Nematodes

"If all matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The locations of towns would be decipherable since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites." 

Nathaniel Cobb, ‘Nematodes & their Relationships’, Yearbook of the US Department of Agriculture, 1914.

Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

Here’s a drink you can make to best enjoy Ancestor, which was released today in trade paperback by Image Comics. Take one Philip K. Dick and one Alejandro Jodorowsky (circa The Holy Mountain) and throw them in a cocktail glass with two blackberries and a splash of agave nectar. Muddle. Add two shots of blanco tequila, two drops of Dimethyltryptamine or Lysergic Acid, and give it a dash of Black Mirror. Mix, shake, and serve. Now take your drink to a dark corner of your room, far from your computer or any wi-fi enabled devices. Read and drink slowly.  Short as it is, Ancestor is a trip for the mind that’s worth your time.

Ancestor is a loaded slice of psychedelic philosophy, written by Matt Sheean and pictorialized by Malachi Ward. Set in a non-specified time in a non-specified corner of the United States, it’s the story of a well-meaning lunatic genius who upgrades a social media platform / body enhancement service into a hybrid, post-human being that changes the course of entire human race. Its narrative swerves are buttressed by knods to the philosophical anxieties that we, as a society of “enhanced” interconnected technologies, are slowly coming to know.

Surrender your autonomy to the service
and make her the perfect cocktail!

The plot’s lunatic genius, Patrick Whiteside, is an outwardly kind, curly haired tech billionaire who's tendency to turn conversations into one-sided motivational pep talks betrays his maniacal desire to control and reform everyone he comes across. Whiteside was a co-developer of “the service.” The service is what personal computing will be like once we're able to inject the internet into our blood streams and tether it directly to our mental and bodily functions. It’s more or less augmented consciousness, an artificially intelligent Siri for your mind, that goes with you everywhere. The service can float social media and web content in your face on levitating yellow jelly screens, instantly identifying friends and strangers and objects. It can also talk you down from a panic attack if you’re going nuts. When talking doesn’t work, the service can, at your behest, administer a calculated dose of whatever medication you need to to get on the wagon again, then monitor your vital signs until you’re copacetic. On good nights, it can take control of your body (after you grant it permission to access your motor skills), which it can then use to make a perfectly mixed cocktail of your choice for whatever platinum blonde art femme you're hitting on. The service is the ultimate integrated web experience.

Whiteside talks it out

Like us and our hyper-connected devices, people in the world of Ancestor can become so inured to the service that they experience varying degrees of anxiety when disconnected from it. While the service enables superhuman abilities, it's also a nuisance to immediate experience. Whether you want it or not, the service will tell you everything it thinks you need to know.

Ancestor’s main character, Peter, is not sure how he feels about this intense connectivity. Though he relies on the service to get a grip on his anxiety disorder, he’s often a victim of the incessant suggestions of it’s yellow jelly screens. As troubled as he is by all this, it’s apparent that he is a brilliant and pensive man who is simply trying to life his live free of anxiety, and sees the service as a tool to that end. Peter is invited to an impromptu party hosted by Whiteside in his billionaire mansion in the middle of nowhere. There, he’s made to participate in the beta-testing of Whiteside’s magnificent new invention, his Service 2.0. Peter, Whiteside, and the rest of the world are then forcefully thrust into unknown territory, as Whiteside loses control of his new product. From there on out, things get incredibly strange and wonderful.

Whiteside is like a cross between Goethe's Faust and Ozymandias from Watchmen, placed in the body of a creepy child-therapist or hypnotist. In him we see the expression of a utopian ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley. This ethos, “California Ideology,” preaches that a blend of technological innovation and bold individual action will eventually solve all of humanity's problems. But as the story progresses, Peter grows to resist Whiteside's manipulations and psychological games, and resents the implication that he needs either a guru or a some post-human bio-integrated bloatware to give him peace of mind. By the end of their "relationship," it's Peter, not Whiteside or the human race, who finds something resembling inner peace.

