The Arcades Project Arcade (insert coin to begin game)

Slough off the cicada's golden shell
(Ch. 4 Chaos Stratagems)
Mask oneself. Either leave one's distinctive traits behind and become inconspicuous or masquerade as something or someone else. This strategy is mainly used to escape from a stronger enemy.
-The Thirty Six Stratagems, China, author and date unknown

“Myro, a girl, letting fall a child’s tears, raised this little tomb for the locust that sang in the seed-land,
And for the oak-dwelling cicada; implacable Hades holds their double song.”
-Anyte of Tegea,, epitaph poem, 3rd century B.C. Greece

“When there’s no more room in HELL, the dead shall walk the EARTH.”
-Dawn of the Dead, George Romero, 1978.

Welcome to the Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk outside of Pittsburgh, PA!
Before you begin roaming the territory of the mall and devouring the brains of the living, make sure you are clearly visible in corpse make-up, including festering wounds and rotting flesh. Please download the MAKEUP TUTORIAL for proper application. And remember, “Stay hungry, stay foolish!”(1)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&t=765s

[download this free album to access MAKEUP TUTORIAL as PDF liner notes ]

disclaimer:
this has nothing to do with the original walk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVSZSFAt-SY
 
THE POINT OF VIEW OF MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR BY LUCID BLATHER (not to be confused with Luther Blissett):
a return sound walk to New Babylon brought up many longtime interests and themes. i like epistemological adventures with unreliable narrators and impossible instructions that require interpretation. Many dense books fit this model. Primarily, these footnotes are a text-collage homage to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, some pre-history for Situationism I felt like highlighting. I also always wanted to make a connection to the Night of the Living Dead sequel as zombie=flaneur has a Baudelaire flair via goth kid mall rats presenting quite an image of recuperation. (also, the repetition of the Dario Argento edit with more Goblin OST proliferates a lot of amusing, alternate titles). However, as shopping malls themselves are increasingly outmoded and repurposed, this is not quite the cynical warning to utopian optimism i once intended.
The Frankfurt School is inarguably Statler and Waldorf in the Muppet Show of radical theory, but it is especially in Adorno where I have found the concept of play developed via Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which has a pervasive influence on many that is surprising to me. German Idealism can’t shake off German Romanticism if not in Hegel certainly neither for Marx. The “fragment” writing style has influence running from avant-garde manifestos (political and aesthetic) to concept art in various forms (especially in its experimental music roots: any kind of instruction score that gives directions like an algorithm or recipe): “workers of the world unite,” to “feed a piano hay like a horse.”

SYSTEM, FRAGMENT, CYBERNETICS

"A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog." Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeums fragment 206

cicadas are easily one of my favorite sounds; pervasive where i grew up, i took them for granted until i left. i like that they are prevalent in some of the least pleasant places in America (like its capital D.C.) but they can be found from Greece to Japan and have great symbolic and historic significance. often they are analogies for the ineffable as they are usually unseen yet palpably loud. this dynamic is useful for describing many abstractions that are also concrete, like most aspects of capitalism, where invisible constructs are yet "the Thing" that runs our lives. likewise, this type of contradiction is apt for the way that Adorno approaches utopia: negatively as in negative theology especially Judaic. Purely a materialist usage, the "ban on images" logic further brightens the dour obstacle courses of his texts, or at least illuminates: his is an ultimately utopian project. i can't help but think of doing an art exhibit by placing black shrouds over utopian architecture. it's hard for me to think of a utopian city without the element of ecology these days, so an old field recording was an easy choice for a New Babylon return piece.

[Cicadas have been associated with rebirth and immortality and their numbers can be overwhelming during their summertime "invasions," plus they literally crawl up from the ground, then die and leave their bodies everywhere, so i'm making an original contribution to their lore by claiming them also as zombie hordes. Any city is indeed theirs when they emerge. Except cicadas are lovers, not fighters, to a fault.]

Situationism has a lot of techno-optimist contemporaries, being the era of post-war abundance and gizmos of the military industrial complex. the closed vs. open systems of cybernetics particularly come to mind. Whatever emancipatory potential that technological innovation held at the time, we can easily see the dreams of Internet pioneers as bust. Self-sustaining harmony of mechanistic systems was an imposition of ideologically imperialist ecologies. Abject, hierarchal technocracy reigns.

I wanted to go the extra mile for this sound walk and make something fun, interactive, and worthy of Situationist optimism. But of course, all roads lead to the internet in societies of control. While doing some casual research, with much chagrin, I found that cicadas have been vaguely hyperlinked by the lazy apophenia of certain right-wing conspiracy theories. I won't even name them lest i get sucked into a nightmare worthy of Umberto Eco. I should have known as I was aping the style of Borges, Pynchon, etc. where the web always comes back around. Thus, homage to Walter Benjamin is all the more appropriate: discerning "aestheticized politics" vs. "politicized aesthetics" is among the most trustworthy in the anti-fascist tool kit when live action role play (LARPing) of the highest delusion constitutes the wide swath of nefarious political activity.

Any conceptual obstacle course or epistemological adventure is only as good as the muscles you build in your mind (like that paradoxical mixed metaphor) so there are no secrets to be revealed at the end of this game, only another thinker I found deserving of homage who was influential on May '68 era ideas and with biographical landmarks in Den Haag. Essentially, all this is a game of allegory without "likes;" using material and spatial language to conjure impossible objects and imaginary places.