Category Archives: Incunabula
Exploring Ong’s Hat
Many people have asked me over the years what I think this all is. So, I’m going to give you what I think in a nutshell. Or should I say Eggshell? What I think the Incunabula represents is an entrainment module for Quantum thinking. -Joseph Matheny, “Ong’s Hat: The Beginning, Authorized Version”Thanks for reading Chasing Shadows! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
What I meant by “game”
A filter statement, if there ever was one
Original post: https://josephmatheny.substack.com/p/what-i-meant-by-game
The above excerpt is from a book I’m currently reading and enjoying, This Is the Strangest Life I’ve Ever Known: A Psychological Portrait of Jim Morrison by Ana Leorne. I was impressed by this quote because it aligns with something I am working through as I write Ong’s Hat: Compleat.
When it became clear in 2000/2001 that people clearly did not understand what I was trying to do with the Ong’s Hat “sacred game” (or living book as I often called it back then), I broke the fourth wall momentarily. I pointed out that there was and always had been an explanation on the CD ROM, which served as the center point for the game at the time. If you want to see it, download the ISO, use something like WinRAR or any ISO extractor, and open the Secret.pdf in the /eXtras folder.
Rather than calming the waters, my admission stirred some people up even more. It ultimately resulted in me canceling the game due to unbridled hostility on the forum over their inability to grasp a simple concept, such as not all play implies winners and losers. Sometimes, it can be about playing for the simple joy of playing. (Read your Homo Ludens).
The misunderstanding persists to this day, with people not being able to understand what an infinite game is and persisting in acting out the only thing they know: zero-sum games. The problem, as I see it now, is that I was speaking a language that some people do not understand. To most people, a game means something trivial or a cause to seek domination, nothing more, definitely not as something sacred.
It astounds me how incapable and unwilling so many people are to grasp a concept that seems so simple. Play for the joy of playing. More about that in Compleat in 2024.
As you can see from the quote above, Jim Morrison got it, and thankfully, I know some of you here get it. I know because you’ve written and expressed it, or we’ve spoken, and it came across. That’s why you are here. So, this is a note to thank you if you’re one of those people, and I wish you all the best in the coming year.
As a side note, in 2013, I spent a week living in Jim’s old room at the Alta Cienega motel and was surprised and amused to see the graffiti below among all the scrawls and scratches on the walls and furniture in the room.
2024 will be full of new things, some of which we might enjoy.
Ong’s Hat creator Joseph Matheny on the blurred lines between fiction and reality
Internet’s First Hoax: Did You Fall for It?
These Scientists Ripped A Hole In Reality From A Cabin In The Woods
Ever wondered about the wild, wacky and wonderful world of quantum physics, alternate dimensions, and internet hoaxes? Well, buckle up for a roller-coaster journey as we uncover one of New Jersey’s most captivating tales, the story of Wally Fard, and his spiritual commune, the Moorish Science Ashram. We spin a vivid narrative on how a carpet salesman became a spiritual leader, buying 200 acres of Pine Barrens forest land to build a pseudoscience and meditation haven.
The Mysterious Portal: Unraveling the Unknown World of Ong’s Hat
ART IN THE AGE OF REELS
AESTHETIC DRUG
To do this, Harmony Korine created EDGLRD (“edgelord”, editor’s note), a “creative factory” focused on innovation and experimentation, installed in a house in Miami. There are 3D animators, skateboarders, fashion designers, video game creators, 3D printers, and a whole bunch of hyper-progressive minds plugged into Tiktok. EDGLRD’s first project, Aggro Dr1ft, is a film resembling a digital LSD trip, which left no one indifferent at the Venice Film Festival. Shot with a thermal camera, the film is visually thought of like a painting, in the sense that the image is ultra-modified and composed of a multitude of digital layers, 3D, AI, etc. We follow the story of Bo, the “best assassin in the world” – a descendant of Georges Abitbol? – in a Miami that has become a tropical dystopia in infrared. Travis Scott plays Bo’s protégé, and speaks like an NPC (a video game automaton), repeating his lines in a robotic manner. Some people talk about it as a genre of ambient cinema, or one that can be compared to the vaporwave genre. “Vibe is almost everything,” says Korine, who speaks of an “aesthetic drug,” and explains that “the visuals and sounds are as if caught between two worlds.” We find this liminal side, between two realities, on the threshold, even in the name of the collective, Edgelord, translated “the lord of the limit”. But what do Harmony Korine and EDGLRD have in store for us next? “One of the ideas of the next film is that it won’t have any particular order, it will constantly remix itself, and allow people to remix it (…) A film that has no ending, which we enter, where we choose a character, skins, etc. “, he explained recently about Baby Invasion, an interactive thriller which will be EDGLRD’s second project. Will films soon have extensions like video