Synthetic Spectres: Theses on Anomalies

essay for The Blur of the Otherwordly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal (with essays by Mark Alice Durant, Marina Warner, and a story by Lynne Tillman), publication date Fall 2005, distributed by DAP

I Definitions
From science fiction to theme parks, from government cover-ups to papal succession, from farmyard mutilation to cosmic phenomena, the paranormal reads like a list of hot tabloid secrets. Only the stars are not Elizabeth Taylor or Martha Stewart, but instead everyone from government agents to grandmothers, exorcists to psychics, geologists to meteorologists. The paranormal is not restricted to the alien birth pictures on the cover of Weekly World News, but is on the front pages and headlines of CNN and the Chicago Tribune.
It might seem like there is a resurgence of interest in the paranormal these days. Perhaps it is more likely that anomalies are increasingly apparent. What constitutes an anomaly? On what is its appearance or disappearance predicated? Why do we notice or overlook the paranormal? In what part of our culture does the otherworldly reside? This essay concerns itself with definitions, descriptions, order, and clarification. These words trace a desire to bring to light the ontology of the paranormal, which cannot be achieved without examining our technoscientific culture's compulsive war with the paradoxes of knowledge and blindness.

As I write, a new pope, Benedict XVI, has just been installed. This rainy third week of April in Chicago, people traveling through an underpass saw an apparition of Mary in a salt stain on the concrete wall. The image looks a bit like a Cy Twombly chalkboard painting and is, in the AP photo images racing around the web, quite beautiful. The altar below the stain casts a warm glow from countless candle flames. People sit and pray quietly as they look toward the static mark. The image is a touchstone for the relation of technology to the paranormal. Technology brings that which is far close; we might never get to Chicago to see this apparition, but the image is right there in our glowing screens. The digital allows us to see as if we were God, at any time, from any vantage point, and with special powers; people viewing the apparition shot countless photos of it, claiming that the image could be seen more clearly in the camera. Communications networks connect us to the invisible; most articles about the phenomenon mention the nomination of the new pope as part of the context of this vision, as if Mary appeared in this dark, dirty place to affirm or witness the emergence of a new spiritual leader for Catholics. Technology breaches the divisions between order and disorder; the Catholic Church makes no official statement or approval of this apparition, yet through the Internet, people all over the world are seeing, or sighting, this apparition anyway.
Torn between technology and religion, today we are trying to figure out where we stand. In America we live with a politicized religious rhetoric (“faith-based” welfare reform, etc.), which seems to return us to a historical connection with Christianity in our government and personal lives. Yet we are in thrall to The Matrix, which merges the action film genre with questions traditionally relegated to Pax TV, though reset in a hip, surreal language. Like the turn of the nineteenth century when an aged Victorian culture tried to wrestle with its social, industrial, cultural upheaval through obsessions with spirituality, mesmerism, and phrenology, we seem to be trying to face the encroachment of technology in the fabric of our bodies, homes, architecture, relationships, and every other part of our world. Stories of anomalies, however quickly they flit by our screens, give us opportunities to reexamine and recast our belief systems, whether we chose to allow or outlaw an experience of wonder.

II Fuzzy Logic
Dictionary definitions of anomaly tend to cluster around asymmetries of inside/outside. Anomalous phenomena are those that have no accepted explanation within the confines of a specific body of scientific knowledge. Words like deviation and departure imply the migration of meaning from a central way station. Descriptions such as peculiar, irregular, abnormal suggest that which resists classification. All these definitions revolve around the magnetic center of the normal or common. In our skies we accept that there are the empirically certain visible objects: stars, planets, meteors. Then there is another class of invisible objects confirmed by science: quasars, pulsars, and black holes. The third category: UFOs, angels, or souls live outside the other privileged categories through an elaborate dismissal by institutions of science, the government, the military, etc. But it is precisely through the avenues of those methodologies that believers pass to prove their beliefs. Area 51, home to alien autopsies, reverse alien engineering, and perhaps the body of Kennedy’s real killer, can now be seen on Google’s new Maps service, which allows users to view and navigate high-resolution satellite images. Examinations of its complexes of buildings, mazelike runways, and numerous craters using this state-of-the-art technology give a certain kind of empirical credence to speculations about odd goings-on inside the ultrasecret compound. The technology, developed by the government for military and space science, is turned back on itself. This insidious frottage of inside and outside, of error and fact, of accepted and refused always characterize any discussion of the paranormal.

