Tim Boucher and I have been talking a lot about alternative methods of communication – whether that be through ham and or amateur radio signals, animal sounds & bird calls, eletronic ’speakjet’ ghost voice-boxes, ‘the chatter’, or Sun Ra styled improvized jazz ‘joyful noise’.
In a comment to one of his posts he linked a brief story:
When I was 3 or 4 I dreamed about a monster that lived in the TV and attacked the outside world with death rays. It took my family hostage and killed our dogs. Its shape appeared in the static and it had a shrill, hissing voice. This is perhaps the earliest dream I can remember.
For some reason static has a definite spooky quality to it and yet I remember my old roommate sadly reminiscing about how you can’t really get static on your television anymore. TV’s now a-days usually fall back on a blue screen that is silent, abandoning that harsh hiss & ’snow’.
So check this out – I just bought this iPhone program called Ghost Static which allows me tap into those old memories.
The application capitalizes on those inherent creepy feelings of the random chaotic static and generates a square field of black and white fluttering just like the good old days of waking up in the middle of night on the couch with your hand in a bag of Doritos and drool coming out your mouth. Other cool features include a hiss that can be seeded with randomness with either microphone data, motion detection, or an algorithm. There is also a random alphabet generator which spits of combinations of letters using the same randomness inputs. For a while when I first turned it on I saw the words flashing “FEAR. NEAR. HERE.” and got pretty freaked out but I am pretty sure that’s actually programmatically set to show up and not actually a main component of the application. The only word I’ve recognized so far is ‘eggs’ but I haven’t really done a thorough investigation using it yet. I’m pretty excited about the emerging hardware/software solutions for mystical and paranormal research and exploration and hope that more things like this start popping out on the horizon.
Oh yeah – speaking of weird sounds from the television – remember this post in which I heard strange garbled ‘voices’ coming out of my television set when it was set to the aux channel? Someone in the comments let me know it was just a ham radio operator (or was it?) but it’s creepy sounding none the less: creepy sound
Also, while we’re at it – maybe you can answer @vajrathunderdog something he asked me on twitter:
“do you think you could summon angels with ham frequencies? where do they lay on the bands?”
Angels Don’t Play This HAARP
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=16573