games? Fascinated by the intense and direct connection that exists between the creators of Tiktok or GTA with their audience, Korine dreams of an experiential, gamified cinema, where the spectator takes part in the story and makes it evolve. He also uses a new word for this type of creation which goes beyond cinema, “blinxs”. “The blinx is its own medium, and can last a second or a year,” he says. If he wants to break the barriers of what is done in cinema, Harmony Korine is also tackling technological innovation, since EDGLRD is working on a “dream box”. A machine allowing you to “think and have a result in images, without prompting. Thoughts translated into images. Basically an illustrator of dreams.” If there is currently a creative and intellectual fascination around liminality and transmedia storytelling, we can clearly see the influence of certain pioneers who have experimented with reality, “active”, infinite, and collective works. But the liminal spaces imagined in the 1980s have since been metastasized by social networks, to become the norm of a post-reality world where our daily existences become art.FICTION LIMINALS
“I tried to create a living book, a kind of ritual theater, where the spectator momentarily becomes an actor, and where the actor momentarily becomes a spectator,” explains American writer and transmedia artist Joseph Matheny. We then cross an invisible barrier which is located between the audience and the performer, and the narration becomes more fluid. But today, the Internet has psychologically broken this barrier, and everyone wants to be part of the performance, and plays their character all the time.” He created Ong’s Hat in the 1980s, the first alternate reality game, a work of fiction inserted in reality (“liminal fiction”) which was so successful that it turned into a conspiracy theory, becoming out of control.“LIMINALITY IS THE WHITE SPACE OF MATRIX, THE SPACE OF THE POSSIBLE. » – MOHAMED MEGDOUL
The story revolves around Ong’s Hat, an abandoned town in the USA – which exists – where researchers are gathered and conduct experiments on reality, then end up finding and settling in another dimension. To accentuate the immersion of his liminal fiction, Matheny uses different delivery mediums: “To create a story that lasts, you must make it accessible to all media, and with several entry points.” But when the Internet enters the equation of this transmedia narration designed for immersion, Internet users become interested in it, develop theories, enter the game, and end up believing in it. Some will investigate on site or even create sectarian groups based on the Ong’s Hat “conspiracy”. If Ong’s Hat and its blurring of the lines between fiction and reality was the beginning of conspiracy movements like Qanon, it also generated many positive things, which are currently re-emerging in progressive artistic circles – like Harmony Korine with EDGLRD. But how does this ambient liminality manifest, and why does it attract us so much?BARBIE-LORE
“Liminality is a bit like the white space of The Matrix. It is the space of the possible, where things have not yet happened, where they could happen, it is the space of pure poetry, which gives us the possibility of conceiving everything, of imagining everything,” explains Mohamed Megdoul, founder of the Immersion magazine. On Tiktok or YouTube, tons of content are created around so-called liminal spaces: empty video game maps, offices, shopping centers, play areas, in short, places of transition that are both empty and strangely familiar. Spaces from dreams, basically. In this vein, we were able to follow the adventures of the tiktoker @unicosobreviviente, who claims to live in 2027 and to be alone on the planet. We follow his wanderings in a Tiktok remake of Eric and Ramzy’s Seul Two, fragmented, distilled every day and followed by millions of intrigued people, caught up in the game, in the story – as with Ong’s Hat. LES BACKROOMS_ These empty offices called backrooms are an internet mythology, used as the basis for various narratives, and have popularized liminal spaces in recent years. The Kane Pixels video, from which this image is taken, has 14 million views… The big entertainment capital companies took a while, but are starting to understand that there is something going on with this taste for imitation reality. Netflix or Apple have therefore recently played with the codes of ARG and liminal spaces in the series The Missing and Severance. The Succession series transformed Silicon Valley into a living Loro Piana ad, and the lore – imaginary world – of Barbie brought the cultural mega-wave of Barbiecore to our iPhones this summer. It is now possible to rent a life-size Barbie house in Malibu, and it is accepted to pretend to be Barbie on a daily basis – and that’s very good. Because the whole idea of liminality is being who you want to be. And to do this, we can either create our own universe, or graft ourselves onto an existing lore, a bit like we would choose the imaginary setting of a theater of self-pressionism. In any case, the mind becomes the medium.META-MODERNISM
