research,” “Urban Resolve”functions somewhere between high-tech city planning assistant and future warfare prediction device, “helping military leaders determine which types of sensors – CIA agents, spy planes, listening devices and so on – are best for tracking enemy forces that are hiding in a modern city.” In the latest experiment- Urban Resolve 2015- the setting is Baghdad, but, according to its promotional literature, “can be tailored to resemble any major urban area from Iraq to Indonesia“.

Efforts at constantly refining and shortening the feedback loops between urban space, sims and planning have become increasingly central, and have entered the realm of a global panoptic fantasy. Put simply, it runs something like this: “Imagine if the first soldiers to enter an enemy city could map it street by street, recording every window and doorway of the urban battlefield in an accurate 3D model that could instantly be relayed to their comrades at base”. An article from New Scientist, “The speedy way to capture a city” describes exactly this:

“Virtualised reality scans the urban landscape using lasers and digital cameras mounted on a truck or plane. A laser measures distances to objects such as lamp posts and building facades, while the digital camera takes 2D photos. Another laser calculates the movement of the truck and checks its position against data collected from the aerial laser aboard the plane. These measurements and pictures are fed into a computer that combines them to create a photo-realistic virtual 3D model of the area.”

Annoyingly, in this context, cities, as physical objects, simply get in the way of the US military’s technophilic fantasies of trans-global, real-time omnipotence. And thus We witness the ‘design by destruction’ discussed above- the physical reorganization of colonized cities, to ensure that high-tech weapons and surveillance systems can work to their best advantage.

Such electronic mapping and satellite-image technologies provide digital urban renditions that can be experienced ‘immersively’, forming a database of the global south. Entirely lacking in even virtual people, these simulations render places like Iraq as pure digital battlespace. The threat of violence from a distance- backing the Drone/UAV warfare with a bringing of ‘there’ to ‘here’ in real-time and with near-versimilitude- means that virtuality has become the ‘fifth dimension’ of US global hegemony. In the MOUT context, such electronic simulation technologies thus blend seamlessly into physical constructions and ‘recreation’.

Cities, as they exist in First World military simulations, are virtualized yet further through inclusion in  Department of Defense video games. Such computer simulations are increasingly the norm “in a growing number of defense exercises. With ever-more-sophisticated simulation and modeling technology, the First World military meets the entertainment industry – the so-called “military-entertainment complex” – via urban design and building contractors.

Thus a cartographic ‘Cyber-deterrence’ becomes the holy grail of contemporary war-as-peace. As nuclear weaponry proliferates and begins to ostensibly level the playing field, digital dominance- here conceived of as a complete cartography- is a realm still only available to the few (richest) nation-states. Cyber-deterrence bears further similarities to nuclear deterrence, as it does not actually have to work to be effective, i.e the power lies in its symbolic exchange, here it is a knowledge-possession of territory, and a demonstrative/spectacular rehearsal of invasion and destruction. (We have your city on file).

In this sense, overhead surveillance from drones & space platforms, high-precision, high-lethality smart weapons, multi-spectral sensors, real time battle-data, networked commands, justi-in-time simulations and so on are all part of the dream of “full spectrum dominance”, where the battlefield has shifted from the geopolitical to the electromagnetic. The cartographic panopticon enacts at once a physically retracted, invisible colonialism (like that increasingly prevalent in Palestine, as provided by surveillance/teleoperation/UAV’s), and a virtualization of urban space (violence), both ensuring disappearance. (See http://diydrones.com/ for a glimpse of the possible omnipresence of such a normalized surveillant culture).

And despite the life-saving rhetoric and reality-dreams of the SIM-War realm, the traffic between map and place is fraught with slippage. The virtual urban models we are discussing have such an reality-impact on troops that CSC has to warn: “if you put a door on the side of the building, the soldier is trained for that. If he gets to the real environment and the door is on the wrong side of the building, he can get killed”. Another sinister take on the virtualization of urban control can be found in SEAS, participants in Urban Resolve 2015.

—

In concluding part 1, We acknowledge the Borgesian currents beneath Our interest in this topic by including a quote from Borges’ work “On Exactitude in Science”, in which an emperor sends out his royal cartographers to make the perfect map of his empire, only to have them return years later with a map that dwarfs the now-shrunken empire; the emperor naturally comes to prefer the model to reality:

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography.”

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Part 2

In Part 2 of “Animatronic Amputees in Mock-Afghanistanian Mud: Military Simulation-Urbanism, Performance & the Future of Global Warfare”:

- “All but war is simulation”: MIME-NET & Gaming

- Blurring the Base: A Typology of Military Performance in ‘civilian’ space

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[1] Computer Science Corporation

[2] see also: SIMULAIDS, http://www.moulage.net/ http://www.moulage.net/IPPhoto.htm

Bibliography:

Caroline Wyatt “Tackling the ‘Taliban’ in Norfolk” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8094396.stm

“War Games” http://www.good.is/post/war_games

“Iraqi village recreated at new Bragg training site” http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/4659235/

Amit Asaravala  “When War Games Meet Video Games” http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/10/65403

“Mock Village Prepares U.S., NATO Forces for Deployment”  www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=51419

“Marines train at Calif. post’s Afghan ‘village’: Training equips troops with insight into terrain, Islamic culture and customs”  9/30/2008

“Troop Preparation – Mock Afghan War Village in Norfolk” http://www.hmforces.co.uk/news/articles/2303-troop-preparation—mock-afghan-war-village-in-norfolk

ANNIE LOWREY “My Trip to a Fake Afghan Village: How the U.S. military is preparing civilians for a surge of their own”.  DECEMBER 18, 2009

Heidi E Loredo “Hollywood magic prepares Marines for combat” 

“Combat Wound Medical Special Effects & Simulations” http://www.strategic-operations.com/zones/services/combattrauma/

Geoff Manaugh “A MINIATURE CITY WAITING FOR ATTACK”

SUSAN WILLIS “EMPIRE’S SHADOW” New Left Review 22, July-August 2003

Dan Orzech “Cybertroops Keep War Games Real”  Wired Magazine 08.24.05 

BBC News “Soldiers train on giant simulator” Wednesday, 27 November, 2002 

Terri Judd “Welcome to Afghanistan? No, Norfolk” The Independent, UK, 11 March, 2010 

BRYAN FINOKI (Subtopia) “GoogleMapping War” JANUARY 22, 2006

BRYAN FINOKI (Subtopia) “MOUT Urbanism” FEBRUARY 23, 2008

BRYAN FINOKI (Subtopia) “Peering into the Arenas of War” APRIL 17, 2007

Vince Beiser “Baghdad, USA” WIRED magazine, Issue 14.06 – June

STEPHEN GRAHAM “WAR AND THE CITY” New Left Review 44, March-April 2007

Tim Lenoir “ALL BUT WAR IS SIMULATION: THE MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX” Configurations, Fall, 2000

Pasquinelli  “Warporn! Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime”, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Amsterdam-Delhi: Sarai, 2005.

Emily Singer “The speedy way to capture a city” New Scientist, 5 May 2005

“How to Do it Better” The Economist Magazine, Dec. 14 2005

James Der Derian, “Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network”, Boulder, CO 2001.

“Saint Schreber’s Centenary”: Fauxist Members in Sydney Performance

Regrette Et Les Trous

The mega-no-show with 10 simultaneous stars to assuage all yr performance pococurantism!

A celebratory work to mark the centenary of the death, and continuing psychoanalytic case-study trans superstar status of Daniel Schreber  (see: http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/173490/ &

http://www.ralphmag.org/schreber.html) marked 10 days late to fall on Easter.

Including:

Glace Chase                    LaDonna Rama               Justin Shoulder

Regrette Etcetera           Lori Keat                            Dolly Rotten

Asha Zappa                    Pony Glitter Pony             Pony (Melb.)

Expecting:

Mega-spectacle, heavy twinned costumes, opera singers, glossolalia, tranny snaps, Freud/Schreber-Christ, diagnostic chants, vomit.

Appearing:

Pretty Peepers Cabaret, April 24th

Post-Performance Photos:

Matthius the Libidinous & Justin Shoulder: "The Peach Twins"

Glace Chase as Saint Schreber/Glace Chase

LaDonna Rama

Asha Zappa and Regrette Etcetera

Regrette Et Les Trous

Upcoming Publications on NFTFI

Exciting New & Upcoming Publications from

Fauxist International Contributors and Sources

in Early 2011.

Stay Tuned.

–

New in the Fauxist Cryptozoology & Military Cryptogeography Series:

(For existing work in this series, see for example: “Bigfoot Found On Mars! The Spatio-Visual Politics of Cryptozoology,Military Cryptogeography, & Space Archaeology“, “‘Out of Time, Place, Scale’: Cryptozoology & Neocolonialism“, ”Yearning for (re)animate Nature: Faunal Colonialism in Cryptozoology and the Case of the Thylacine”, “Exo-conservation narratives & The Environmental Apocalypse“, “Cinematic Dinosaurs & the Apocalyptic Extinction Genre“)

–

“Animatronic Amputees in Mock-Afghanistanian Mud: Military Simulation-Urbanism, Cultural-Performance & the Future of Global Warfare.”