We all know by now the mythology of the tech boom. Scientists and ex-hippies, with the help of massive private and public investment, invented the personal computer, the internet, the iPhone, the Google. The digital backbone of information technology was highly influenced by a bourgeois subset of the 1960’s counter culture. This counter culture failed to liberate human consciousness from its societal captors. Having failed, those with the knowledge and the inclination began to look towards technology and capitalism as humanity’s only hope. A large part of the advertising for contemporary technology and software displays a remnant of that failed hope for technological liberation and omnipotence, the hope that “existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals [or businesses] and their software.”

In response to the Silicon Valley messiahs preaching salvation, peace, and money through tech-gnosis, Ancestor offers an almost satirical counter narrative. It expresses a healthy distrust towards anyone who claims to have all the answers, be they human or otherwise. Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean’s story is an expression of the desire to not be told who you are or what you need to do with your life. It also asks whether or not we should sacrifice genuine unmediated experiences (and the commensurate euphoria and excitement that comes of sometimes not-knowing) for the sake of complete control and self-determination.

If Ancestor has one failing it’s that it’s way too short. While readers will get a conclusion that satisfies the arc, there’s 15 billion years worth of plot missing that I wish they had gotten into. By the end, I found myself wanting to hear more about the how and why of it, to see more of Matt and Malachai’s bizarre alternate reality. It’s such a tease. Maybe the comic book gods will see fit to provide mankind with a spin-off? It’s pretty great for what it is though - a self contained thought experiment with poetic conceits and beautiful art.

I would recommend also checking out this short comic by Ancestor's creators regarding "the process" of making Ancestor a reality.

Object Anxiety / Art by Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker's first name is Rune, and he is from Denmark. He has a tumblr and I suggest you pay for the honor of hanging something of his in your domicile or corporate office.

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker's drawings are things of manic surrealistic beauty. They are little battles waged eagerly between the persons depicted and the Armageddon around them, a world of alternating softness and certainty. Objects fall in clouds, shoot out in confetti spurts, in bomb blasts, swallowing, deforming, growing in blobs and clusters like tumors.

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Google is trying harder than anyone else to make machine brains work

Backchannel has a fairly in-depth write up about Google’s scramble to hire or train programmers with experience in “machine learning” (aka artificial intelligence and neural networks). It’s betting hard on the technology’s ability to mine and interpret data in a way that’s not just novel, but also useful to it’s flagship Search app and more.

Deepmind, a British technology start-up that was bought by Google in 2014, and whose motto is “Solve intelligence,” was an early move for them. The company caught Google’s attention after they published an article detailing how one of their machine babies learned to play seven different Atari games well enough to pose a threat to human video game dominance. DeepMind also created AlphaGo, a machine learning program that whooped a “9 dan rank” human Go player in 2015. Additionally, the company is partly responsible for the DeepDream phenomenon of last summer. It was a neural network system that was able to take user-fed images and figure out terrifying ways to fuse them with puppies and slugs.

Google Brain / DeepMind HQ

Per the Backchannel article, Google has been “obsessed” with machine learning this year. Among their efforts so far: Pilfering any and all students of artificial intelligence guru Pedro Domingos of the University of Washington; allowing artificial intelligence engineers out of the mysterious Google X R&D basement and into daylight; posting flyers in the cafeteria bulletin boards of technical colleges across the country and the world: “Do you want to be a machine learning ninja????!” Google also made a powerful neural network building tool, TensorFlow, available to the public in November 2015, ostensibly to help build a generation of amateur programmers already familiar with machine learning, to be hired en-masse once they have degrees.

Machine learning is a new way of programming. From my limited understanding, it seems to be about creating semi-intelligent data golems to do your bidding, often to superhuman effect. Not only can a neural network learn and in a way understand what a shiba inu looks like (and find pictures of it for all your doge memes), it can use that understanding to then go through a pile of, say, a million pictures of dogs and doges of different breeds and then delineate between each different breed. “If it learns one breed,” reads the article, “it can use the same technique to identify the other 9999 using the same technique.”

Birth of a new God???

Machine learning can also, to a limited extent, understand language, which Google has put to use with its SmartReply feature. Per the article: “Traditional AI methods of language understanding depended on embedding rules of language into a system, but in [SmartReply], as with all modern machine learning, the system was fed enough data to learn on its own, just as a child would.”