This is never more the case than when a central figure of our culture comes out in full support of any ideas associated with the paranormal. Near the end of his life, Thomas Edison was quoted in Scientific American as saying, “I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something” He saw séances, Ouija boards, voice trumpets as crude devices not taking advantage of current technological innovations. Essentially a technospiritualist Edison, particularly at the end of his life, was hailed as someone who in his ability to harness technology through invention had a unique relation with the powers of nature, even those supernatural. In the 1920s, sketches and plans were made to build a radio device to communicate with the dead, but nothing remains of that pursuit. Though not a spiritualist, Edison, known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, lived in a time when popular culture was in thrall to a motley crew of charismatic mediums. Well aware of the emerging industrial market’s dependence upon media spectacle, he was quick to take advantage of turn-of-the-century society’s fear of electricity. In the late1880s The Edison Electric Light Company’s publicity demonstrations of their new electrical feats occasionally ended with the trappings of a séance, complete with flashes of lighting and glowing skulls.
Electricity had all the hallmarks of an anomalous phenomenon: invisibility, instantaneousness, advanced technical knowledge, unfamiliarity, and a radical shift in lived experience. Suddenly our bodies had a completely different experience of time and space; we could see each other at night as if in full midday sun and just as quickly cast those rooms back into their familiar darkness. Before people had light in their homes and businesses, they attended electrical light spectacles, in which inventors would create elaborate dramatic, sometimes narrative, scenes to popularize and familiarize the public with the new electricity. These spectacles cast electricity in a larger-than-life spectacle, and people quickly leaped to associating electricity with the supernatural, whether God or the spirits of the dead. Half a century later, Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson heard some staticky voices amidst birdsong on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. When he played the tape back, he heard “Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?" It was the voice of his dead mother. Researchers around the world jumped on the phenomenon, and today electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is the subject of over 25,000 Google hits, novels by Philip Dick and William Gibson, and movies such as White Noise, a 2005 film with the tagline “The dead are trying to get a hold of you.” EVP and related phenomenon are victims of an uncertainty in navigating signal-to-noise ratio in communications technologies.
In 1948 Claude E. Shannon, so-called the father of information theory, put forth a way to measure information via a signal to noise ratio. “Signal” refers to the wanted information; “noise” is something unintentionally added to the signal: “These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy for facsimile), etc.” Both signal and noise are information. What determines which is which? Paranormal phenomenon that leak out of our ordinary technologies are condemned as anomalies, as noise. Perhaps our culture’s investigation of anomalies, in science fiction, in the news, and on the Internet, maps a desire to grapple with the uncertain ratio. The perseverance of anomalies gives us a chance to pierce the divide and recast our assumptions about information.