CONTENTS: 

The rise of Mock/Sim-Villages: Global Training Facilities; “Architectural ornament as target criteria”: The Arab City in Orientalist Imaginary; The Future is Slum Wars; Employing Diasporas in Diplomacy;’Amputees in Action’: Makeup & Amputees (Video Collection);Global War-Games and the city: Meta-MOUT’s;

“The PlayStation to beat all PlayStations”: Telepresence Architecture; “All but war is simulation”: MIME-NET; Blurring the Base: A Typology of Military Performance in ‘civilian’ space.

–

“Chupacabra in Chernobyl! The Hunt for a Global Cryptid through Border Politics, Psychosis-Architecture & Military Cryptogeography”.

Contents: The History and Biopolitics of Chupacabra; Goat-Sucker Goes Global: Diabolical Diaspora; Chupacabra & the Mutants of Chernobyl; Disaster Prediction in Chernobyl’s Cryptids: Mothman, The Kaptar & Black Bird; Stalkers & Cryptogeography in ‘The Zone of Alienation’; Psychosisgeography, Dream Architecture & Radiation Monsters in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R game series; Picturing Chupacabra: Vampiric Mutant Canids in S.T.A.L.K.E.R; Re-enacting Disaster Architectures: S.T.A.L.K.E.R Cosplay/LARP in the Irradiated Zone.

–

“BigFoot on Google-Mars: Space Archaeology, Telepresent Performance, & Cryptozoological constructions of “Martian Indigeneity“ , (Part 2 of “Bigfoot Found on Mars!: The Spatio-Visual Politics of Cryptozoology, Military Cryptogeography, & Space Archaeology”)

The second installment of the popular “Bigfoot Found on Mars!”, investigating telepresence and colonial affect in the Lunar & Martian rovers, cartographic re-enactments, Martian Indigeneity in the work of anomalists and NASA, and the recently expanded field of Space Archaeology.

–

“Selected Cryptogeographic Projects”

As part of Fauxist investigations into military cryptogeography, this document presents elements of our research and contextualizing materials for existing work in the field of cryptogeo, military urbanism, simulation-architectures work and ‘an anthropology of telepresence’.

Contents:  Cryptogeographic Histories; Military Cryptogeography and Globalisms; Gaming in Gitmo; Blank Spots on the Map: Projects of a Cryptogeographer; Decoding Military Landscapes

–

New in the Alien Sex, Xenophilia & Exopolitics Series:

(For existing work in this series, see for example: “Fauxist Sex with Aliens Survey 2009“, “Fauxists ‘Moon Bomb’ Amateur Telescopy Party” (and Review),”Fauxist 2011 Space Playground Design: Goulburn West Primary School” “”Mindless Fleshapoids Are Easy: A Trans-Viral Technophilic Oz“

–

“Alien-Human Hybrids: Body Panic, Schizoid-Tech,  & becoming the other Other (again).”

Part 1: Hybridity in the American Alienation: Alien-Human Hybrids: History, Identity, Support groups & literature; Becoming Other (again) in America: Race, miscegenation & Erasure in Hybrid discourse; ‘Starseeds’- Exemplary Statistics & Electro Sensitive Citizens

Part 2: Genealogies of Estrangement: “Hair of An Alien”: The ‘Alien DNA’ paradigm; Off-Earth Hybrid Populations and Acceptance; ET pre-human evolution & Sociobiology/Evolutionary psychology; Alien Experimentation: a teleology of evolutionary Intent.

–

“God is Dead & I’m His Telephotographic Wife”: Daniel Schreber & Alien Feminizing Rays. Being The True Story of One Fauxist becoming a woman with an ass irresistible to God & their Various Efforts to build a Alien Feminizing Ray Receiver-Condenser”

CONTENTS:

Part 1: The Case of Daniel Schreber becoming a woman with an ass irresistible to God; the front courts of heaven are drained of souls; man/woman, body/soul, conscious/unconscious, private/collective, God/human; psychoanalysis eschewed; Histories of Alien Feminizing Rays ; from the solar anus to civilizational amplitude;  Alien Feminizing Experiments of matriarchal martians and sex-meddling Arthurians; Defense Attempts A design history of thought-proof helmets;

Part 2: Cosmic DIY Trans-Femininity: My Feminizing Ray Condenser How to make a DIY feminizing god/alien ray antenna/amplifier using commonly available parts, design antecedents, trials and preliminary results; High-grade voluptuousness eventually passes into sleep,

–

“’Retracing the Alien Scalpel’: Alien Implants, Schizo-Surveillance & the Super-Scientific Alien-Machine”

Contents: Implants; “Compared to them, Pavlov was an angel”: Histories of Implantation 1967-2010; The Implant Doctors (including Fauxist interview with Dr. Roger K. Leir); “Pleased to see the lack of inflammation”: Alien Implant removal stories & interviews, as told to the Fauxist International; Panic Bodies; Schizoid Surveillance- Postmodern mythinformation & the Super-Scientific Alien-Machine; “Illnesses You have to fight to get”: Implants & Electrosensitivities as ‘Alleged Illnesses’ under privatized healthcare; Hacking Alien Tech: DIY Uses of Domestic Appliances & Auto-Surgery; What is Alien Medicine? Quarantine, disease, & entropy

–

Hysterical Genealogies: Human-Alien Pregnancies

Contents:  “Woman’s 18^th alien-hybrid pregnancy”: Giovanna Podda; A Genealogy of ; Alien Pregnancies for sale in Second Life; Alien pregnancies & Alienated Wombs in popular culture; ‘Should I Baptize my Hybrid Baby?”: Exclusive Fauxist interview with Dr. Jameson (the “abortion reverend”); Alien Insemination Pornography- A Genre Analysis

–

“Drugged Animals Signal Aliens!: An Expose on Alien/ASEMIC writing in the actions of Fauna regarding the Exo-Eco-Apocalypse”

Contents: The Truth behind crop-circles: Pinned Marsupials, algorithims and geometers; The Alien-God in the Postmodern Bestiary: Augury, Allegory and Secular Apocalypse in Alien-Nature; Asemic writing, hieroglyphs and Exo-linguistics in whale beaching patterns; Queer Soldiers & Mass Bird deaths; The Luminescent Runes of the North Pacific Giant Squid Architeuthis martensi; Quorum Sensing; The Dolphins of Heaven (Animals as Aliens): Psychic ETI Sasquatch, Children’s fears of animals, reptoids; Addendum: Transcripts of telepathic Messages from alien Whales to Humanity

–

New in the Fauxist Drug-Architecture series

(For existing work in this series, see for example: “Temporal Slip in Crystal Architectures: Meth Museums, Meth Labs in Space, & The Meth-Architecture-Organism“, ”4 Fauxists Visit the True City of Fauxism on PCP“)

“Ketamine’s Thanatological Themepark: Near Death Experiences, K-Hole Architecture, & K-Transgender”

Ketamine & Near Death Experiences; Ibogaine in North Africa: Ritual Near-Death Drugs;  The Ketamine Architectural Goddess; Overdose At The End Of The Tunnel: Near Death Experiences & A Thanatological Themepark proposal; Ketamine & Transgender; How to Look Good in a K-Hole: Fauxist Couture; A Kat-Valium Eternity: Chronotopic Architecture, Paulo Virilio, & Depression; Chasing Gravity on Wonk.

The Blobsquatch Against The Rational: The Abject Romance of Low-Res, Information-Mythologies & Divination in Cryptozoological Media

Bigfoot-as-blobsquatch forces the side-exit of the ruins of the (para)scientific method, opening new imaginative realms for the cryptid, new definitions of the screenal-field of a troubled Nature, and new tensions in photographic reality. This publication interrogates the problems that the blobsquatch poses for the Cryptozoological community, and looks at the blobsquatch as a form of delightful info-myth, a form of data-divination, which blurs signal-noise as figure-ground as science-myth in a postmodern take on the troubled constituents of the Medieval Bestiary.

Contents:

-       Blobsquatch: A History

-       Blobsquatch Theory: Cryptid Cliches &  “Unknowability” as “Unphotographability”:

-       From “Proto-Blobsquatchery” to “Blobsquatch in the Expanded Field”: The Work of Carl Diehl

-       Endnotes & video addenda.

Blobsquatch: A History

‘Blobsquatch’ is a term Bigfooters use to declare an alleged Bigfoot photo too blurry to determine anything- literally a blobby sasquatch. Thus the term “blobsquatch” refers to any vaguely Bigfoot-shaped mass seen (or not) in an otherwise unremarkable photograph of, for example, trees. In other words, “Blobsquatch” is specifically the object in a photograph of a supposed Bigfoot or Sasquatch that has a lack of definition and detail, whether an ostensible illusion created by a play of light within an often unfamiliar natural environment, or the result of camera movement, lack of focus, glitch, or more recently the effects of digital high-zoom and pixelation.