Personally I like typing my replies and I think I always will, and, from what I read, SmartReply initially had the tendency to suggest “I love you” as a reponse whenever it sensed tension in the conversation. But other machine learning could be important, and, as this article will explain, Google is desperate to be at the forefront.

Nameless, or, "Grant Morrison Just Wants to Watch Them Bleed"

What we all love about Grant Morrison is how resolved he is to make the traditionaly trashy or silly into something profound. Nothing new. Everyone wants to, and only a few are successful, and only one does it, effectively, with the calculated use of gigantic weaponized sperm cells.

Thus far, Nameless isn't that. From the three issues I've read there's not yet any attempt at philosophizing the esoteric references to current events, modernist architects, and ancient religions he slaps on every other page. Yeah, it's all there, that encyclopedic emesis Morrison loves to spew at you, and it's not unenticing to look into every bit of triviality, but it's so obviously not what's on display here. It's a vehicle for what ultimately feels like a gory sci-fi body-horror B-movie with culture. In short, it's pretty fun.

I honestly don't think Grant knows anymore.

The world, unlike a lot of Grant Morrison's settings, isn't a future filled with the noise of abruptly changing information structures, and no one is falling into their own mindhole and discovering glowing discs of knowledge that forever alters their world view. It may as well be set in the present, albeit a present where, for reasons not yet explained, lizard people and naga stalk the land and suburbs, making families happily massacre themselves, and hunting after our square jawed and stubbled protagonist, named Nameless (because names have power, he says) after he nabs a mystical key on behalf of his client.

Brave and handsome

Nameless is an occultist for hire. He's like a John Constantine in need of a long relaxing bath and some benzedrine. When we meet him he's recalling December, a "cunt of a month", when things started to get markedly Lovecraftian. None of Constantine's reflectiveness here; No philosophy. He needs money so he's doing this thing and now there's fish people trying to rip out his throat, then there's a fucking lady in a veil with a bulbous fleshy parasite on her face, and he knows her pretty well and he's so over her shit already, and it feels like just another fucked up day in his happy life. Nameless, through all three issues, retains this air of haggard wisdom, always knowing at least a bit about what's happeing, though not enough to save his or his company's asses.

The people who want the key, and who eventually get the key after some intense effort on the part of Nameless, turns out to be a secretive and privately funded corporation run by a billionaire named Darius. Darius, appearing only mildly Asian and generally smiling, wants to save the planet from a hulking fuck of a space boulder named Xibalba, after the Mayan underworld. He's at once an altruist and a capitalist and someone who uses his money to advance human knowledge. A mildly asian Elon Musk, in other words. Darius even floats around remotely from a base located on the dark side of the moon using a video-conferencing hele-drone, as we all know Elon Musk would love to do.

Xibalba's not just an asteroid. This thing is marked on a long flat side with a rune the size of a mountain. It's apparent that the asteroid does not simply intend to smash into the Earth like any amateur space rock: It has a payload, and Darius employs Nameless to find out exactly what the world is getting into, and how to stop it.

That's issue one. It's not much, to be honest. Issue two and three, however, is when the series begins hitting it's stride. Nameless and a team composed by Darius go to space to meet Xibalba headon and deploy drones with sensory equipment to explore what turns out to be an asteroid full of alien structures, "brutalist" in design and obviously not meant for children. Shit goes down, eyeballs with giant talons attack, and Grant Morrison smashes and reassembles the narrative in that special, and in this instance creepy, Grant Morrison way.

In a nutshell

Sometimes the art, done by Chris Burnham, feels like Quitely. Not to knock the artist, he's fantastic. There are some clever panel sequences, and the panels depicting the journey of the drones through that brutal alien architecture are done with a real sense for how massive and lonely celestial objects really must be. Xibalba seems not to be of exclusively extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, but a mixture of both, in a way that implies that maybe the two were one and the same all along (shades of The Invisibles here). Chris Burnham gets both across, with covers and splash panels alluding to creatures that reside in lonely H.R. Geiger space fortresses, but look like amorphous demons made of shapeshifting muscle tissue, and that do things to human bodies straight out of medieval Hell.