III Borderlands
At the turn of the century, Charles Hoy Fort, novelist, collector of data about the paranormal, and philosopher of anomalies, haunted the New York Public Library and the British Museum, cataloguing reports in science magazines and newspapers on phenomenon that were considered beyond the normal. In over 40,000 notes on index cards kept in old shoeboxes, Fort meticulously copied down sightings of everything from showers of frogs or fishes to levitation, from spontaneous fires to giant wheels of light in the oceans. His researches are the basis of four profound and profoundly hilarious books that condemn scientists who lure us into complex explanations of phenomena, but ignore, or in his words damn, a huge part of our world as unacceptable. His desire is to radically overthrow our dichotomies of belief and to reinstate a collective state of mind that champions a notion of in-between, of that which is neither this nor that, of the impossibility of fixing an unpredictable world into concrete form. Fort in the same breath makes a radical statement and then equally passionately states the opposite: "In hosts of minds, today, are impressions that the word 'eerie' means nothing except convenience to makers of crossword puzzles. There are gulfs of the unaccountable, but they are bridged by terminology." This method of observation, collection, and writing follows a process of interruption and discontinuity. Fort’s writing is performative and indirect. He keeps us in a state of indecision so as to keep our minds on the main point: that the questions are in definitions and not in the phenomena themselves. He writes: “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.” It hardly matters if there truly existed “black rains and black snows -- rains as black as a deluge of ink -- jet-black snowflakes,” which Fort describes in The Book of the Damned. What matters is that Fort sets ideas, facts, phenomena, and experiences into a network that is fluid, filled with holes, and never completed. He feverishly resists “absoluteness, or the illusion of it -- the universal quest.” Instead he places ideas from all disciplines from science to religion to quacks to journalists to the military in a tangled web that is impossible to unravel.
It is significant that most of Fort's data came from newspaper accounts. He takes from a technoindustrial media culture fragments of experience that he then sets free into hallucinatory fields of signification. While most of us might experience a newspaper account of a contemporary paranormal phenomena (last month's ebay sale of a grilled cheese sandwich with an apparition of the Virgin Mary upon it, for example) as a skeptical, even ridiculing, account of a marginalized group of excessive believers, Fort would simply have recorded the facts, loosened them from their rigid framework, and then piled them upon others. Never creating a taxonomy, Fort's new world is one of astonishment, of rupture, and of “wild talents” (also the title of one of his books on paranormal human experiences and abilities).
Wild talents occupy the terrain between mind and matter, including telekinesis, astral projection, telepathy, synesthesia. Wild talents surround us; we flock to the spectacle of them every day in movies, circuses, and videogames. Are they the realm of the Gods or virtual reality fantasies? As technosciences seem to threaten to remake our bodies in some perfect vision of healthful, youthful beauty, how strange is it to believe in ESP or mind control? It seems less B-movie nerd and more savvy futurist to inquire into the possibilities. Braincourse.com exhorts us to “Use Your Sensory Telepathic Abilities!” in a self-improvement course based on two hundred mental exercises to increase the abilities of your brain. In a page on the site devoted to connecting their course to Fort’s research into wild talents, they mention James Garfield, our twentieth president, who could write Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right. Fort would love that example: a U.S. president’s extraordinary mental powers is linked in an unlikely triumvirate: with the guru of the paranormal, the insistent lingo of pop psychology, and the highest office of the government. But Fort’s point was not to induce us to want to attain wild talents, but instead to have tools to decipher the absurd lengths that science goes to suppress psi phenomena. “The real, as it is called, or the objective, the external, the material, cannot be absolutely set apart from the subjective, or the imaginary: but there are quasi-attitudes of the imaginary.” IV Time Travel
New technologies have created for us a world in which thoughts, conversations, images, and things travel across space and time, leaving no physical evidence, no visible traces. Thought has become nomadic, and movement is culture’s primary state of being. No longer do objects with concrete forms encapsulate our ideas. Books, manuscripts, paintings, newspapers, records, even DVDs and cds, depend upon weight and volume. But the global communication network is about thoughts in motion, where ideas can travel from form to form freely. Of course the material forms of keyboards, screens, fiber optics, etc., continue to determine so much about our use of them (increasingly this haptic experience seems simply to be one of an aching immobility of our bodies as we hunch in front of our screens for ever-increasing hours). But the drive is toward incorporeality, as if our thoughts and dreams long to be free from clumsy matter.
Technological innovations stress the tiny, the invisible, the instant, in a transcendent language of messianic zeal. As consumers and producers, we eat these visions up and spit out ever-expanding technocultural dreams. Through wandering and mutation, processing information in new, unpredictable, in-flux relations, we become a digital flaneur. What is important is not a quantity or collection, fixed on shelves or cabinets for all time, weighty with value, but instead an experience of flying over the surface of a gargantuan field of data and in one moment in time culling a network of relations into an interactive form. So our iPods have one songlist today, another tomorrow. Our blogs record one cool thing we’ve found on the web, which may or may not have to do with the previous or following entry. Our TIVO is programmed to catch our favorite shows without us having to even know when or what channel they are on, so that we can be free of any relationship to a fixed set of data. Lists are ordered by trajectories of desire instead of pedantic chronologies or methodological specificities. Prophetically, Walter Benjamin stressed the instantaneous flash of photographs, saying “similarity flits past.” So our relation with culture today rests upon the glimpsing, speed, and restlessness.