Thus these blobsquatch “photo-creatures” which may or may not be, but probably are not, a Sasquatch, are pareidolic[1] phenomena that assist people’s imaginations in “seeing” (finding/divining/projecting) a Bigfoot. Related photo-cryptid forms include “Blob Ness Monster” and “Blobcats”, and in physical terms, the Globster[2]

The Wooldridge Yeti

Due to its efficacy, the term blobsquatch has been retro-extended to past photographs that are not specifically about North American Sasquatch/Bigfoot. One such instance is the infamous Woolridge “Yeti Rock” image.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leah4PRA2ZA

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Blobsquatch Theory

Often a little flick is sufficient for a decision to be made. Heads or tails, a book opened at random…The bit of noise, the small random element, transforms one system or one order into another. —Michel Serres, The Parasite

 

While various sorts of cryptid evidence slowly accumulated as the twentieth century wound down, no one managed to capture images of a quality comparable to those obtained decades earlier. As in the case of Our investigation of the “Bigfoot Found on Mars” controversy, most blobsquatches refer back to earlier images and forms- and most often the 1967 Patterson-Gimiln film- Paterson-Gimlin film (arguably the most well-known cryptid photo in existence)- in a case of debatable images based on debatable images for their forms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUAHJC9XgyA

With each advance/change in electro-visual technology, new forms of Blobsquatch come into being- new types of noise, resolution increases, and necessarily, the home software (photoshop) of the cryptozoologist leverages new spectra, deeper layering and control. (For more on this see Our work  “Here Be Dragons”: Armchair Exobiologists love Photoshop”). Perhaps most interestingly, the blobsquatch exists as a central figure of the ‘signal to noise’ ratio/relationship of the image- the figure-ground collapse, which in this case often interrogates varying affects of ‘Nature’, the boundaries body and media/technology constructs. The image below re-orders the signal-noise spectrum as the ‘blob-squatch’ continuum. We will return to this more fully below.

The viral nature of the blobsquatch- it suggests a possibly infinite expansion, inhabiting the fuzzy areas of all images, ‘treated’ or not- is curtailed only by credulity and definitional limitation. For example, one defunct CZ group defined “blobsquatch” as “anything in a picture or film which might be possibly mistaken for a Sasquatch”, which would suggest that the definition of the Cryptozoological ‘Field’ (in both senses of the word) could take on hallucinatory broadness. (See Our work “A History of NASA photograph PIA10214“ for a treatment of alleged transparent cryptids). This process necessarily implicates tensions between constructions of ‘natural space’-the screenal reality of most experiences of natural space, the reality-status of the image, and the re-animating or re-wilding leverage of the cryptid. (For more on this, see Our work ”The Bunyip as Mega-Faunal Oral Memory: Colonial Projections in Cryptozoology” and ‘Wild Hairy Men’: Cryptozoology, Class and Masculinity in Australia and the USA’)

The video below illustrates this- the delineating marks becomeing delightfully unstuck (especially from 0:51 onwards)- and thus implicates almost all of the space/nature/screen as blobsquatch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_jV2qmUs6k (ORIGINAL VIDEO REMOVED BY USER)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZFP7TutmrIframeborder=0

In “documentary” photographs of UFOs this elevated natural-referential status also threatens to come unstuck, to the point at which light- Photography’s basis- itself is imbued with negative and terrifying connotations.  For, despite eyewitness accounts that describe “flying saucers” as tangible technical apparatuses, they rarely have been photographed as such.  Of the innumerable photographs purporting to document flying saucers collected by the government agency Project Blue Book, very few reveal any recognizable form.  Often, these photos only show spots of light floating in the sky. It is not the fact that these photographs image what could be potentially dangerous technologies in the service of unknown beings that makes them terrifying, it is their impenetrable quality that does so.  These photographs “picture” that which cannot be seen – cannot be known.  They do so by employing the sign of the formless – the blob– and thus imply that the sky itself is an animate medium, that these atmospheric floccus- the flashes, thickenings, and quickenings- on the photographic field coalesce and disperse alternatively paranoiac and utopian intent.

While some measure their world with a very rigid yardstick in excluding all blobsquatch photos, of course, a misleading blobsquatch could be a really bad picture of an ill-defined Bigfoot in the woods[3]. But the cryptozoological field sorely- if not completely- lacks hard evidence, and that one person’s expunged blobsquatch could be another individual’s “initial” piece of potential evidence (blobsquatch motes in the eye of the beholder), forces a continuing engagement with the possibilities of the blobsquatch as evidence. Simultaneously, the discourses around the apparent, the alleged, the fake, the hoax widen to include ever stranger anomalous photographic phenomena which are increasingly divorced from the ‘traditional’ habitats, appearance and meaning of Bigfoot, making it function more obviously like a Rorschach splat than previously.[4]

The cryptozoological community is well aware that this slippage in definition, scope and field is a widespread credibility (credulity) problem in their circles, and indeed to the extent that the grainy/noisy blobsquatch photo could be said to be one of the key cryptozoological clichés. Indeed, one site contributor quips that “we might as well add blobsquatch to our list of Crypto-critters….” under the following description:

Blobsquatch. Height: ? Weight: ?

Description: dark blob

Habitat: possibility any or all photographic documents…

The CZ community evinces mixed reactions to this cliché- many bemoaning or criticizing this tendency as a final judgement on the field. Others, in a more positive move, offer sets of advice, instructions and technical information on how to create better quality, standardized images and documentation. It is on this second reaction that We now focus.

Often as part of these instructions, a list of the ‘Crypto Cliches’ is drawn up to show how obvious indeed things are. Many contain information relating specifically to the types and forms of cryptids (eg Loch Ness or BF clichés), but of interest to us here are the broader visual/media clichés, which in both their presence and nature bespeak both methodologies of hoaxing, and content related to the cultural politic of ‘encountering’, ‘photographing’, and the troubled structures of proof and veracity. Cryptozoological cliches which concern visual indeterminacy include:

- Fuzzy or out of focus pictures

- Only a glance or a few seconds of film

- Situations or conditions preventing pursuit or capture.

- Lost or corrupted ‘Evidence’

- High Zoom, pixelation.

- Arrows/circles used to demarcate a body or trace.

Thus the blobsquatch is situated in a specific spacetime- the photographer was most often unable to chase the cryptid and get more documentation- with the secondary implication being that often the photographic moment is an equally fearful encounter (importantly that is, for both hunter/hunted). The long history of interplay between the tale, the travellers report- from bigfoot as loggers tale, Paul Bunyan story, whitewashed indigeneous stories, to Pliny and the medieval Bestiaries- and scientific rationalization plays out here in the documentary narrative and indeterminancy of the creature. Thus the Blobsquatch could be said to pre-date (predate?) Bigfoot itself, being part of the long history of animal-monster speculation, now concomitant to electronic communication technologies. In this sense, to the empirical branches CZ community, the Blobsquatch has done more harm than good.

Conversely, We believe that the blobsquatch can be seen to have a productive, expansionist role in CZ, turning people’s awareness to the characteristics of these histories, the media, coincidence, forms of info-animisms and  etcetera. The blobsquatch destabilizes the authoritative role accorded empirical-scientific methods and photography, and indeed the role of the body in the sometimes-scientific field of cryptozoology. The blobsquatch summons many of the central tensions within the CZ field, recalling those around modern interpretations of the Medieval Bestiaries- those between animal/spirit (monster, demon), presence/absence, wild/described, rational/paranormal (hysteric, mythinformatic), allegorical/literal,…

Specifically, in that cryptozoology predominantly deploys an uneasy conjoining of the looping, schizoid truth claims and associative research of the anti/para-scientific, paranormal, Fortean and conspiratorial ‘genres’, with the quest for objective empirical evidence (aping scientific-zoological methodologies), by haunting the photographic realm of consumer screenal nature, and blurring the aforementioned categorical divides in ‘the document’ as field, the Blobsquatch gestures toward the side exit (like the P-G Squatch headed stage left…) of cryptozoology’s relationship to scientific method and veracity, fostering new imaginative habitats for the cryptid. (For more on this, see our recent publication “Out of Time, Place, Scale: Cryptozoology and Neo-Colonialism”.)

Remaining for a moment longer in the realm of ‘Blobsquatch Theory’, let Us pose a few interesting questions:

-       How does one bait the Blobsquatch? seed and collect glitch media?

-       What then is the Cryptozoological ‘Field’?

-       What is the ‘expedition’?

-       Will the ubiquitous ownership of portable photographic devices (i.e cell phone video/cameras) ostensibly make the search and capturing of Blobsquatches much easier?[5].

From “Proto-Blobsquatchery” to “Blobsquatch in the Expanded Field”: The Work of Carl Diehl

Hidden Animals Intro from carl diehl on Vimeo.

