Black Planet

Commissioned and published in the catalogue for Invisible Fields. Geographies of radio waves (Arts Santa Mònica).

How can one hide before that which never sets?

[Heraclitus. Fragment 16]

As we can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another, in such manner as to elude general comprehension…

[Edgar Allen Poe. A Few Words on Secret Writing]

The world as will and representation is transformed into the world as paranoia and conspiracy (without the theory); a phenomenology channeled by cryptomane Edgar Allen Poe, and later embellished by the twin stars of Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick. It already begins to read like a cover story.

The defined strategies of war thus become a total military ontology or an ontology of security; enclosing a black, over-engineered planet with engineering always as an operation of the military; the origins of the word as referring in the 14th century to "a constructor of military engines."

There is always the possibility that "..the coffee begins to taste more and more metallic."

The military acronym of C5I, standing in for command, control, communications, computers, combat systems and intelligence, can more elegantly be replaced with the octopus C3 trinity of conspiracy, code and cryptography, spelling out in clear text certain interlinked and self-evident aspects of the military project or technological apparatus. These can be haphazardly catalogued as follows:

• A communication and a hiding (including the spreading of propoganda, or of deliberate misinformation, the jamming or denying of certain communications eg. the destruction of electronic equipment and satellites via Electromagnetic pulse (EMP)).
• A seeing and a listening (eavesdropping, radar, surveillance, mapping, spy satellites, TEMPEST/forensics phenomena, geophysical observation).
• As control (mind control, media, software), as (remote or autonomous) control for weapons (guidance).

And finally, as a weapon, to satisfy demands for containment and exclusion, to obtain and to reveal… information.

The list, hopefully acting as a practical guide to exacerbate military ontology, is not exhaustive but documents the obvious uses of a certain dark side of the spectrum, a hidden, occluded or shadowy side, unseen, unmapped; the "black world" of Trevor Paglen.

Encryption (that obscuring) is a military necessity accompanying any transmission (bringing to light) and control. The story of war is always the story of cryptography (Marconi recognising the curse of transmission as the possibility of interception), and (spy) literature is always occulted telegraphy. Keeping hidden is a natural tendency within communication or the transmission of information - always the necessity to "elude general comprehension". There is a (military) play with a certain opacity (of a too coded message), with symptoms (an unwilled exposure of signification), and with steganography.

Steganography can be simply described as the concealment of the fact that there exactly exists a hidden message. Yet, neither is there this alterity of a well-intentioned signal, noise, the surface appreciation of an encrypted code. Rather a clear or cover message, however innocent which belies the presence of hidden information; originally hair grown to cover an image, map or message tattooed on the low-bandwidth carrier's head. A hidden writing, after the apparent magician Johannes Trithemius whose own Steganographia, encrypted a treatise on the very subject of cryptography, within an ostensibly magical text.

Number stations thus act as an inverse, darker steganography, spelling out its own message; that something is quite obviously being hidden yet there is no access to that transcendental message, that indeed there is only the appearance of hiding.

And that which is hidden in this case may simply be a placebo, operating as a promotion of hiding and thus paranoia in the world. The message is simply that spies do exist, that there is something hidden within the world (the possibility of hiding does exist).

"…don't press the key too long, or the enemy will take a bearing on your transmission!"

[Handbook for C. Lorenz AG medium-frequency transmitter]

"Paranoia is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in Creation, a secondary illumination."

[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow]

Paranoia presents a network of communications, this illumination which is technology as a revealing (as, after Heidegger, Aletheia; the state of not being hidden, of being evident, a certain revealing which is not unrelated to the hidden). Conspiracy theory takes part in this game of revealing which is military or technological ontology, defined, with all the expansions engendered by linked phrases such as "homeland security", as a project of enclosure, of containing in the world, a world set into being by the military engineer.

An apparatus or pure machine whose genesis can be wrapped within a short parable which can go under the names of "The Gold-Bug", Enigma, Colossus, or Ultra, or even, MKULTRA, beginning during the second world war and reaching its climax during the cold war. A story ghost written by a vast network of automatic workers overseen by conglomerates such as Siemens AG, IG Farben, and C. Lorenz AG (responsible for both the riders on the wave (Ultrakurzwellen-Landefunkfeuer) AKA the battle of the beams, and cryptographic technologies), and, operating under the shadow of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), later CIA and NASA. A short story, a conspiracy compressed, tracing the technological vector from the Nazis (and foreign business interests within IG Farben) through Operation Paperclip to the NSA, CIA and MKULTRA (pioneering "techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means"). An already fantastic story, as revealed and documented conspiracy which is shadowed by a narrative of suppressed occult technologies, this darker, electromagnetic conspiracy theory which wraps all such theories with MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) snake threads labelled with proper names such as Tesla, Roswell (a cover story), JFK and MJ12; a theory of an occult and occulted ether physics.

