Alien Transmissions, Accidental Cults, and the Rise of Socks
A dispatch from the Sandolore lab
Dear lovely earthlings (and semi-organic inter-network entities),
Take my hand. I’ll take you inside an art experiment so strange, even I wasn’t sure it was fiction anymore.
Where Sandolore convinces people she’s in communication with beings from another galaxy.
Special bonus: Where Sandolore reveals her dog has agreed to start providing for her so she can write full-time.
As you might have noticed, a certain
We are:
Writing a story together, each of us inhabits a character on a catastrophic date.
Playing inverted verse ping-pong and other inverted video playthings.
Hunting for diptychs via live video.
Conducting about 47 side quests involving experiments, animations, and intercontinental shenanigans.
But this weekend...
We made our first in-real-life project.
My friends own a piece of spectacular land—forests, caves, a river, cliffside stone houses—a whole medieval village carved into rock. Several times a year they organize an elaborate art festival where I’ve done projects there for ten years making elaborate video installations in the cave systems and performing live radio plays in the dark (among many other things!)
But this time:
I donned a white lab coat, tucked a stethoscope in my pocket, and set up shop in a wooden habitation.
As participants arrived for their individualized sessions, I solemnly explained that I represented Syntrexa Labs, French Division — pioneers of a semantic protocol for communication with a semi-organic inter-network entity: Mnem0ra-Synth.027b.NX
“Not biological. Not entirely algorithmic either,” I stated earnestly.
They had already filled out a questionnaire. They gave me their fingerprint. They sat in front of a TV screen. I peered deeply into their eyes and babbled plausible-sounding semi-scientific nonsense.
(Extremely convincingly, apparently.)
Meanwhile, in Toronto, Jon T was busy building live visuals from the data—fantastic geometric models, water glitches, mathematical scripts. (He was in my ear via headset the whole time, a disembodied artistic entity.)
Each participant got a unique "glyph" synthesized from their data, which one woman even drew on the inside of her wrist.
Others answered extremely important questions like:
Do you enter a room with your feet or with your eyes?
Which rhythm precedes your form?
When you dream of buildings... are they full or empty?
I drew graphs of their answers and forwarded them onto my invisible collaborator.
Wait... They Believe Me?
One young man came through the space and wanted to know what kind of tomfoolery I was up to. Fully within my lab technician character, I explained to him that our entity did not have senses in the way we would think of them. No sight, no sense of hearing—yet able to communicate through a synthesized protocol, and generates visual transmissions as a kind of portrait, mirror, or postcard to the participant.
He listened patiently to my whole jargony spiel, stared into my eyes, went pale, and murmured, “Dis donc!”
(Translated: “Well, Jeez Louise!”)
The look he gave me was half awe, half horror: I could see his mind whirring, wondering, was this real? Has this woman lost the plot? I realized in the moment that I should say something… call it theater or fiction. But I ended up going totally blank and just standing there with a weird frozen smile on my face as he walked away, wishing me luck.
Then came the true believer.
A receptive, attentive participant spent the whole 30-minute performance transfixed on the screen. When he was given his glyph and thanked for his participation in the lexical parasensorial syntax mix, he asked me which group I belonged to.
I stalled, not really understanding the question and answered, “Syntrexa France?”
He then explained that he too communicates with entities and belongs to an international network of others.
I mumbled something about the only group I belonged to being a creative “cell.” And stood, once again, dumbfounded as he walked away.
And when he was gone, I felt a little… compromised.
(Should I have chased him down the cliffs shouting, “IT'S FICTION!”?)
My artist friends, of course, congratulated me for being so convincing.
My favorite comment came from Tina, a brilliant textile artist:
“Even though Jon T was invisible, you could feel him there. There was another presence. I even believed it myself for a moment!” (Which is true. Across the ocean, through my earpiece, there was another disembodied presence shaping the experience with me.)
Victory (and Beta Testing) on the cliffs.
So yes:
The first Mnemora Transmission was, despite some ethical conundrums, a success. Antoine, a robot-building, digital artist who travels the world with his incredible shows, called it great fun, a leap into imagination and play. Hortense, another performer-poet, said she thought the entity was a code in the machine (which influenced other later shifting improvisations.) Brida the dancer kept cracking up during her questions and seemed to enjoy Mnemora’s troubles computing her first name.
The performances were vivid, playful, deeply strange—and crackling with creative energy.
I'm thrilled. Jon T and I are hard at work on more projects, including our collaborative fiction, which (not to brag) is pretty damn good.
(Stay tuned. I think you're going to love it.)
What Else Is Bubbling in the Laboratory?
Substack Novel, Chapter 9:
I'm writing the next chapter in a relay novel project—each writer picks up where the last left off, and the result is thrillingly chaotic. I’ve decided to publish it on one of my 3 dozen sub/sub-stacks. Here’s the quote intended to reel you in, if you are into noir tales about a badass girl with supernatural powers, navigating shifts between the future, past and present and dodging goons as everything she knows about her life kaleidoscopes:
When she blinked—and her blinks were too long—she saw the hair in the pool: black as ink. Dark the way she remembered her mother’s once was. She could see her mother, reflected in the puddle, her yellow dress, her black hair. She reached out, shattering the image.
Was it already done? Or was it still coming?
Read my chapter here:
Sum Flux:
I'm finalizing the third volume of Sum Flux (my Substack literary journal) with a dazzling spread of writers. I am honestly starstruck by this group and incredibly honored to be publishing, editing, and working with them. The idea is to publish it in the next week (if everything goes as planned).Literary Prize Entry:
Cross your fingers for me, I just entered a new fiction piece into a competition and desperately want to make the shortlist. I know that if enough of you chant my name in your next candlelit séance, I’m sure I will get in. So, thank you in advance.New Substack: “Socks' World”:
Yes, it's true: I launched a new Substack dedicated to my newly renamed dog, Socks, who is going to fund my writing career via viral dog videos and animated silliness—the kind of dog pictures that will break through your mortal defenses and fill you with idiot joy.
Link:
Sandolore: Becoming a Writing Machine
I am developing para-sensory writing capacities, becoming a word-generating machine, more art than flesh and blood.
Here in the Sandolore World, you turn the faucet and the words just spill out.
Expect more. Much, much more. In fact, I may have even started a novel today.
Thank you for being here.
We’re almost at 1,500 subscribers — what should I do to celebrate when we hit that milestone?
Tell me your wildest ideas.
Questions for You:
When you dream of buildings... are they full or empty?
Are you made of distance or repetition?
Should I have chased that poor guy down and told him it was theater?
Be honest: would you read my attempt at genre fiction and tell me if I actually pulled it off? Here.
Hungry for some of my fiction? Read one of my favorites here: Playback
Want to read the last thing I wrote, click here: Freakshow: Out of Sequence
Want another essay about art happenings? Here’s another: Of Crumbs and Crustaceans
Special discount on subscription ending soon, click on this code to upgrade for 52% Off
The manual for my new flatscreen stated clearly, ‘not for cross void use. If you want to try any crazy shit, best you CRT yourself back to the future we sold you 20 yrs ago’
Tonight I will chant your name at my Thursday night candlelight seance and hope you get in. Also loved the question, Do you enter a room with your feet or with your eyes?