Critical work on the blobsquatch is rare, limited mainly to disparaging mentions on CZ forums, accusations leveled at new photos from time to time, and defensive responses from makers. The work of Carl Diehl stands out as one of the only Blobsquatch investigations worthy of mention. Taking a slightly different tack than We do here, Diehl’s Blobsquatch theory draws in Casio keyboard fetishes and circuit-bending noise, “Metaphortean Research” and phenomena of malfunction. We have included a number of Diehl’s excellent Blobsquatch video works here: “Blobsuatch in the Expanded Field”, “Proto-Blobsquatchery” and “Hidden Animals”. See Diehls site: http://www.electronicelsewhere.com/ for more. Warning: One must contend with the torpid, dead-pan echo-delay narration.

Carl Diehl “Proto-blobsquatchery”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNj0y7-kpp0

Carl Diehl “Blobsquatch in the Expanded Field” (Parts 1-3 of 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXvqI8hFxk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUVGtKQSUEI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy1sLVOGLT8

Endnotes & Video Addenda

The Globster

Gimlin-GlobSquatch?

The following video presents an interesting circling of this- implying that a Blob-Gimilin can be seen in the background of the Patterson-Gimlin film…

CLICK HERE To VIEW

Gimlin-GlobSquatch

——————-

[1] Pareadolia- explanation and link to BF on mars.

[2] Globster: a conflation of monster and glob (‘Glob’ being a combination of Globe and Blob) describes an entertaining sub-genre of aquatic cryptids that form when agglomerations of weed, rubbish, and/or decaying bodies or biological materials wash ashore. The Globster would thus seem to be a physical or ‘body’ blobsquatch- an interpretative field involving physical matter and possible biological forms. The Globster neatly fits Our definition of an accidental instance of ‘Botched Taxidermy’ as discussed in “Out of Time, Place, Scale: Cryptozoology and Neocolonialism”  and promises interesting experimental forays. See video in endnotes below.

[3] See HERE for a deeper investigation on how to analyse a blobsquatch photo.

[4] We have undertaken a comparison of the blobsquatch to Rorschach images/tests elsewhere.

[5] This is indeed a current debate in crypto communities- adherents expressing a simultaneous mix of revulsion and desire around the increasing deployment of consumer imaging technologies- as to whether such devices offer more chances at documentation, more eyes in the field, or the further blurring of the scientific intent of CZ and the proliferation of bad Bluberry Blobsquatches. See HERE for documentation and debate on one of the first cases of an apparent cryptid (The Wiltshire Panther) caught with a cell phone camera:  , and as discussed on CryptoMundo.com

Fauxist Associated Projects: Regrette Etcetera’s “So this one time…”

“So this one time I turn up for a trick…”

Selected ‘Surprisingly Astute’ & ‘Hilariously Erudite’ Outcall Stories

of Regrette Etcetera, 2008-10

News From The Fauxist International is are pleased to announce that Our Editor and Luminary, Regrette Etcetera (link) has published their much-anticipated collection of sex-work stories “So this one time I turn up for a trick…”: Selected ‘Surprisingly Astute’ & ‘Hilariously Erudite’ Outcall Stories of Regrette Etcetera, 2008-10

(Click HERE for free download)

If Etcetera’s Fauxist work is anything to go by, (and indeed the publication includes an account of the Fauxist Spirit Recording Project!) We are in for a labyrinthine treat… We are told that issue 2 is slated for release in mid-2011. Is this how Fauxist’s “pay their way through medical school”? Ha.

Launch Party

‘International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers’

Sex Worker Art Exhibition

December 17,

Little Fish Gallery,

Newtown, Sydney.

 

About “So this one time…”

As excerpted in Interstitial Bestiaries magazine iss. 4, “So this one time…”  collects the international whore stories of Regrette Etcetera. We follow this heady narrator into being paid to sit in on French Lit. lectures, parrying post-porno-pooches, appearing in an all-trans-ho amateur Gertrude Stein production, and taking various forms of revenge on a retinue of the strangest tricks- among them Etcetera’s high-school english teacher, a self-proclaimed alien-hybrid, a tazer-wielding trannychaser, and the unforgettable ‘Caeleb Wilson’- all the while being offered a hilarious, patrician commentary on all that occurs.

Critical Reviews

“Captures the inherent weirdness of the outcall moving with it into self-reflexive plays on the similarly weird psycho-mythic representations of trans women… Unique.” UN Magazine

“For once a respite from the sex-worker titillation genre!… Etcetera’s mock-moralisms and ridiculous, convoluted humour are a delight to unravel”                                                                                                 Karen Elliot, Smile

“Refreshingly repudiates the transfeminine autobiography-cum-autopathology moral-confessional motif… an unapologetic work of makeup, coincidence  & hallucinatory autodidacticism…”         Alexis Jung, 1-Claw Zine

——

We will be publishing a Fauxist review of “So this one time…” in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned to NFTFI.

 

Bigfoot Found On Mars!

The Spatio-Visual Politics of Cryptozoology,

Military Cryptogeography, & Space Archaeology.

An investigation in 2 parts.

 

Part 1.

- “Bigfoot Found on Mars”: A Fauxist Favorite

- A History of NASA photograph PIA10214

- “Here Be Dragons”: Armchair Exobiologists love Photoshop

- A Detour into the Xeno-Domestic With Jonathon Richman: “Here Come the Martian Martians” & “Abominable Snowman in the Supermarket”

- The Alien Super-Scientific Machine: Paranoiac Mythinformation & Resolution Revolutions

 

Part 2. (Forthcoming).

- Choreographies Of Telepresence: Martian Rovers, “Google Moon”, & Space Archaeology

-  Making Martian Indigeneity on the High Frontier.

“Bigfoot Found on Mars”: A Fauxist Favorite

Suiting Our penchant for all things apocryphal, for popularly maligned memeological hoaxes and hijackings, there are always some rather strange images circulating within Fauxist networks. One of Our longest-running favourites in the last year has been the image come to be known colloquially as “Bigfoot found on Mars”, as seen above.

First publicized in 2008, it features what appears to be a Martian Sasquatch-reminiscent rock formation (indeed an almost perfect instance of the blobsquatch) captured by NASA’s Spirit rover on the Martian surface. NASA photograph PIA10214 has since become the subject of both pervasive parody and vast internet debate. Meanwhile, what has kept this image cropping up for Us has been its interesting conceptual leverage – it exemplifies key tenets of Our works on Cryptozoology and Neocolonialism, reanimate Nature, Military Cryptogeography, Astrobiology, and apocalyptic exo-conservation politics.

On looking further into the image’s history though, We find that the Martian bigfoot was late to arrive on the scene, and in fact a host of labyrinthine stories and critical hoaxes from the cryptic realms of exobiology, exopolitics, and conspiracy theory to the annals of National Geographic and NASA, then lead us spiraling into Martian history, the search for life on Mars, and the voluminous publications of interpreters and their heady claims at an elusive photographic reality.

In what follows, We unpack these narratives, and look into:

-   The history of Mars as a speculative, productive space- as a cosmic Rorschach or Mirror.

-   The history of the hallucinatory NASA mistakes in the search for ‘Life on Mars’, and how their logic fuels conspiracies.

-   How the 20th century has indeed been a bad one for the Martian.

-   The field of Martian Anomaly Investigation (with its photoshop –savvy ‘Armchair Exobiologists’ and claims of ‘transparent Martian species’, Martian Subway stations and etcetera) and its attacks on scientific authority.

-   Figure-ground and signal-noise collapse in the search for aliens and artifacts, and the troubled reality-effect of science and photography.

-   Take a trip with Jonathon Richman into a domesticized xeno-cryptid dream.

-    How amateur exobiologists and anomalists (sometimes knowingly) navigate and promulgate the schizoid traps of postmodern Mythinformation,

-   How the figure of the alien constitutes the ultimate superscientific machine, and the trickster spirit of misinformation.

-  We take up the politics of tracing planetary surfaces, looking into Space Archaeology, telepresence choreographies and cartographies, and Panoptic vision.

-  The revival of nationalist frontier politics and forms of ‘Martian Indigeneity’, and the animating of cryptogeographic space with class, race and protest masculinities.

History of The Image

NASA photograph PIA10214 is a panoramic montage of a series of snapshots of the Martian surface that were taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in 2007, when Spirit was perched on the western edge of the Home Plate plateau in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills range of Gusev Crater on Mars.

On December 7th, one Andrew D. Basiago, whilst perusing the broad westward expanse of the Martian surface that can be seen in the photograph for other indications of life, after enlarging the photograph on his new HP Pavilion Entertainment Personal Computer, was ‘shocked to discover’ in it’s depths evidence of life forms and artifacts on Mars.

Basiago, 47, founder and president of the Mars Anomaly Research Society, and author of exopolitics.com, thought, quite simply, that the enigmatic forms looked like a statue (see statement) or the fossilized remains of Martians fleeing a cataclysmic event or ‘Reptoid Predation. Basiago quickly published a number of verbose press releases, articles, a series of high-zoom blowup images of these pixelated fields (see below), and later contacted National Geographic (letter here) informing the world that he had discovered life on Mars, with all the pomp that such an apparently epoch-shattering event would warrant.