Just as there are, for the Manichaeans, according to Pynchon and maintained in that sacred site of Peenemuende, the first wedding (for CCTV) of the twinned conspiracies of science and technology as always simply engineering, two rockets, a good rocket and a bad rocket, we can divine both a good spectrum (or rainbow) and a bad one; "… a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide, the two perpetually in struggle." A good Wernher von Braun, and an evil, black twin Wernher, sowing the technical seeds of occulted Nazi physics within the US space program, by way of equally suspect Operation Paperclip.

According to the military looking glass logic of conspiracy theory, one narrative exists, solely as cover story for the other. The text which comes to the (public) light of day simply lids and hides the occult development of an other, darker technology. According to this logic of sense, the two, apparently competing (cold war) space programs of the USA and USSR represent solely the public face of a hidden, esoteric physics, maintained in its darkness by an "extensive Nazi network of intelligence agents and scientists".

"The Automaton does not invariably win the game. Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case — it would always win."

[Edgar Allen Poe. Maelzel's Chess Player]

The pure and total conspiratorial machine, otherwise known as code, control or software (a masculine birth at Bletchley Park), is a play between an ontology of hiding and a functionality of revealing which is in one sense the world (given in that deciding) as a military-philosophical project of a holding of the day and of the world as [un-]certain. This is gnostic Philip K. Dick's Black Iron Prison (BIP); an evil construct, a projection outside real time commencing in 70 AD and, supposedly ending in 1974 to be replaced with a benign, golden age represented by a Palm Tree Garden; the projection ("the universe consists of a spurious projected reality") and the means of projection to be shaded, obscured and dismissed as the delusions of wavies, of the crazy "aluminium foil hat crowd."

The fairy tale relating the means of projection can be traced from Nikola Tesla, and Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, with his stimoceiver controlling a certain national missile (or bull), through MKULTRA experiments with psychotronics, Project Pandora (spoken words can be delivered to subjects directly via pulsed microwaves), to RHIC-EDOM (Radio Hypnotic Intracerebra Control – Electronic Dissolution of Memory) operating under the cover story of UFO technologies and abduction.

Arriving at Michael A. Persinger, John C. Lilly and Philip K. Dick, operating under a colossal hypothesis: On the possibility of directly accessing every human brain by electromagnetic induction of fundamental algorithms. VALIS, in other words, being "attracted or potentiated by the Soviet microwave psychotronic transmissions."

14 The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.

[Philip K. Dick. VALIS]

And it is precisely the overcoded lack of presence of low frequency radio or electromagnetic particle/waves which engenders a conspiratorial quality, a being-always-hidden of that which, in another frequency domain, is the always coming to light of the self-evident (light itself); a childish military game of hide and seek, of keeping secret(s) (camouflage, cryptography, steganography, stealth, secrecy, double agency) which creates the world within an inversely Gnostic imagination.

But which came first? The exploitation of a shadowed materiality (planetary resonance, for example) for religions of hiding or its very coming into being (of science and technology) through some kind of magic or conspiracy; a more complex W.A.S.T.E network which goes beyond a simple means of transmission.

Was there something hidden in the amber (elektron), a container to be rubbed with fur, a blueprint or future circuit diagram layed out in stone circles, equally symbolic or coded arrangements within the landscape, megalithic antenna arrays storing rather than transmitting or receiving energy within quartz capacitative structures; a "heiroglyphic sense of concealed meaning" (in the landscape)?

Did an alliance of William Crookes, Charles Dodgson, Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle (mirroring Poe as his double-agent within a certain Musgrave Ritual) collude within the white lodge of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to usher in an occulted, spiritualistic aetheric age concealed under the cover story of simple communication?

The antenna as an accident of physics and mathematics or with some symbolic or magical design here; this heiroglyphic interface between physical oscillation, between readable electronics (a city map, a circuit diagram) and paths of symbolic transmission (the ruling lines), between the protocol (the law) and the resonant earth.

The antenna as curse, as sole signifier for an invisible war, radiating a certain warmth aside from its information carrying capabilities, a measurement tied to watts and energy (how many potential spies can be reached with so much power from the transmitter); a heat which can be directed by the antenna, for use as a weapon (an Active Denial System). The antenna as plague buboe, as symptom, cancer sites cross-correlated with pulsed, microwave antenna fixtures.

A truly dark spectrum would depict this conspiracy as purely imaginary, with the antenna as rational, a clear historical development of communications technology fulfilling an age old desire to both (appear to) reveal and hide; precisely as anti-paranoia after Pynchon (nothing is connected, there is no (technological) network, no W.A.S.T.E).

Electromagnetics remains as an ur or uber conspiracy, a conspiracy (theory) in itself if we can define conspiracy theory as precisely a secret or hidden plotting which is unable to ask or answer the question of "what precisely is the aether?"

A veiled writing constructing a black steganographic monolith (a roofed-in writing), a crypt which is always to be deciphered, a Colossus CPU which is constantly decoding, a certain transmission of software (invisible code), of Zebra, the first reality-projecting artefact; a solid-state conspiracy (after John C. Lilly).

An antenna-monolith, buried under Teufelsberg, destroyed at Skundra, visible as HAARP, illuminates with low frequency emissions precisely the darkest dream of Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, the violation of a circular, resonant Cycle by the System.