NASA and ESA’s collaborative solar watchdog, SOHO, will give European and American solar physicists their first long-term uninterrupted view of the sun. They’re looking at things like solar flares, the sun’s magnetic field, and solar plasma. Onboard is the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument, a telescope designed to block the light coming from the solar disk in order to see the faint emissions of the sun’s corona. In some coronagraphs paranormal researchers have seen white pathways that are evidence of space vortices, the paths in which ghosts travel. A kind of modern-day spirit photograph, these images are equally haunting. Whether we decipher alien spaceships, ghosts, hyperdimensional beams, or other anomalies (with names like Orca or The Tower), these tiny balls look a lot like the ghost orbs seen in millions of cemetery ghost images all over the web. Those orbs may be the noise of film photography: dust on the lens, negative, or print. Or they may be energy emissions of dead spirits. These solar coronagraph anomalies might be aliens or ghosts, but they equally might be part of the host of technical particulars inherent in that technology (The SOHO website even needs to add a disclaimer to their images: “The LASCO cameras have recorded many ‘streaks’ across the CCDs of varying brightness, length and character. These are intepreted to be dust particle(s) or other debris passing in front of the telescope during an exposure.”)
These images are continuously recorded and most are available from the SOHO LASCO website. They are images of fleeting phenomenon, caught as if out of the periphery of the coronagraphic camera’s eye. When we view them on the Internet, glowing on our laptop screens, on web pages filled with multiple examples, each single frame is incessantly graphed, zoomed, parsed, and dissected, as well as accompanied by elaborate pedantic technical analysis. The overload of data thrown ruthlessly by the obsessions of these paranormal researchers overwhelms us, and our eyes flit and hands twitch as they scroll hastily down the page. Just like the convulsive jumps of the saccadic movements, we are hardwired, and now softwared, for speed. In an instant our vision is half absorbed data and half imagined in-betweens. In that twinkling of an eye anything can become noise or unnoticed, unwanted information. All the noise, the stuff we wish to supress, is discarded, squeezed out in favor of hearty bits of dreary information that secure us in place

V Wonder
Philip Fisher, in Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, articulates an aesthetics of wonder as a subset of an aesthetics of rare experiences. Stressing the momentary, Fisher claims that we have paid far more attention to shock, the sudden, and surprise, all of which may be more accurately set within an aesthetics of fear. But his aesthetics of wonder attends to delight, pleasure, and the impossible. This experience seems to have some relation to technology; newness or the first emergence of a new technology gives rise to wonder. “An aesthetics of wonder has to do with a border between sensation and thought, between aesthetics and science.” This borderline is always becoming.
Based on making sense rather than on knowing, on making rather than on achieving or owning, an aesthetics of wonder is particularly relevant in our emerging computerized world. To understand wonder within the context of technology, we need to think about what is ordinary, what technology has made us very comfortable with, and then from there glimpse the instant of wonder in the new, the rare, and the extraordinary. If the ordinary is what we don’t notice, then technologies of apparitionlike projections, artifacts in digital pictures, downloadable music, etc., are simply part of the fabric of our everyday and not something that startles us into noticing it as unusual in any way. The unexpected as giving rise to wonder pierces this murky film of the ordinary, and in technology that usually happens through the advent of radically new technologies (Dolly the cloned sheep was our media wonder-baby for months) or a new use of old technologies (Google’s new map function showing images of streets and shops nearby is simply a linking of search-engine technology to databases of images, but it is a startling experience of our everyday lives in the deterritorialized matrix of the web).