In the detail from PIA10214, Basiago saw “a male humanoid being with a bulbous head and a long, spindly body can be seen standing inside a rock enclosure”. According to Basiago, the humanoid is “wearing tan pants and is bare-chested and can be seen leaning against a rock wall at the back of the rock enclosure.  The scapulae in his upper back are evident as he leans against the wall”. He went on to produce a number of increasingly baroque suggestions as to what the image captured, (like the ‘transparent Martian species’ mentioned above) which We will explore further below.

Like the majority of Martian anomalies, the figures were quickly dismissed as a natural rock formation resulting from erosion by wind, water, and time. Bigfoot was yet to hit the scene.

But it is not these dismissals that are of importance here, as We will see. Immediately of interest is that despite Basiago’s prodigious productions, correspondence, and the fulminations on exopolitics.com, all claiming that these images stood as evidence for an ET humanoid species, and indeed, civilization, the image quickly overstepped his assertions and control, and became known as ‘Bigfoot found on mars’, due to the resemblance of the form to that of the meme-glut still image from the 1967 -Paterson-Gimlin film (arguably the most well-known cryptid photo in existence) and was reported upon as such in the media (as above). Thus the image began to do the rounds on the majority of cryptozoological sites.

At left: The Paterson-Gimlin Film still

In that Basiago’s assertions- which We will continue to discuss- were deemed to be too complex, too deliberately weird and were largely abandoned in favour of a cryptozoological standard, a memeological monument, speaks volumes about both the conceptual power of the cryptid hominid in colonial space and the historical cessation of the Martian.

Whether of not Basiago’s assertions were knowing hoaxes and an ostensible critique of NASA’s objectives (which We believe to be the case), analyzing the image from both perspectives- that of the interpretative space of the anomalist, and that of the  using classical cryptozoological cliches and metholodologies etc., which We’ll explore in the following section.

“Here Be Dragons”: Of Martian Canals & Armchair Exobiologists

“The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth”    Michel Serres

“Science acquires its staying power from a sustained struggle to keep down the demons of the supernatural with whose visions, however, it competes”     Avital Ronnell

“When I analyzed PIA10214, and saw what was there, I felt like Charles Darwin encountering the animals of the Galapagos Islands for the first time, except that my Galapagos Islands were on the Internet and my animals were on Mars.” Basiago

"Here Be Dragons": A cartographic tradition used to denote unknown realms and the monstrous inhabitants imagined to inhabit them

Medieval 'Map Monsters' awaiting the explorer

The fuzzy imaginative space of Mars has long harbored, fostered and facilitated the alien, the marginal. Its distance and elusiveness allowing a proliferation of projections and speculations even as terran ‘frontiers’ and ‘others’ became familiar. The Martian surface, as planetary antipodes, is a key cryptogeographical and cryptozoological terrain, physically accessible only by advanced tech and capital agglomerations, and redolent with menageries of didactic creatures, and symbolic artifacts.

Indeed, Mars began its visual-scientific career as a cosmic Rorschach blot in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli stared through a 9-inch Merz refracting telescope and declared that the spidery lines he saw etched on the planet’s surface were “canali.” What he meant was channels, but the English-speaking press, still hopped up on the recent opening of the Suez Canal, settled on the sexier term canals, implying an alien-architectural origin more suited to then-current desires. In the US, the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell widely publicized his conviction that the splotches and lines revealed by his observatory’s 24-inch telescope suggested vegetation and alien-made waterworks. (Lowell, “Mars”, 1895) Lowell’s ‘discoveries’ were to be soon followed in 1898 by H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, with its malevolent, techno-advanced martians, and the panic it’s 1938 radio broadcast so famously caused.

In this time of immense public interest in the scientific and narrative potential of Mars, forms of belief melded, produced etc. in the midst of an enormous amount of speculative work, science fiction, monster movies and news reportage variously construing the Martians as benevolent or threatening, pedagogic or mindless, humanoid or radically ‘other’,[1] depending on what cultural phenomenon they were attached to, however indirectly. Three brief examples, which each take account of this simmering popular imagination in differing ways, should suffice.

Firstly, Disney’s parodic piece on the ‘popular culture of Mars’, from 1957, playing out some generic motifs like the Martian as inhuman, scintillating/sexually threatening, as racial-compendium, and official ‘other’, speaks largely for itself in capturing the stereotypes of a pre-Sputnik Mars. (Sputnik was launched 2 months before its release).

The second example, produced by The Museum of Jurassic Technology (L.A) is the book “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson, 1915-1932”.

The book is made up of letters received by the Mount Wilson Observatory from members of the public. For decades after its construction in 1904, the Mount Wilson telescope was the largest in the world, and was central to astronomical research conducted by A. A. Michelson and Edwin Hubble. The lay public learned about their work through the popular press, and the observatory entered that stream of popular culture that made icons of science, space, and aeronautics. The letter writers urgently wished to share information and impressions with the astronomers, who were broadly seen to be casting the Eye of Science further into the cosmos. The title alone simultaneously reflects both the cessation (or culling) of possible popular, abject and parascientific knowledges regarding space, spirituality, and the Other, and conversely, the productive possibilities expressed by alien ‘contact’ and the great  astronomical ‘endeavour’.

A couple of brief passages from the letters (retaining original spelling and syntax) will give the flavour:

“A New York professor was about to try Einstein’s insulation-of-gravitation theory. He thought he could walk on the air, if insulated, but I wrote and told him to be careful, and not try it on himself but try it on a monkey, because should he try it on himself and succeed, instead of walking on the air, the pressure of the air would shoot him up at an accelerated speed, and, according to Newton, a body once put in motion and acted on by no force continues to move forward in a straight line forever; so he might never return. We have not heard from him, but we hope our letter reached him in time.”

“The Planet mars is inhabited by human spirits like us can talk eat & drink wear clothes, but have great power. They are somethink people of this earth have never seen. They are kept to do work overhead. They also work our wireless gramophones, machinery, Moving Pictures Talking Pictures and all that sort of thing. All that sky is worked spirital… So I have been told & seen in half sleep trance.”

These letter writers grappled with science and technology in modes that encompassed not just the naive, and not just the ‘irrational’, but complex combinations of scientific understanding, popular belief, and ‘magic’, as indeed many scientific theories of the time would similarly appear today. Their perceptions seem propelled by fervent beliefs, desires and fears flowering in the imaginative space of an uncharted cosmos, and an unseen Martian, and often take the form of a more or less disguised challenge (whether in the form of ‘reminders’ or advice) to the knowledge producers (and space colonizers) of the observatory as representatives of empiricist scientific rationalization.

Let’s check in with Disney again to appreciate this mix of the productive, mirroring quality of Mars with scientific speculation:

This speculative production continued to jostle and coexist with advances in visual technology for almost a century, until in 1964, a NASA probe took the first pictures of the planet’s surface, shattering Lowell’s visions of Martian gondoliers. This trend was to continue with each subsequent advance in visual-electromagnetic technology, the visual illumination and surveillance chasing away the Martian, shrinking their physical habitat, and importantly, intruding upon and eroding the psychic-imaginative territories and their populations. (See: Hotakainen’s “Mars: A Myth Turned to Landscape” (2008) for more on this. And for an account of the history of ‘Martian Radio’- the speculative electronic realm of contacting martians, theorizing of martian signals, intelligibility, and so on- see Jeffrey Sconce’s “Haunted Media: Electronic presence from telegraphy to television”)

Despite such debunkings, the possibility of a (now bio-zoological) ‘Life on Mars’ persisted in the minds of some scientists into the 1960’s. Eventually, this led to NASA’s Viking missions to Mars in 1976, when the Viking spacecraft landed complex instruments on the planet to make direct tests for the presence of life in any form, including microbes of diverse physiological types. The results were negative. Again in 1996, NASA scientists created a media frenzy by announcing evidence for the presence of microbial ‘wormlike’ microfossils in a Martian meteorite[2]. After much hype, the “microfossils,” however, were soon shown to be inorganic artifacts. In 2006, a new and similarly dubious NASA claim of evidence for past microbial life on Mars appeared regarding another Martian meteorite which had crashed to Earth in 1911 (striking Egypt, where it ‘collided with a hairy dog’) in another case of mistaken identification of organic matter [3]. NASA hype continues to publicize Mars and other celestial bodies as possible locales of microbial life in the context of the expanding field of “astrobiology”.

In this sense, the 20th century was a bad one for the Martian, which is to say, for the scope and scale of human’s perceptions of them. 100 years ago, Martians were intelligent, energetic creatures, capable of undertaking vast public works, possessing ultra-sophisticated technologies, and even of launching myriad expeditions against Earth with wildly varying intentions, results and targets. By the century’s end, the multifarious Martians, now conceived as the harshly circumscribed term ‘Life on Mars’, have been reduced to mere microbes, cowering in dark crannies far beneath the planets frigid surface, waiting only to be poked at by NASA’s expensive remote-control golf-carts.[4]

Indeed, for some, Mars will always be inhabited, no matter what the data say. Occasionally one hears the opinion that somewhere on the planet there may exist a wet, warm place—a Martian Garden of Eden—where Martian life forms are thriving, that Earth-Mars biological transmission (panspermia) is seeding either planet [5]. Or, alternatively, that the Viking instruments did in fact find life—that the Viking data can be interpreted to mean that there are organisms living in the soil at a population density below the GCMS [gas chromatograph mass spectrometer] limit. The Rovers still sample,  and the field of Astrobiology- a gussied-up, better-funded Exobiology with a more avowed imperialist-instrumentalist agenda [6]- continues to grow and subdivide, despite the sheer paucity of forthcoming evidence.

