UN_SPACE: Jason Brown: Paranoid Machines Event

Modern techno-mythologies assume that more information and more connections will literally make more sense, extending all the way to the post-human desire to transcend the meat entirely and evolve into pure code. But even before before porn and spam turned obfuscation into a profitable business model, the noise and bugs of the meat were already embedded in the code. From the supernatural mass murder which inspired the Arts of Memory to the atomic alien conspiracies that spawned the Web, information technology has always been paranoid.

This talk covers several thousand years of information technology, focusing on strange threads of symptom and haunting woven into the history of mnemotechnics. How does ancient gnostic cosmology influence the way we use computers? How did magicians, junkies and sexual deviants give us computers, programming and rocket science? How did a cave in Kentucky became the blueprint of cyberspace? How did a moth presage y2k and terrorist paranoia? How is the crashed flying saucer at Roswell tied to the origins of hypertext?

These weird errors and coincidences cannot be cleansed from the history of our memory machines, because memory itself is buggy. It operates by associative logic, making unexpected squirms and jumps, revealing poetic truths about the world without concern for linear reason. We cannot escape into the clean world of information and code because the messy conspiratorial logic of sex-dirt is in fact the paranoid logic of code.

All of this will be examined through the gnostic allegory of the 1983 Disney movie, Tron.