Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

More on Silver Ladder: the ARG community takes hold

Silver Ladder is more complex than it seems.  It's not just a mysterious website, but an alternate reality game (ARG), or a piece of chaotic fiction, or perhaps performance art.  It features characters and organizations struggling and collaborating across a dreamlike landscape of websites, conversations, physical buildings, and persons living or dead.  http://www.silverladder.com/ is the starting point (read yesterday's post for a description).  But, as Unfiction forum readers discovered, the story is based in many venues, including MySpace, YouTube, instant message, phone, and also the Silver Ladder site.

Let's assemble a narrative, starting with summer of this year.  The Silver Ladder domain has been the home to an art studio, or an artist's site, run by Shane Watson, as far back as 1999.   In June 2007 the main page (copied in archive.org) carried a paragraph informing the world that the site was down, and had nothing to do with the Halo 3 ARG.   In July the Silver Ladder site changed drastically.  Instead of being a digital artist's portfolio and set of personal pages, it became artwork without identification.  The reason? AboutUs, a wiki-based directory, carries a description of Silver Ladder with this obituary note:

Silver Ladder is a site formerly run by Shane Watson, who was confirmed dead at 11:11 PM on June 11, 2007 from injuries sustained from a car accident in Tucson, Arizona. Mr. Watson was the only person injured in the accident, as it was a one-car accident, and he did not have a passenger in his vehicle. Following the passing of Mr. Watson, control of the site was handed over to Ms. Athena Snows of Seattle, WA. The site has since been run as a form of interactive art exhibit in tribute to the late Mr. Watson.

Shane Watson: we'll return to that name below.  Same for 11:11.

In September, the story expanded.  A mysterious YouTube video appeared on the 20th, entitled "The Two of Spades Speaks," and introducing several themes: playing cards, rabbit hole (classic ARG note), November 11th, and the Silver Ladder URL.  The title's syntax also implies the idea of playing cards as characters.

On the following day a second YouTube video appeared, summoning collaborative help in finding out "the information."  The speaker described a set of cards, implicitly structuring the search project, of which "only the Deuces are available".  More cards are to appear, but only with increasing difficulty.  The file's tags call out to ARGs, while touching on some themes from the Silver Ladder site:

rabbit   hole   11:11   11/11  novermber  11  silverladder  cryptic  ufo  bizarre  transmission  broadcast  EVP  voices  recording

 

On the same day, an Unfiction forum thread opened up, asking for help in figuring out what the Silver Ladder site was about.  One poster quickly whipped up this fine site map/list.  Another created an even more elaborate graphic.

From this point on, I am largely drawing on that forum's work, occasionally adding insights of my own.  Unfiction forum posters also elicited content by their actions.

A series of characters appeared via individual MySpace pages.  For example, the two of clubs is a 27-year-old single male from Arizona... who is concerned about an upcoming Ice Age.  Likewise there are the two of diamonds, the two of spades, and the two of hearts.  Athena Snows - the woman named in AboutUs' obit - has a space with videos and suggestive text.  Interesting name, "Athena Snows": an anagram for "Shane Watson."

A crisis struck around September 24th-25th, as a new character appeared and attacked: The Korporation.  The Silver Ladder main page was apparently hacked by the Korporation. Athena Snow's MySpace was hacked, too, and some inserted content referenced Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  One Unforum poster received a message from Two of Spades, freaking out, worried about getting in touch with Athena, and insisting "if anybody asks you tell them that the plan for 11/11 is still on." 

The Silver Ladder and Athena MySpace pages recovered by the 25th.  Yet on the 26th a YouTube video celebrated the Korporation's takeover of a Seattle space, presumably the physical location of Silver Ladder Studios.

Also on the 26th Athena Snows appeared in an IRC chat (pdf) conducted by Unforum posters, and offered a series of clues: an object was to be found "in a fairway," aces are characters, and the entire game should last about one year (one card per week).

On September 27th, Athena put up this understated video on youTube, and fell silent on MySpace.  No reason given.

Yesterday one of the deuces published a YouTube video, called "Tribute to the Core," which includes images of some active Unforum posters.

What next?  A long month lies between today and November 11th.  If Athena's suggestion about weeks and cards is true, perhaps several cards, characters should appear.