“I see social networks, Instagram, as a stage. Choose who you want to play, look whatever you want. Create a persona of your own, because everyone online is fake anyway. (…) people think we’re not real,” one of the two members of 2girls1bottl3, a Tiktok account at the forefront of new-weird, which mixes comedy, mysterious storytelling, Y2K fashion, and cosplay – you will soon see them posing for your favorite brand. We can also make a link between liminality and the fashion which consists of undermining oneself like a teenager from the 2000s, immersing oneself in a period of transition where everything was possible. We find this idea in the SS24 fashion show by the Barràgan brand, organized in an airport – the liminal space par excellence –, or even at Heaven by Marc Jacobs. But as with Ong’s Hat, it’s a question of not falling too deep into fiction, as Joseph Matheny reminds us, “if you play all the time, you’re never sincere.” It is here that a new generation of cinema – driven by the success of Everything Evrywere All At Once – and described as metamodernist, finally re-establishes a more natural link between our real people and our cultural references. In metamodernism, we finally reconnect with a certain sincerity, because unlike Pulp Fiction, although full of references, those found here have a direct emotional link with the viewer, since they are Internet memes. “In the virality of memes, there is an unknown factor, which comes from something very deep, from a collective unconscious which makes us what we are, and which we ignore. When someone does something instinctively, unconsciously, and everyone else reacts just as unconsciously, we have put our finger on a theme,” explains Joseph Matheny. In the age of ultra-connection fueled by algorithms, the community movements of our unconscious interests therefore seem to shape new cultural playgrounds, new common imaginary spaces which are self-nourishing, and located in a world between two . Are we collectively breaking the fifth wall? By Jean-Baptiste ChiaraThe Worst of All Possible Worlds: 111 – Slender Man and Marble Hornets
THIS IS A PREVIEW. FOR THE FULL EPISODE, GO TO Patreon.com/worstofall Anne Huston (Caveat NYC) joins Brian and Josh to do battle with the Slender Man and other monsters from 2009’s viral YouTube horror series Marble Hornets. Their journey takes them from semi-incoherent college memories to the content cornucopia of the Something Awful Forums, Reddit, and early YouTube: reminders of an internet where people could create freely without extreme commercial pressure. They also talk a lot about something called Ong’s Hat. Hope you had a happy Halloween! Anne Huston is the General Manager at Caveat, a cabaret comedy theatre located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Want more TWOAPW? Get access to the rest of this episode, our full back catalogue of premium and bonus episodes, and add your name to the masthead of our website by subscribing for $5/month at Patreon.com/worstofall! Media Referenced in this Episode: Marble Hornets Season 1 dir. Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage (independent, 2009). Full playlist on YouTube The Blair Witch Project dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (Artisan Entertainment, 1999). BoxOfficeMojo // Letterboxd // TMDB Ted’s Caving Page on angelfire.com “Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real” by Jed Oelbaum. Gizmodo, February 21, 2019. The Wyoming Incident Original Upload on YouTube The “Wyoming Incident” discussion thread on the Something Awful Forums Max Headroom 1987 Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident on YouTube Create Paranormal Images thread on the Something Awful Forums.
Listen-111 – Slender Man and Marble Hornets (feat. Anne Huston)
Portal in Ong’s Hat, A Story of Interdimensional Travel and Ong’s Hat Science Camp Collections
Portal in Ong’s Hat, A Story of Interdimensional Travel
Several theories attempt to prove that numerous realities and dimensions exist in parallel to our own and that these realities overlap from time to time.Several theories attempt to prove that numerous realities and… pic.twitter.com/UFhZRiZUC5
— Rocio Becerra (@Rocio__Becerra) November 2, 2023
Ong’s Hat Science Camp Collections
@samanthaleighdigitalart Show your love for, and flex your knowledge of internet lore and ARGs with my original design tribute to the godfather or internet urban legendry, ONG’S HAT! Ong’s Hat is widely recognized as the first (or at least one of the first) fictional internet consipracy ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It was a colaboration between creators dating back to the 1980s that tells the story of a real ghost town in New Jersey, USA becoming the location where rogue physicists experienmented with Chaos Theory and quantum physics, uncovering a portal for interdimensional travel. After facing threats from government military officials, the scientists and physicists decided to pack up and leave this dimension for another, leaving behind only a shack and a gateway to another world. Show your nerdy side and flex your extensive knowledge of internet lore with my original design tribute to this fantastic work of fiction…or is it…*wink* Available in my Redbubble.com shop now! *Link in bio* #ongshat #internetlore #arg #alternaterealitygame #sciencefiction #scifi #science #physics #quantumphysics #wormhole #alternateuniverse #americana #fringescience #conspiracies #internetconspiracies #interneturbanlegends #classicarg #analoghorror #nerdart #fanart #internetculture #internethistory #creepypasta #scienceart #redbubble #femaleartists #femaleartistsofinstagram #digitalartist #argmerch #argart ♬ original sound – SamanthaLeighDigitalArtistry