Notably then, the ‘anomalous’ nature of official ‘finds’ of life on Mars- the mistaken resemblances, media alerts, sensor scale and category mistakes and so on- can thus be placed on a continuum with those of the Anomaly or broadly paranormal communities, rather than methodologically or qualitatively opposed.

Returning then to Basiago, who, in occupying the lovely, fuzzy peripheries of the anomalist-exobiologist world, would have us believe that all is not lost in the search for Life On Mars. Because in Our case, conversely, with every increase in visual resolution, some new oddity, some fresh anomaly inevitably emerges from the pixelated strata of Mars.

And so it has been since the 1960s, when NASA probes sent back the first shots of Mars, amateurs have filled their files with curiosities. These anomalies- whether appearing variously as worms, trees, UFOs, pyramids, subway stations, giant fungi, fossils, planetary genitalia, buried cities and etcetera- invoke both the imaginative history of Mars and the scientific drive, in re-routing its data and repeating, with a brazen, hallucinatory sensibility, the interpretative moves made by Mars scientists as discussed above.

One of Basiago's Blow-ups

For example, in 1976, when a Viking probe passed over a region named Cydonia, the orbiting craft took a fuzzy picture of a huge mountainous structure below. In a subsequent press release, NASA announced that this mound “resembles a human head formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose, and mouth.”

(Also: An interactive 3D rendering of the Cydonia ‘Face’)

 

The space agency was probably just trying to stir up public interest in an increasingly demystified Mars, and thus it’s Martian projects, yet it stirred up a hornet’s nest of speculation and conspiracy writing, making it clear that Mars still holds an enormous cultural pull. link to various theories- findings of more faces, pyramids, etc all of a similar interpretative looseness.

Diagram showing the the correspondence between Martian surface features and their apparent history as the 'Tharsis Pyramids'

Since then, numerous ‘anomolous’ features (enough to occupy a number of dedicated research groups and the archives of numerous ungainly websites) and blurry pixel-clusters have had their ‘day in the sun’.

Basiago, as a dedicated Martian Anomalist, situates his Martians and artifacts squarely within this history, saying “This evidence goes far beyond that provided by The Face on Mars at Cydonia and establishes with scientific certainty that advanced, intelligent humanoids exist on Mars”.

And like Basiago, there are many playing armchair exobiologist these days.

Like the 1997 NASA Mars Pathfinder rover- which broadcast images clear (&’ fresh’) enough to afford a convincing spatial sense of another world and achieved more than 45 million viewers logged in and over 80 million hits per day during the 1^st week of the operation- an internet record and indeed defining moment for the internet- when Spirit began transmitting, Mars fans downloaded over 35 terabytes of visual data from NASA’s servers in less than a week. And they’re not just loading up on boring screensavers, as We’ll see below, they’re putting their image-processing software to the test, hunting the digitized Martian landscapes for signs of life, past and present, and publishing their reports. These may be the postmodern successors to the Mount Wilson letter writers.

According to EBTX.com, a Web site devoted to “figuring out the universe” and run by 56-year-old “E.B. from Texas,” amateur investigators don’t look for the sorts of general principles that attract most scientists. “We look to the anomalous features,” says E.B. The methods of distinguishing an anomaly (figure) from the landscape (ground), like the Martian Blobsquatch- which in the realm of high-res orbiter and rover scans often amounts to figure-ground as signal-noise- are suitably vague, often amounting to seeming resemblance, suggestion and narrative, and in this case, resulting in Basiago’s hominids being out-meme’d by the Paterson-Gimlin squatch.

The interpretative move of the anomaly, however vague the technique, then allows an anomalous doubling. While a Martian carbon dioxide-breathing, -140 celcius-proof humanoid-serpent family or Bigfoot (whatever their provenance) would indeed qualify as anomalous by anyone’s standards, Basiago again aims to use an distinctly ironic exopolitical leverage to further stretch the field.

Notably implicating standard tricks of the cryptozoological field (recourse to ‘mythic sauroids’, creative interpretation of fossil ‘forms’, and heavy reliance on the Blobsquatch- as discussed in an earlier Fauxist publication) in claiming that while “Many of the animals that appear in the NASA photo resemble the frogs, lizards, serpents, and tortoises of Earth. Others resemble the extinct reptile species known as plesiosaurs, which had long necks like snakes and round bodies like turtles”. So now there are Dinosaurs (and notably the Loch Ness Monster plesiosaur) on Mars. He then goes further, claiming that in fact, all evidence is potentially anomalous, opening up (again in deft Exopolitical fashion), the interpretation of what is a ‘lifeform’: “There is evidence of camouflage in some of the species”  (Figure-ground collapse) and finally that “One is transparent in form”. (Observable details on this particular species are understandably thin on the ground).

The fossil hominids of Basiago (indeed his fossilized catastrophic narrative) and the artifacts-in-ruins of the anomalists (like the Tharsis Pyramids above) implicate a radical deepening of time in their search. Thus, while the photographic overpasses, the landers and rovers arguably brought Time (history) to Mars, the anomalists complicate any linear geo-chronologies with their speculations. In some obverse of Conrad’s journey to Kurtz (“Heart of Darkness” (1902)- where geo-spatial movement connotes a Lyellian movement, regressing through moral-temporal strata- the ‘dig’ and the foray here reveals underlying strata laid down, as it were, from Civilization’s (or Humankind’s) future. Reaching back to the canali and gardens of the early telescopists, We investigate the possible boundaries of the field of Martian archaeology- the geologic timescale, amorphous ruins, and possibilities of interpretation in part 2 of this work.

That Basiago asserts the existence of transparent species and the ability to divine such from the data evinces his critical, parodic agenda. In an ironic re-enchantment of Martian space, a liminal haunting of the instrumentation-as-colonizing eye, Basiago deploys an anti-enlightenment cum Utopian desire  questioning the reality assumptions and authority of the military-industrial-space complex.

Whilst this anti/parascientific skew is foregrounded in much of the anomalist work, importantly, in the majority Imaginative Martians have turned into Interpretative ones. Rather than a Mars populated by didactic creatures of the imagination- as part of a larger galactic bestiary- the Anomalist’s beings are produced now from evidence produced by the military-industrial panopticon, from tele-operated machines on the Martian surface and the archives of NASA. The anomalists thus fight, in a comparatively literal fashion, to repopulate the realms of pre-colonial, utopian Mars-as-Outside.

However much the enthusiasts want to destroy or usurp these institutions and truth-structures, and however much their interpretative move of “That NASA photo blown up 400x sure could look like BF, therefore…” performs a noble myth-informational function, the net result of this speculative field surely enhances NASA’s power and agenda apace, as any news is good news when pertaining to a politically offensive, budget-consuming program driving carts on a distant planet looking for microbial residue.

For its part, NASA has learned to sidestep and incorporate such seeming controversies. “I think it’s great that we’re releasing raw images, warts and all,” says an extremely tactful Joy Crisp, project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “Everyone can make their own interpretation – artists, kids doing science projects, folks with different mindsets”. And significantly, “Everyone can be an explorer.” Or, as E.B. suggests, you can “experience the thrill of discovery (or self-delusion) for yourself.”

Joseph Skipper on MarsAnomalyResearch.com- the coruncopic archives of images and speculations on paredolia, rock forms, and shadows of the martian (and lunar) surface, and  perhaps the best one-stop shop for Martian enigmas- formulates the cryptozoo/geographic position succinctlty: “No one’s interpretation of the visual evidence should be considered established fact.” Skipper’s site includes scores of annotated images, as well as claustrophobic commentary that scrolls on quite endlessly.

In a report titled “The Real Smoking Gun as to Life on Mars,” he discusses one of his most important discoveries: Photoshop. The graphics program, which allows the 61-year-old Florida insurance investigator to sharpen detail in NASA’s images, “lifted the scales from my eyes”, changing ‘reality’ (the photographic reality which is Mars) into a penetrable, workable field. Indeed We find that such consumer image programs are de rigueur for anomalists and amateur exobiologists, and in merely glancing at any such site one encounters hundreds of zoomed, chopped, colour-morphed, inset and annotated images of the feature under question.

The following video is a good example of this process, containing as it does an almost endless sequence of different filter, spectrum and visual morphs on the martian BF:

These tools allow self-identified exobiologists a measure of control and creative input into the hitherto inaccessible cryptogeographic space and scientific method of Mars. And, by exploring and expanding official cartographies and data with a baroque, anti-reductionist, para-scientific lens, they introduce, with their noise, multiple spectrums, filters, a deepening, reviving, and burlesquing of the Martian possibility.