In 1976 the Viking Orbiter, passing over Mars to scout for landing sites, photographed a rock formation resembling an enormous humanoid face staring up at the astronauts. Labeled the ”face on Mars,” scientists quickly dismissed any notion that it was a form built by aliens, but they did include the mention of its human resemblance: “The huge rock formation in the center, which resembles a human head, is formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth. The feature is 1.5 kilometers (one mile) across.” Now this face has become a national celebrity. If it were to google itself, it would find 1,170 images, 57,200 websites, and most amazingly 1,640 products to purchase. In 1976 when NASA was flying around Mars surveying its surface, we had a rich history of scientific and science fiction narratives of Mars, such as Giovanni Schiaparelli and subsequently Percival Lowel’s late-nineteenth-century observations of a complex system of canals on Mars or Orson Wells’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, set on Mars. But we also had had an entire decade of much-publicized NASA attempts to land on the Moon, indoctrinating us into a new language of space exploration. The face on Mars, an unlikely human echo staring up at us, was glimpsed in the NASA photographs immediately. We anticipated all kinds of strange aliens or futuristic spacecrafts, but what we found was a plain old human face, something cold war America least expected.
Subsequent flybys that produced more high-tech, high-res images have equipped us with lots more data about the site. The new images laboriously analyze, decode, and disprove. But if wonder is somehow connected to the birth in an instant of a new knowing set within a familiar terrain, then the original picture continues to haunt us. What is the connection between wonder and the visual? Can there be a haptic experience of wonder? Certainly the Face on Mars image is solely visual. We can’t even imagine ourselves in that place, as we could imagine ourselves looking at an apparition on a wall. The scale, temperature, light, cycle of day and night, weather, and landscape of Mars is, even after the onslaught of Mars Rover panoramas last year, outside our ken. But that image somehow puts Mars back inside our territory. It is this relation of the extraordinary unable to be comfortably reconciled with the ordinary that makes the image of the Face on Mars persist as an experience of wonder. Its unintelligible landscape and intelligible form, its surprising emergence and exhaustive dismissal are all parts of a stripmall wonder, which careens from anomaly to archeology and from cold data to inscrutability.

VI Wow
In 1960 Dr. Frank Drake became the first person to systematically listen for alien communication in a project called Ozma, which was named after a Frank Baum book in the Oz series. Using the twenty-five-meter dish of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, Dr. Drake listened to two stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, April to July 1960. Though unsuccessful, his subsequent equation N=RxfpxnexflxfixfcxL launched a culture, market, and scientifically tangible search for aliens. Drake’s innovation was to to shift the focus from speculations on galactic requirements for life to mathematical formulas.

