Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The arrival of render ghosts

"Render ghosts": James Bridle thinks we have another way of haunting digital media.  These are people's images that we recycle through multiple uses far removed from their origins. For example, Lena Söderberg becomes Lenna, widely used test image.  Stock photos are another instance of render ghosting.

They inhabit a space which exists only in the virtual spaces of 3D computer rendering software, projected onto billboards, left to rot and torn down when the actual future arrives; never quite as glossy or as perfect as our renderings of it would like it to be, or have prepared us for.

The Render Ghosts are waiting for their own end.

The recycled uncanny, perhaps.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

More ISIS Gothic

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, or ISIL, apparently ramped up its Gothic horror work with a spate of crucifiction.

[The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights] said ISIL had executed the eight men in Aleppo province for belonging to more moderate groups. The men were crucified in the town square of Deir Hafer in eastern Aleppo and would be left there for three days, it said.

...their corpses were still on view

What is the motivation for these excruciating executions?

The men were accused of being "Sahwa" fighters, the Observatory said, a term ISIL uses to refer to rival combatants whom it accuses of being controlled by Western powers.

Or "because they were considered too moderate", in Reuters' paraphrase.

ISIS has been practicing this:

ISIL also crucified another man in the province in al-Bab town near the Turkish border, [The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights] said. He was pinned up for eight hours as a punishment for giving false testimony but survived the ordeal, the Observatory said.

ISIS/L is apparently taking its horror campaign very seriously.

Previous Infocult posts on ISIS: one commentary, some horrors.

ISIS does horror

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has apparently turned its hand to Gothic video.  Esquire describes some gory imagery, turned to terror's effect.

The first series of images is a jeep driving alongside cars and strafing them with machine gun fire. But whoever is working the camera doesn't stop at the hit. He gets out of the car and proceeds on foot to show the bodies up close, lingering on blown-up skulls. In one battle scene, after the jihadists have bazooka'd what looks like a school dorm room, the camera spends half a minute on the mounds of shredded flesh, before the fighters light it all on fire.

And so on.  More in the article.

CNN, always ready to dig into the Gothic, did a short take on this story.  Most of the terror in the CNN clip is political, until the end:

Even Youtube is horrified:

We're already noted one related Gothic aspect of ISIS.

Time to peel off the parent's skin mask

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal offers this horrfic comic about families and masks:

Faithful Infocult minion Steven Kaye reminds us to click on the big red button on the page, below and to the right of the panel, for a bonus image.

Everyone should be reminded of this classic Gothic passage:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

                          The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2

Gothic Iraq

War writer Chris Hedges looks upon the ISIS (or ISIL)  revolt in Iraq and lets loose the Gothic. It's the language of monsters to suit monstrosity:

The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes...

They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground.

People have used Gothic language to describe war since the genre's beginning.

What Hedges does here is powerful and appropriate.

Another fine tale of clown fear

Snopes, that essential guide to our culture's depth, shares this excellent scary clown urban legend:

A couple with children were trying out a new babysitter. About an hour after they left for a night on the town, they realized they had forgotten to give her their cell phone number, so one of them called her.

After she wrote down the number, the babysitter asked if she could watch satellite TV in their bedroom. She had just put the children to bed and wanted to watch a particular show. (The parents didn't want their children watching too much garbage, so the living room TV did not have satellite channels.)

Well of course she could watch TV in their room, they replied. The babysitter had one other request: could she put a sheet or blanket over the clown statue that was in the bedroom? It kind of made her nervous.

Take the children and go to the neighbors, said whichever parent was talking to her. We'll call the police. We don't have a clown statue. The police caught the clown as he was running through the neighborhood. 

(photo by Jeff Turner)

Run, zombie, run

Zombie Runner seems to be a shoes + caffeine outfit in the San Francisco area.  With a fine sign:

(thanks to Zach Chandler)

Reconnecting with a zombie satellite

"Calling Back a Zombie Ship From the Graveyard of Space"

is the grandly Infocultish title the New York Times generated for their account of the ISEE-3 rescue.  A group of scientists and space enthusiasts built and crowdsourced the apparatus needed to reconnect with this 1970s-era space probe.

But the Times found the Gothic angle.  Zombies and space graveyards... a chilling line for an otherwise heartwarming story.

(thanks to Chris Cavanaugh and Steven Kaye for the link, and Wikipedia for the image)

Demonic doll versus al Qaeda

In its campaign against al Qaeda, the CIA prototyped a creepy doll weapon.  It was an Osama bin Laden action figure, and it offered an intriguing feature.  Instead of a kung-fu action grip,

The face of the figure was painted with a heat-dissolving material, designed to peel off and reveal a red-faced bin Laden who looked like a demon, with piercing green eyes and black facial markings.

Like so:

While the manufacturer (led by a Hasbro exec, a GI Joe leader!) made several prototypes, the demon bin Laden doll never went into production.  Or so they say.

Bonus horror movie reference:

Elon Musk fears the machines

Even a Heinleinian technology inventor harbors some techno-fear, it seems.  Elon Musk confessed to some worries about articificial intelligence during an interview.

(Text is in all caps, as per transcript.  It does look more formidable that way.)

MUSK: ... I LIKE TO JUST KEEP AN EYE ON WHAT'S GOING ON WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I THINK THERE IS POTENTIALLY A DANGEROUS OUTCOME THERE AND WE NEED TO –

EVANS: DANGEROUS? HOW SO?

EVANS: POTENTIALLY, YES. I MEAN, THERE HAVE BEEN MOVIES ABOUT THIS, YOU KNOW, LIKE "TERMINATOR". [That is probably mislabeled as Evans, instead of Musk]

The interviewer has fun with it:

EVANS: BUT HERE IS THE IRONY. I MEAN, THE MAN WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR SOME OF THE MOST ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN THIS COUNTRY IS WORRIED ABOUT THE ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY THAT YOU ARE AWARE OF.

MUSK: YEAH.

And more fun, bouncing off of Musk's Martian goal:

MUSK: I DON'T KNOW. BUT THERE ARE SOME SCARY OUTCOMES. AND WE SHOULD TRY TO MAKE SURE THE OUTCOMES ARE GOOD, NOT BAD. YEAH.

EVANS: OR ESCAPE TO MARS IF THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.

MUSK: THE A.I. WILL CHASE US THERE PRETTY QUICKLY.

The old AI/Frankenstein's monster/golem meme lives!

(thanks to Todd Bryant for the link; Musk photo from Wikipedia)