Besides finding evidence of life, Skipper also claims that NASA is tampering with the Mars images, removing evidence of alien life and civilizations, in what may be a Photoshop InfoWar. Notably, Skipper’s analysis of the BigFoot on Mars image- “Mars Rover Statue or Person?“- finds paths, graffiti and so on in the surrounding rocks and landscape. (See image below)

The layman’s visual equivalent of SETI (which significantly has also recently opened it’s data streams to public interpretation: SETI-Quest : “Contibute to the Search for Cosmic Company”) wrests authority over distant geographies and existential malaise from the institutions archival wastelands.

And thus, with these Photoshopping Philogelians in action, space scientists no longer have the last word, aka definitional authority. And indeed they give Barthes and Sontag a run for their tenure regarding the reality status of photographs, and thereby- now implicating Baudrillard- Mars itself. If anything, what We can entrust to these accessorized anomalists is the introduction of strange loops, and the implication that surface details, however surreal, always contain a deeper explication of what may be happening.

In this sense, they also manage to forcibly recover that elusive cryptid, FUN, from beneath the epic-dour military dreamspace of interplanetary Vision and even the pedagogic  of Crisp’s ‘kids doing science projects’. For example, in response to some of the Spirit’s images- which contain features that look like a bunny, a crab, or even a croissant- a Web designer named Jim Love put up MartianCrabs.com and asked web denizens to peg the true nature of the object themselves. In a week, more than 600 opinions poured in, ranging from the absurd (“a jumping corn chip”) to the beautifully paranoid (“All the photos are fakes!”).

Love says that roughly 15 percent of the reports seem to take the anomaly seriously. “But it’s hard to tell because so many are sarcastic.” And that’s what both the true believers and the hardcore skeptics miss. Anomalies aren’t just the result of our attempt to visualize the unknown. They are also fun. As steve2.net noted on MartianCrabs, the fact that the bunny was most likely “rover fluff” didn’t detract from its value. Why? “We like this kinda freaky visual nonsense.”

This ‘fun factor’, parodying the paradigmatically epic intents of NASA (and thus their mega-budgetary consumption) may seem to be amongst the few responses left to the expansion of the military-cryptogeographical, panoptic colonization of the universe, and imminent ‘migration’ of the rich-and-talented off–Earth…

Finding bigfoot trying to entertain her serpentine guests whilst the pesky jumping tortilla’s threaten to be-crumb their tracksuits in the intersticies of an orgasmic NASA’s nationalist techno-mythopoesis… or leveraging the possibly omnipresent transparent alien… returns Us to some of the beauty of the Rorschach-like, imaginative and Utopian potential of Mars. And indeed, we may not have the same knowledge again.

Basiago's "Evidence of Martian Gremlin in Spirit Rover Photograph" (2009)

 

A Detour into the Xeno-Domestic with Jonathon Richman

Staying for a moment longer with the ever-tyrannical Fun factor, We believe a short detour into another pop-cultural tributary. The ever-wonderful, often spooky, Jonathon Richman of the Modern Lovers, is known for his sophisticated-naïve songwriting. And two of his songs in particular capture the inversion of the martian and cryptid, removing the frontier narrative in acts of xenophilic diplomacy, which offer a comedic, loving take on the exopolitical work of Basiago and his Exopolitics group.

The threat of ‘the coming martians’ in “Here Come the Martian Martians” (1977- the Viking year) turns into a welcome, and domestic enquiry (finding out their favourite icecream flavours, helping them get around, and wondering if the martian schoolgirls will like him…),

Whilst  bigfoot’s ostensible hominid relative, in “Abominable Snowman in the Market”, is hanging out and disrupting the space of consumption, while Our Jonathon is trying to reconcile the scared shoppers (here suspiciously rendered as ‘housewives’) to his presence, and find out how to talk to him. Dig?

One wonders what Ms. Richman would say about the Spirit rover, or indeed Bigfoot on mars… For interest’s sake, and for a much longer detour, contrast these 2 songs with the following 39-part interview series with Basiago, in which he discussed his histories in various insidious CIA/PSYOPS programs:

 

The Alien Super-Scientific Machine: Paranoiac Mythinformation & Resolution Revolutions

“There is no longer any distance. You are so close to things that they no longer affect you at all.” Joseph Roth 1927

With the usual belief-in-God-as-Psychopathology and the ‘Global Terrorist’ nestled firmly in cheek, We ask: How pathologized is belief in alien beings? A number of surveys indicate that a majority of North Americans (65%- according to the ever-reputable CNN) believe in UFO’s. So much for the Enlightenment. And what’s more, nearly 50% believe that UFO’s have visited Earth, and have conducted their abductions, cornfield-geometrics, cattle-vampirisms and so on.  (Chupcabra-as-alien even gets a liminal look in).

Now, the question of whether or not UFO’s are ‘real’ is, alternately, too crude and to philosophically taxing to broach. As Keith Thompson points out in his smart if sometimes breezy Angels and Aliens: UFOS and the Mythic Imagination, in the end the Alien is nothing more than our attempts at interpreting it. Recognizing that each hypothesis is “a particular and limited question put to the UFO by particular observers with particular assumptions,” Thompson shows that mainstream ufology’s Holy Grail of physical evidence is not only boring but moot, and it is far more interesting to engage our own reflections in those almond-shaped white-less eyes that peer back from so many paperbacks and cluttered websites. And if We follow Thompson, the cryptid/alien ‘field’ (in both expeditionary and media senses), and evidentiary structure, namely the leverage Bigfoot on Mars and the Anomalies exert and how this is achieved becomes the most compelling part of Our investigation.

As such, it is perhaps most efficacious here to consider the UFO field as a theatre of the absurd, an intelligence whose ‘message’ seems almost intentionally tangled. The UFO/alien is realm in which evidence and hoax become indistinguishable, un-interpretable, and We need only to mention Roswell to invoke the microcosm of the strange loops information takes in its vicinity, and the preponderance of alleged leaks, cover-ups, infectious rumours, high-tech ‘hieroglyphs’, suspicious fact and synchronicity, simmering away in the Cimmerian realms of fringe media where the Alien prospers.

From this perspective, it is as if the UFO incarnates the trickster spirit of information itself, constantly flip-flopping the meanings and effects of signal and noise, to the extent that the UFO becomes impossible to extricate from a cultural field of visionary noise, a Hermetic ambiguity that animates and galvanizes and concentrates those info-critical currents and theories, and threatens the whole human informatic structure- recall how often UFO’s are reported to stop any and all electronics and usurp signals.

With this, We begin to circumscribe the obverse to the great myth of information (any-and-all-and-more information) as the new place for secular worship of the postmodern world. Most obviously, postmodern communication technologies themselves have become some of the central focuses (and indeed typologies) of psychopathologies and the various media-paranoias grouped under schizophrenia. Cases of paranoiac mythinformatic neuroses concerning Space were described by psychologists as early as the 1960’s, generally being framed as a product of the cultural obsession with Space. See for example: Kerry, R. J “Phobia of Outer space”, Journal of Mental Science 106 (1960) 1383-87. and also: Marks & Bebbington “Space phobia: syndrome or agoraphobic variant?”

That nefarious, quasi-telepathic forces are using communications technology as surveillance, electronic implants to colonize or monitor minds and so on, come to form saturating secular psycho-mythologies appropriate for the ‘outered’ electronic self, a self of open and exposed psyches in digital space and the archive and amongst the systematic and deeply invasive character of media and increasing cybernetic logic of control of all institutions.

When the alien/UFO, with its associated techno-experimental narratives of contact, abduction, medicine-invasion, breeding, and surveillance- their superscientific machinic nature, if indeed the ufo/alien ican be considered the ultimate superscientific machine, straight from the radiating heart of postwar technoculture- stand in as a (de)materialized figure of digital and panoptic culture, it can bee seen as further representing fears of being the subject (that is object) of techo-scientific invasion or endo-colonization.

In our current context, the liminal hairy-nature-man escapee that is Alien Bigfoot doubles this representation- in running from the camera, the autopsy, the institutional eye- and by standing in for a residual, resistant Other/Nature. Even for the nuts-and-bolts crowd, the overwhelming strangeness of the UFO makes it a fundamentally spiritual object. Holy, violent, and utterly goofy, the alien is the ultimate identity crisis.