There are many, many openings and mysteries here.  To pick a few:

• What does the Radiohead link mean?  In 2004 Shane Watson posted about his admiration for OK Computer to a board.  Radiohead references keep cropping up (Infocult reader Cayden caught one).
• Other pop music angles, like the odd Paul is Dead reference.
• How do the anti-corporate politics connect with the other political threads about a New World Order?
• How does MySpace serve as an ARG or chaotic fiction platform?  Should I start mine up?

(image from Athena Snows' MySpace)

Bringing the dead back to life with a dash of suspended animation

A new medical treatment "brings patients back from the dead."  It sounds a lot like science fiction's beloved suspended animation.  When a person is stricken by heart attack or other killing injury, a saline mix is injected into their body, Next,

[c]ooling pads are then wrapped around a patient. The body temperature is normally 98 degrees, but cooling brings it down to 92 degrees. Doctors keep it there for about 24 hours. This process is called intentional hypothermia.

(thanks, Lambert Heller!)

Meet-me: the anti-fearsome virtual world launches

Press coverage of Japan's Meet-me is largely based on avoiding the Second Life shadow.  CNN, for example, casts the new world as:

Orderly, pornography-free and safe for children...
The operation and design of "meet-me" will be strictly controlled by Transcosmos, ensuring law and order and far more policing and filtering to ban profanity than in "Second Life," which only recently outlawed gambling and is grappling with violations.
"Japanese aren't going to take to the culture of 'Second Life,"' Hamaoka said. "It's the kind of place where you can get shot in the back as soon as you log on."

Second Life might be too libertarian.  And look where it comes from!

the free-spirited anything-goes of "Second Life," created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab.

Reading further down in the article, it's nice to see CNN use a number below one million in describing SL users.

(thanks to Ladi)

Silver Ladder, yet another weird site from September

A third new, mysterious site (as per yesterday's post) is Silver Ladder.  It's far larger and more complex than the other two we've explored this weekend.

It's hard to tell exactly what Silver Ladder is at first, but after an initial exploration it looks like net art.  Silver Ladder's web site consists of a series of sparse HTML pages, very late 90s in style, each with simple, powerful graphics and often some short text.  Many of these pages feature an embedded sound file, sometimes for ambience (these footsteps for this corridor), or for complementary content (reading over this text, a Beatles track over a gun image).  There are a few embedded videos.  Many pages have hit counters, with numbers in the hundreds or low thousands.

A series of short hyperlink chains constitute the site's hypertext structure.  Starting from a single page, we can spot a handful of links, usually targets within a single image (again, very 1990s).  There are some organizing nodes, like a five-way branching menu disguised as a terrestrial equinox chart, or this travel narrative, or a channel guide.

The content is difficult to synthesize.  Taken in parts, we can find a series of themes: climate change, Alice in Wonderland (classic ARG note), the Cold War, cars and car commercials, electronic voice phenomena, and numbers radio.  The title appears on a page describing a new technology, Silver Ladder (TM),

an artificially-engineered transgenic tissue sculpture. It is created using a variety of animal and vegetable DNA strands, which is then mapped onto a host chromosome palette. It is considered to be one of a handful of new species created from the basic building material now available to us through recent breakthroughs in modern science.

The overall effect is hard to describe.  There's a distancing effect, as the opacity of images and text refuse our ability to get closer to the material over time.  There is also a sense of political outrage or anxiety, with images of authoritarianism, waste, and CIA fear.  Moreover the site is disturbing, even creepy.  As one navigates page after page, the accumulation of horrific images and uncanny content (skulls, Raudive sounds, dead pigs) suggests something dark, morbid, or threatening.

Unfiction has been all over it, and their discussion leads in two very different, but probably linked directions.  Via Myspace we see an alternate reality game (ARG) ramping up.  We also learn that this could be a tribute site to Shane Watson, who seems to be dead.  More on this in the next post.

Details aside, it's worth relishing the weird power of the first page. No context, no menu, just a bizarre screen, with difficult to hear sound.  It reminds me of watching tv in the days before cable, late at night, stumbling across bizarre programs, sliced up by commercials and edits, like blasts from an alternate history.