Whether the book will reach for some big-deal psychological or philosophical conclusion has yet to be seen, but I have a feeling Grant Morrison just wants to rip people apart and destroy civilization for a bit. Looks like Morrison's taking all his occult and science fiction training, and using it to make an irreverent, gory, AND clever monster movie. In Nameless #3 we get a glimpse of Xibalba floating on the horizon, it's ominous rune staring down at us all, and we just know it's getting ready to make life interesting in painful and horrifying ways. Honestly, can't wait.

Breaking News: The Apocalypse is Irrelevant

No one likes a good apocalypse as much as me. that's what I thought, anyway, until I found out someone wrote an entire thesis on post-apocalyptic fiction. Her article, up at the much beloved io9 blog, is a pretty good summary of what and why apocalyptic literature means so much even when we have no idea how or why the world ended in the first place.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

The bit about disaster porn is debatable, at least in the all powerful realm of the feature film, where the image, enhanced by calorie-induced popcorn euphoria, reigns supreme. The chance to watch every familiar feature of our modern world be destroyed is, I think one of the major drawing points for some of the most popular Armageddon stories, from Dawn of the Dead to 2012. But the also arguably recent tendency for global calamities to not be explained is fascinating and something I also noticed.

A video of Ms. Chanda Phelan presenting her thesis can be found at Vimeo here, and more random thought by her can be found at her blog.

Totally Wreck

"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?" *

Some nights, soaked in sadness and drunk with the lack of sleep which often precludes such revelations and reveries, I can sometimes stumble upon visions by prophets which crisply illuminates the edges of our bitter contemporary world. Thing is, these prophets are composed more of fictional memories and movie clips than anything "real". Luckily, there's artists such as those in the Austin, TX collective Totally Wreck.

I first came across this group via their YouTube channel, which features a collection of blurry and iridescent videos ranging from droney color studies of over saturated VHS tape to fabulously disorienting variety shows. Seemingly to do more with the past than the future, the video makes a strange, blissfully comfortable connection between the sedated psychedelic retro-futurism of the 1970's and the franticly connected, overstimulated present. No, this isn't new. Like so many others they seem to spring from the glittering entrails of the now mythical Rhode Island art scene. If nothing else, though, it provides yet another node in that seemingly endless chain of associations, and further proof that the mode is not yet dead.


The typically inflated exihibition blurb for the groups Berlin show, Totally Berlin, offers some thoughts and a quote by collective member Ciscneros:

"By pushing the limits of neon green screens and DIY costumes the group forces the everyday into a tense hyper-reality through their exploratory imaginations, which transcend time and space. Their zeal for hyper-infinities is manifested in futuristic narratives that portray fantastical characters striving to create alternate identities in the "digital age". Those characters are embodied by the collective’s overlapping realities. The work blurs the line between occult sub-culture and futuristic predictions. It draws upon references and inferred associations to archaic societies melded with technology to form a hybrid understanding of a world to come."

"Johnny Cisneros states: 'I believe in the unadulterated possibilities of the future and the development of a decisively post-20th century aesthetic and values. The belief in its ability to broaden man’s horizon of possibility of thought, to toss the notions implausibility and the laws of physics aside in an effort to break through barriers of mental, physical and spiritual human possibilities.'”

Though this just makes me think of a video I saw wherein MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden stutteringly pronounces the beginning a new psychedelic generation of love and colors everything is colors everything is beautiful -- right of course, whatever -- it mimics the symptoms of most other art world advertisements: good points stated in atrocious language. My favorite pictures and videos from this group embody a playful contemporary mysticism. Like PaperRad or Ryan Trecartin they revel in hysterical (both manic and hilarious) juxtaposition, donning post apocalyptic vestments composed of accumulated childhood toy bin trash


or portray more silent understated lapses into folksy homages to hex signs and visual poetry -- or baphometic rituals as embodied in this article's opening image.

Like other the technicolor prophets it's hard to tell whether these works foretell doom or paradise. The collection entitled "Economic Crisis 20012" perhaps puts it in proper perspective. Baffled in a world where the president of the United States opens for Lady Gaga, massive systems of finance and trade which barely anyone can fully understand casts its shadows over middle class comfort, and Wikipedia articles on Sonic the Hedgehog and Abu Graib are of comparable length, there is perhaps only one conclusion to draw.


Totally Wreck Blog