Frederic Jameson, in discussing the resolutely alien intelligences to be found in various sci-fi works, and others dealing with the “impossibility of ‘contact with aliens’” (i.e even conceptualizing the truly alien), focused on a Foucauldian take on power/knowledge- in terms of the colonizing effect of exploring the ‘other’: “If we grasp even the intent to understand as an intrusive and aggressive power, we may abandon the Other… abandon it to some complete isolation as sealed and seamless as the future itself or even that radically different system we call Utopia”. This is perhaps literalized by Basiago’s transparent species- the landscape, the photograph itself is Other, is hallucination…

In this way, in the Martian context, these technologies perform an annihilation of space and time that also chips away at the boundaries of the self, and especially the North American self, built as it is on utopian frontier dreams and (conceptually emptied) WIlderness. The Rover’s telepresent, telekinenetic, teleprosthetic witnessing, gathering and zooming refocuses Utopian attention and production on this distant surface- of Mars, of the photograph, of a possible New Deal- and brings us to a place where we may be closer, more deeply epistemologically invested, to the Martian surface than the politics of an Earth right in front of Us. Recall Basiago’s statement that his Darwinian Galapagos islands are the internet.

Useful here is Leo Marx’s concept of the ‘technological sublime’. While the Wilderness interpretation of Martian space imbues the landscpape/images with a certain Sublime quality, with the Rover standing in for the Kantian/Burkeian viewer, or indeed the Lyotardian pomo-artiste (all threatened by the deadly ‘reality’ of the inviting pastoral), Marx’s conception of the replacement of nature worship with techno-worship-horror serves Us well in trying to explore the techno-facilitated nature of Martian reality/space, and the associated tele-presence epic of unmanned reconnaissance.[7]

Here, in the Information-Sublime, We have a second mythinformation-obverse. The package of ‘more signal, more noise’ (please) proffered by the UFO enthusiast, with its debunking of a hegemonic data-proprietary, epistemic boundaries and veracity, acts as an attractor or node for those adrift in what is an increasingly saturating info-environs. In dealing with this apocalyptic collapsing of time and space- Mars as postcard as God-scape as Global Village as anomalist’s evidence? – the alien cult seems particularly attractive to people who lose their way somewhere along the normative, capitalist routes of the information superhighway, and follow some beautiful byway into a fragmentary world of deep webs of suggestive correspondences, ‘marginal’ information, and conspiracy, where every piece of data that has strayed into their path then knits into an expanding web of paranoiac connection. In other words, like the 19th century Spiritualist, under the sign of the secular Info-Godhead, the anomalist-enthusiast irrationally mis-uses (scientific) data, and ‘Straight time‘.

Even mainstream science’s sop to ETs—SETI, the big dish search for intelligent radio signals in deep space—reflects the faith that signals can always be untangled from noise. Taken to its extreme, this information theory becomes information mysticism, a giddy flux that runs through one of the most universally reviled literatures currently produced anywhere: New Age channeling.

This results in more or less literalist cults of information. The UFO churches, the channelling fad (spiritualist TV) and Starseed transmissions at one extreme- where ‘messages’ received are uncritically celebrated as revealed truth even as the “messages” themselves often consist of bad SF plots or a noisy haze of New Age jargon (interestingly, some of the Evangelical Protestant ilk even hold that the angels in Revelation refer to global satellites)- and at another, the Exobiologist-Anomalists digi-scouring NASA’s data midden and finding transparent Martians and worrying about the ‘establishment photoshoppers who got there before they did’.

At this rhizome-nub of the spectrum, and in returning to the Fun-as-deconstruction pseudo-science element discussed above, We find that some of the best (most critical, most entertaining?) production works to mutate the authority of scientific style by soberly fusing cosmic-comic speculations and legitimate hard science in the style of Basiago’s more sober bretheren. Basiago’s own ironic, history-savvy sci-fi (of fi-sci) offers numerous suggestions toward just such a methodology.

Marginalized from the legitimacy and cash conferred by institutional research, the enthusiaasts desperately want to normalize the UFO into a legitimate object of study. They don’t want to hear that their urge to prove what they call the “ETH” (extraterrestrial hypothesis) using the tools of science is just one more metaphysical compulsion set before the feet of a radical enigma. They don’t want to hear that busting science moves like graphs, credentials, acronyms, and the language of hard evidence (dates, exact times, measurements) is just a fetish in the face of the void.

Most scientists would appear to hate this material not solely because they’re trained to, but because pseudoscience has a dangerous tendency to encourage the astrofurutist lumpen prole to jump the fence of technical languages and sneak around the arena of Truth, and even, like Basiago, to informedly take the piss.

—–

Stay tuned for Part 2. (Forthcoming).

- Choreographies Of Telepresence: Martian Rovers, “Google Moon”, & Space Archaeology

-  Making Martian Indigeneity on the High Frontier.

---

[1] See for example: “Mars: From Myth and Mystery to Recent Discoveries”

[2] In August 1996, a NASA report by McKay et al. (1996) announced detection of past microbial life on Mars as evidenced, in part, by observation of “wormlike microscopic fossils” in a Martian meteorite.

[3] At a 2006 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, McKay et al. presented new evidence of organic remains of life in another Martian meteorite, designated Nakhla. This meteorite fell to Earth in 1911 in Egypt, where it collided with a hairy dog. According to an account in Science (Kerr 2006), the McKay group believes: “The putative organics [in the meteorite] are in veins whose walls are peppered by tiny tubules extending into the adjacent mineral, olivine….They (have) argued that microbes acid-etched the tubules in the hunt for nutrients.” Andrew Steele [Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory] commented: “McKay has so many contaminants he has to eliminate. We do know Nakhla is contaminated with a lot of organics.” The Science account continues: “They include organic matter produced by abiotic means on Mars, organisms that invaded Nakhla after it fell to Earth in Egypt killing a dog, and organic agents used in the preparations of thin sections. Steele would take another tack: ‘In Nakhla, I assume it’s contamination. Prove me wrong.’” See here for one of the latest (2010) apparent NASA life discoveries.

[4] See for example: E. Imre Friedmann and Ali M. Koriem “Life on Mars: How it disappeared (if it was ever there)” Advances in Space Research Vol. 9. Iss. 6 1989, accessible here. Interestingly, the memorable Martian narrative of The War of the Worlds, the techo-advanced and world-threatening Martians fortunately, for Earth’s humans, begin to die rather suddenly en masse because they are susceptible to terrestrial pathogenic bacteria. The narrator of the novel explains this as the result of the “fact” that there are no bacteria on Mars. Consequently, Martians have no immunity and are “irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.”

[5] For an overview of the field, and its inherent politics and possibilities, see Our article on Panspermia. For specifically Mars-Earth panspermia, and technical information on the necessary forces, see Mileikowsky  et al. “Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space: 1. From Mars to Earth and Earth to Mars” Icarus 145, 391– 427 (2000). Accessible here.

[6] See for example Gest, H. “The ‘Astrobiology’ Fantasy of NASA”. 2006

[7] See also: Mosco, V. (2004). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fauxist Submissions Feature in Fetish Magazine

Interstitial* Bestiaries**

Free Fetish Personals for Discerning Devotees

Vol. 1 Iss.4, Nov.-Jan. 2010-11 ACE

“A Desire Called Dystopia: Abject Sex & Archive Trauma”

For free, full-colour pdf download:

Interstitial Bestiaries 4

—

From Interstitial Bestiaries:

“This month’s featured artist, Utopia Etcetera, takes us on a brief tour of

their large collection of Second Life imagery, project excerpts and working

documents. Utopia has solicited their SL friends’ submissions also.

In a double-sized issue with the theme:

“A Desire Called Dystopia: Abject Sex & Archive Trauma”,

We’ve an amazing, exclusive interview with Zoltan, Designer of Robot AI Sex dolls & regarding his robot girlfriend Alice, an account of the Museum of Sex Furniture in Second Life, artist submissions including ‘The Virtual Transgender Suit’, the ‘Menstruation Machine’, A themepark of Near Death Experiences, a tranny surprise film, & a comprehension test submitted by the Fauxist International.

If that wasn’t enough already, We’ve crammed in late entries: a psycho-sexual reminisence on Mattel’s famous 90′s goo-toy ‘Gak’, & a story about a game-designer’s fossilized porno dog ‘Artaud’, from Regrette Etcetera’s upcoming collection “So this one time I turn up for a trick…” … AND… We are also privileged to have received a number of choice items for review this month, donated by the Portland Paranormal Society”.

Note: Fauxist Representative Regrette Etcetera also featured in Interstitial Bestiaries #3, available for download in the menu bar at left.

Contact: interstitial.bestiaries@gmail.com

 

* interstitial: (in-tər-ˈsti-shəl): Pertaining to being between things, especially between things that are normally closely spaced. 1 a : a space that intervenes between things; especially : one between closely spaced or nominally indistinguishable things <interstices of a wall>, <the interstitial fluid found between body cells> b : existing in or filling a gap or break in something generally continuous <the interstices of society> <passages of genuine literary merit in the interstices of the ludicrous…plots — Joyce Carol Oates> 2 : a short space of time or content between events or features.

** bestiary (bĕs`chēĕr’ē): A

type of medieval book that was widely popular, particularly from the 12th to 14th cent. The bestiary presumed to describe the animals of the world and to show what human traits and moral lessons they severally exemplify. The bestiaries are the source of a bewildering array of fabulous beasts and of many misconceptions of real ones, and demonstrate differences in pre-modern and modern taxonomies and beliefs.