"I came across the strangest signal I had ever seen, and I immediately scribbled 'Wow!' next to it," explained Jerry Ehman, scientist for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project at the Big Ear Radio Observatory at Ohio State in 1977. The signal fit the bill of requirements for an anomalous, non-Earth originating source: it had 50,000 times more energy than the incoming signals considered a hit today, and the frequency of the signal was near the 1420 MHz hydrogen line, where all radio transmissions are prohibited on and off the earth by international agreement. To this day Ehman and others have no idea what the signal might mean or from where it originated. Is it some kind of cosmic burp, an astronomical phenomena not yet discovered? Or is it an alien communication randomly received and untranslatable? What is now called the Wow Locale now has antennae all over the world pointed at it, while scientists continue to patiently listen for further signals. In 1996 SETI launched Project Argus, which “will ultimately involve 5,000 small radiotelescopes worldwide, built, maintained, and operated by private individuals (primarily radio amateurs and microwave experimenters), coordinated so as to miss no likely candidate signals, and providing independent verification of any interesting signals detected.”
The Wow signal serves as a benchmark for the expectations of all the equipment involved: if the technology is good enough to receive the same emission as the Wow signal, then they’re in. Five thousand of these backyard satellite dishes, which can each cost as little as a few hundred dollars, will let SETI listen in all directions at once to a distance of several hundred light years. Pioneers in distributed computing, the SETI Institute has revolutionized our experience of ET. No longer is it in the realm of the wackos or film directors. Now we can crunch numbers on our home computers or set up a little backyard radio astronomy setup, and presto, we’re just one of thousands of people working together to attain a previously unreachable, and certainly unthinkable, goal.
Of all the paranormal phenomena, UFOs come straight from the world of technocultural invention. Sightings of alien crafts have always mimicked new technologies of the times. Drake couldn’t have searched for alien calls in the early sixties if radio astronomy hadn’t developed to the stage that it was possible. Jeffrey Sconce’s groundbreaking book, Haunted Media, has been enthusiastically received for its tracing of the phenomena of Spiritualism and other paranormal phenomena to concurrent developments in technology. The direct relation between extensions of our bodies, senses, and physical world, whether deep within or far away, is always a technological imaginary fraught with the contemporary dragons. The moment of the first telegrams in our country birthed the Spiritualist movement, in the form of rappings on the wall of the Fox sister’s home in New York state. The raps sound suspiciously like the telegraph machines, and the Spiritualists clamored to get on board the hurtling train of society’s connection of new technologies to the supernatural.
It is not only the new inventions that birth these outsider figures, but also an accompanying rush of data. From the established halls of science to marginal weirdos, a plethora of information has clustered around the magnetic pull of other worlds and other beings. A roster of sixties science fiction films: The Three Stooges In Orbit, Invasion Of The Star Creatures, Village of the Damned, Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women, and even Santa Claus Conquers The Martians reads like a list of fortean phenomena. In 1965 Jacques Vallee, a French astronomer-turned-computer-scientist, published Anatomy of a Phenomenon, discussing the use of computers to analyze and categorize UFO data. Today you can go online to the National UFO Reporting Center to find sightings of UFOs by your neighbors down the street. In my mining of nearby occurrences I found that a couple of months ago, just in the next neighborhood over, someone stepped out of the supermarket to see a “Green glowing disk changing to white light, streaking silently over the city of Boston, visible for less than 1 sec.” These interfaces all satisfy a desire to experience the otherworldly in our suburbias, to face the fears and utopias of unearthly imaginings.
To really get the UFO phenomena, you need to look at all these interfaces. If we take the stand that everything in the world is data and everything can be connected, then hokey B-movie images, JFK’s Moon speech, Drake’s equation, the Airforce’s Project Bluebook, and the Weekly World News all operate on a level playing field. The Internet is a popular culture-clearing center where all these ideas play hooky from the schools of reason. As a hive of individual efforts where any and all ideas can butt up against each other, our networked culture increasingly allows for bleeding from one narrowly defined discipline to another, all while we are looking elsewhere. A phenomenon like the Marion apparition in Chicago mentioned at the beginning of this essay might be something that you could actually visit, but the virtual visitation is what has insidiously become the real experience. Not so much a viral emanation from an original point as a creeping organic branching march connecting this to that, the internet allows everyone to consume a piece of the information pie.
Finally, the fascinating thing about the emergence of googling as a verb and international pastime is a techonology that grows from user experience rather than a centralized categorication committee. At the same time that we feel like we can google for practically anything we need to know, we also easily adapt to the knowledge that no site is more or less complete. Completeness, hierarchy, and value are not the point. Our networked nations are filled with holes, with gaps in data, that seem less important than the data visualizations that connect pieces to ideas. Like a ghost’s tapping sounds, or eerie chilled breezes, or texts manifest upon physical form (think of the words “Help Me” appearing on Linda Blair’s body in The Exorcist), the signal is at once nothing and overfull. Its is part and parcel of our everyday, while challenging us to make sense of what is accepted and what is dismissed. It haunts us, beckons with immateriality, and asks us to live with flux.