blackbirdonline journalSpring 2010  Vol. 9  No. 1
poetryfictionnonfictiongalleryfeaturesbrowse

CARL DIEHL  |  Video Essay Suite

Blobsquatch: In the Expanded Field

Contributor’s Commentary
Working with video, installation, performance, and speculative fiction, l refer to my current practice as “Metaphortean Research.”

Metaphortean Research is inspired by the work of the independent, early-twentieth–century researcher, Charles Fort. Fort collected volumes of data detailing anomalous phenomena that had allegedly been excluded, rejected or ignored by established Science because it was unexplainable.

I use Fort’s theories in association with the abundance of residual media circulating through vernacular networks and secondhand markets. Despite being largely trashed, rejected, or abandoned by new media marketing imperatives, the techno-cultural imagination continues to innovatively eschew Obsolescence through adaptive reuse of technology.

Deriving metaphors and tropes from Fortean phenomena, l examine the anomalies lurking between structured obsolescence and the perpetual fissures of curiosity.  


return to top