Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Canada's dismemberment spree continues

Another week, another Canadian body part story: this time it's a human torso, bereft of head or limbs, found near Niagara Falls.

Police don't see a link to another case involving a torso-less collection of body parts:

Investigators and forensic experts say the torso is not related to the Peel police investigation involving the slaying of Toronto woman Liu Guanghua. Ms. Liu's body parts — but not her torso — were found earlier this month west of Toronto in Mississauga and near her home in east-end Toronto.

Infocult: where the world plays Lego with corpse bits.

(thanks to Ontario expert Randy McCall; photo by Paul Bica)

Hello Great Beast

Are we ready for the Aleister Crowley/Hello Kitty mashup?

(curse you, saramin!)

Florida Gothic: the organ locker

A Florida man stumbled into Infocult's world when he opened a storage locker's contents.  What did the lucky auction winner find after "notic[ing] a foul smell"?

[H]uman brains, hearts and lungs of more than 100 people.

Oh yes.

Officials at the medical examiner’s office in Pensacola say the remains were found crudely stored in Tupperware containers, garbage bags and drink cups. Many remains were not identified.

Florida offers another slice of the American Gothic organ meat, of course.  

This story also summons up two other realms of fear.  There's the complex of anxieties we feel around medicine, from bodily invasion to impersonal bureaucracy.  Alongside this is the old Gothic hidden object trope, where mysteries lurk in chests and boxes.

(link via Jesse Walker; image by Steve Jurvetson)

Slate wonders about creepy technology

There's an odd meditation on creepy technology over at Slate. The piece begins promisingly, offering many examples of uncanny digital and pre-digital media. 

Then it diffuses into uncertainty.  Sometimes creepiness is a merited feeling, if there are good reasons, like the ones sociologists give.  Such as privacy, unless it's not.  Or fearing tech is an accurate response to something when we... just don't know what or why.  Because that's useful, somehow.  Harrumph.

That uncertain part of the article does yield a useful gem, finally, when it hesitatingly offers a conclusion.  People fear new tech because it's easier than doing something more wise:

What we don’t know is exactly how the ads will be configured, how accurate the information scanning will be, and what kind of safeguards will protect consumers against having their information misused. It thus is easier to be worried than prudent.

It's easier to install filters than teach internet literacy.  It takes less time to insist on acceptance than to instill a critical thinking attitude.  Letting old media instruct us about the new is less demanding than doing one's research.

(thanks to Charles Cameron)

Ghost terrorizes east African islands

A specter is haunting the voters of Zanzibar. It's a numinous figure that attacks sleeping people on those Indian Ocean islands:

The ghost or genie goes by the name of Popo Bawa and people believe that it sodomises its victims, most of whom are men.

The timing is curious, as Popo Bawa seems to be electorally motivated:

In recent years the residents on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands claimed that Popo Bawa only visited the islanders during voting, such as in the contentious general elections in 1995 and 2000.

Until now:

But to the surprise of many this current ghost has reappeared when there is no polling of any kind.

Which begs the question: why now?  

(link via Mike Sellers; photo via Kristaps B.)

Ancient plant blossoms

Mad Curious Russian scientists nourished 32,000-year-old plant tissue into blooming life.

Team leader Svetlana Yashina re-created Siberian conditions in the lab and watched as the refrigerated tissue sprouted buds that developed into 36 flowering plants within weeks.

Discover's account offers no hint of the many possible ways this could go wrong.

But Infocult-minded reads will find the article's conclusion ominous:

This summer Yashina’s team plans to revisit the tundra to search for even older burrows and seeds.

(via MetaFilter)

The Facebook cemetery

"Deadbook", or the future of Facebook over the long haul. What will happen as the number of dead users increases?

[I]n the very long term there will actually be more dead people on facebook then there are people living on facebook. I’d estimate that crossover to be around 50 years into the future, possibly a bit later....

[T]he atmosphere on facebook will change, from photo sharing website to digital graveyard, a place where we come to worship our ancestors.

Every year we become more aware of our digital afterlives.

(link via HackerNews; photo via Felipe Gabaldon)

Phantasm meets AT+T

Infocult's mashup of the week goes to Ars Technica for combining Gothic classic Phantasm (1979) with AT+T (eternal).

 

Ghosts of ancient ROM

A team of curious techies poke around very old Mac hardware, and find some files they can't immediately figure out.  The results can be considered Easter eggs, but the lead tech prefers to call them Ghosts in the ROM.

Ghostly indeed is the first file they figure out, as faces surface from the code.  Some of these folks are now dead, it seems:

The ghost metaphor is one that's been with digital technology fears from the beginning.  "Ghost in the machine" is a longrunning meme.

(via HackerNews)

House of plastic

A woman's body is on display at the famous Body Worlds traveling exhibit, where body parts combine with plastic to make modern simulacra.  This woman is unnamed, being a representation of pregnancy, but perhaps she actually represents something else, and something sinister.

[N]etizens suspect the pregnant woman's body in the current display might belong to Zhang Weijie, a former mistress of the disgraced politician Bo Xilai and a well-known anchor of Dalian Television who went missing...

How could this be?  Modern China Gothic:

The skull shape and other features of the pregnant woman’s body at the Body World’s exhibit is said to resemble those of Zhang. Also, the nearly mature fetus inside the pregnant woman suggests the woman had been been the victim of an officially sanctioned execution.

Sounds like urban legend territory, but what Gothic goodness!  It draws on the old wax museum story, not to mention the larger themes of human simulacra and our fears of dead bodies.  It connects with the British Gothic's obsession with powerful state systems - was Zhang Weijie executed? How much time did she spend in torment?  The story also summons up the classic Western ability to come up with weird stories about China (Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu).  And there's simple body horror, from the fetus to the open-ended question of just how much flesh is there with the plastic.

Speaking of Bo Xilai, here's another story about a potential doppelganger at his trial.

(thanks to Steven Kaye; photo by Alanna Ralph)