(via ARG Netcast)

itscoming: another mystery site

A second mysterious, new website (from yesterday's post) is itscoming.

The site begins with a lovely, ominous landscape, and acts like a point-and-click adventure. The implicit narrative, the bits of swag (IM icon, desktop), the amount of media development suggest a movie campaign.  One object on the page is a watch, informing us that the countdown stands at 16 days.

When you find and read the journal, you'll notice it updates every few days, and follows our calendar.  Next entry should be early next week.

Unfiction is thinking about Itscoming, and came up with this banner ad, not to mention this page with embedded video (at ConstructionEquipment.com!).  Feels like a horror movie, but the machinery angle is odd.

(via ARGNetcast)

Intergalactic energy bust remains mysterious

Six years ago, astronomers detected a brief, very high energy burst from outside of our galaxy.   It remains unexplained.

What could have caused this?  Two theories:

One idea is that it may be part of the energy released when a pair of superdense neutron stars collide and merge. Such an event is thought by some scientists to be the cause of one type of gamma-ray burst, but the only radio emission seen so far from these has been from the long-lived "afterglow" that follows the original burst.

Another, more exotic, candidate is a burst of energy from an evaporating black hole. Black holes, concentrations of mass so dense that not even light can escape their powerful gravity, can lose mass and energy through a process proposed by famed British physicist Stephen Hawking. The newly-discovered radio burst, the researchers said, might be the "last gasp" of a black hole as it finally evaporates completely.

A practice firing from the invasion armada's main weaponry is, of course, another, more obvious explanation.

(via Slashdot)

Red Monday, mysterious count-down site

Several websites present themselves as mysterious content nodes this weekend.  They could be alternate reality games (ARGs), viral marketing, art projects, or something... other.

Here's the first one. Red Monday presents a countdown.  They invite email, which might lead to something else. This could be religiously-themed, as the main site's password is Biblical (check the source code). 

Mobilepodcast reports an encounter with a mystery man, who gave them an envelope pointing to the site.

Nothing by email so far.

(via SFFAudio)

Molecular rights management: new intellectual property meme

Molecular rights management is a meme experiment launched by Jamais Cascio.  It's IP protection for nanotechnology.  One imagines nanobots that can't be copied, or moved from a certain location, or applied to a different medium.

MRM is likely to emerge for two primary reasons: the continued need for intellectual property controls, so as to prevent a wave "napster fabbing;" and the need for security to prevent the production of controlled goods ("assault rifles," figuratively or literally).

A glimpse from the future as it approaches.  Or looking forward in classic extrapolation, seeing two trends (DRM and nano) rise and intersect.

Brain-eating amoebas attack, driven by climate change

Incidents of death by brain-devouring amoebas are on the rise in the United States.  Naegleria fowleri prefers to inhabit warm, standing water.  It also likes to invade one's nasal passages, advancing up into the brain, where it eats the flesh therein.

Global warming plays a role in spreading naegleria fowleri: warmer climates, warmer waters, more places for n.f. to hide.

I'm waiting for the first parental admonition: "Don't cannonball into the pool, young man!  Or else the brain-eating amoebas will swim up your nose and eat your brains!"

I'm also waiting for the Giant Microbes gang to come up with a plush today version.

There's something deeply satisfying about saying "brain-eating amoeba."

(via Bruce Sterling, who writes "I don't make the news, I just blog it, folks")

Gaping holes tunnel into the very face of Mars

Some mysterious holes have been spotted this year on the Martian surface, for our spacegoing Gothic pleasure.  They look ominous, elegant in the depth of shadows.  Here's one:

I love the language Astronomy Pic of the Day uses to describe these:

this mysterious dark pit, about 150 meters across, lies on the north slope of ancient martian volcano Arsia Mons...
While the visible light images showed only darkness within, infrared thermal signatures indicated that the openings penetrated deep under the martian surface and perhaps were skylights to underground caverns...
Black spots have been discovered on Mars that are so dark that nothing inside can be seen. Quite possibly, the spots are entrances to deep underground caves capable of protecting Martian life, were it to exist...
The above hole is about the size of a football field and is so deep that it is completely unilluminated by the Sun...

Astro Pic of the Day is one of the Web's great, great delights.