Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The nuclear dead hand persists

Cold War Gothic: the Soviet Union actually built a doomsday machine, according to Wired.  If it looked like the US had launched a nuclear surprise attack, and Moscow's leadership had been wiped out, "Perimeter" would launch the USSR's nuclear arsenal. 

Perimeter was also called Miertvaya Ruka: "Dead Hand." 

The article has some brooding, Gothic passages, like so:

Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

And now Dead Hand - sorry, Perimeter - has become a historical secret.  According to author Thompson, it can't be spoken of.  And maybe worse: "One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase."

Haunted painting: The Hands Resist Him

We haunt each medium we create.  Case in point: an unsettling painting, with a disturbing track record.  "The Hands Resist Him" (1972) putatively depicts a childhood dream remembered much later by the artist. 

Bill Stoneham describes being the little boy in the middle of the image.  Not the creepy doll (left), shadowy door (center), or multiple disembodied hands (all over the place).

for an additional level of fearsome media, the haunted painting then infected the Web.  Let meine kleine fabrik tell it all:

The painting appeared on the auction website eBay in February 2000. According to the seller, the aforementioned couple, the painting carried some form of curse. Their eBay description claimed that the characters in the painting moved during the night, and that they would sometimes leave the painting and enter the room in which it was being displayed. Included with the listing were a series of photographs that were said to be evidence of an incident in which the female doll character threatened the male character with a gun that she was holding, causing him to attempt to leave the painting. A disclaimer was included with the listing absolving the seller from all liability if the painting was purchased.

News of the listing was quickly spread by internet users who forwarded the link to their friends or wrote their own pages about it. Some people claimed that simply viewing the photos of the painting made them feel ill or have unpleasant experiences. Eventually, the auction page was viewed over 30,000 times.

After an initial bid of $199, the painting eventually received 30 bids and sold for $1,025.00.

There's more, too.  Haunting upon haunting.  An imbrication of uncanny media.

Stoneham's been painting ever since.  One recent work, "The Body Politic," is also finely Gothic, and sadly well suited to our times.

We at Infocult Studios been touching on haunted paintings for some time.  Consider The Crying Boy, or the less spooky but still clever sneaky drawings on glass.

A quick guide to futures: Cascio's Process

A quick guide to futures thinking comes from Jamais Cascio.  The process he describes is a solid one, accessible to just about any audience.  Nice teaching tool.

More on Poe's head games

Edgar Allan Poe played games with his audience.  This we've known for a while, about that lover of hoaxes and cryptography.  A New Yorker article thinks this was driven by his lifelong poverty, and offers an interesting reading of some of his stories and poems.  Some proto-alternate reality game fodder here:

["The Gold-Bug"] is a kind of hoax. It aspires to popularity by assaulting the very idea of a popular audience.

Once again, I'm reminded of my project to reconsider literary history in terms of games and hoaxes.

Here's a longer, fun passage:

“The Gold-Bug” is a tangle of puns, many of them, as the literary scholar Marc Shell has pointed out, having to do with currency. Legrand has found a bug the color of gold. “De bug is a goole bug,” Jupiter says. In other words, a ghoul bug. It looks as if it were made of gold. It is not. “Dey aint no tin in him, Massa,” Jupiter says. There’s nothing in him—no tin, and no gold, either. Legrand has also found a parchment, made of goatskin, kidskin. It contains a map showing where a treasure was buried on the island by the pirate Captain Kidd. This pun Legrand himself has to figure out, in order to find the buried treasure. (Kidd’s map, in this sense, is itself a guide to Poe’s tales. Is Poe kidding or not? Are the tales a joke, and worthless, or brilliant, and priceless?) The parchment is covered with invisible ink, which, as Legrand discovers, conceals a cryptogram. After decoding the cipher, Legrand takes Jupiter, the dog, and the befuddled narrator on a hunt for the treasure, which turns out to be a chest containing jewels and gold coins.

Rise of the robot phlebotomists

Behold the Bloodbot.  It's a robot designed to draw blood from people, or scare the Goth out of needlephobes, and created by the Imperial College (London).

How does it work?  According to Wired, the nightmare-inducing machine

presses a probe against the surface tissue and measures the force on the probe. The pressure difference across the area indicates the presence of a vein. Once the Bloodbot finds a vein it inserts a needle and draws the blood. The system is sophisticated and precise enough to ensure that it doesn’t insert the needle too far into the vein or overshoot the vein.

"doesn't insert the needle too far into the vein" - now that's a phrase to conjure up squirming dread.

How often does BB avoid that slip-up, overshooting the vein, and other horrible errors? Bloodbot has a 78% accuracy rate.  Which is impressive, although one wonders about that 22% other:

22-percent of the time it's either needlessly stabbing you, or causing dangerous, uncontrollable bleeding.

Perhaps Ohio could use the Bloodbot?  Yet another instance of Ohio Gothic, just waiting to happen.

(thanks to John Lynch)

The end of the world: an accidentally Gothic art installation

"The World has been cancelled. It doesn't even look like the world." An epitaph for a decaying, accidental work of apocalyptic art.  It's a group of artificial islets built by the Dubai government to look like a map of the Earth:

But it has been abandoned, and decays in the waters, a shipping hazard.  It's also a fine Gothic installation, a celebration of beauty in decay, ruins in emergent process.

The recession's ghost armada

The Great Recession Gothic goes aquatic in this account of a weird merchant marine.  Ship after ship empty, floating without crews, in economic limbo.

the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

It's a hidden fleet, curiously kept away from the global economic crisis of confidence.

The world's ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world's economies.

Simon Parry's story is melancholy, projecting gloom into the future:

...These empty ships should be carrying Christmas over to the West. All retailers will have already ordered their stock for the festive season long ago.

(many thanks to the hordes of kind folks who forwarded me this)

Another eye-tooth implantation

Another procedure to implant human tooth material into someone's eyeball was done, this time in America.  

How does this medical effort work, besides sounding like something from a forgotten French horror film?

[It is a] months-long procedure in which an eye tooth (also called canine or cuspid) was implanted in one eye as a base to hold a prosthetic lens...

Nearly two weeks later, her visual acuity is 20/70 without corrective lenses in the treated eye...

We caught the first eye-tooth surgery earlier this year.

Infocult: chronicling the Gothic conquest of the world, one organ at a time.

Infocult transmissions are caught in the ether

Apologies are owed to all Infocult readers if our transmissions have been slow this September.  We're dealing with a persistent internet outage in our Vermont mountain fastness. 

So the Infocult tsar finds himself driving all over the mountain and neighboring valley, snatching connectivity from the air as he can.

Hopefully the nomadism will cease shortly, and we can resume our normal ghostly broadcasts.

Hello Giger

Best Hello Kitty ever: