Joseph Matheny's Blog, page 16

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https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/ubmcq5/Episode_51_-_Joseph_Matheny9vcj1.mp3

 

LINK TO SHOW: http://sittingnow.co.uk/episode-51-authoring-reality-with-joseph-matheny/
This week Ken sits down with our old buddy Joseph Matheny.

Joe is an innovator in the ARG space and is well known for his Ong’s Hat mythology, he also used to rub shoulders with some pretty impressive people, including Robert Anton Wilson and Christopher Hyatt.

This week we discuss: Conspiracy theory, ARG, that flu thing going around, and much more.

Main theme by Simon Smerdon (Mothboy)

Music bed by chriszabriskie.com

Joseph Matheny’s bio:

Some of the things I have achieved as an inventor, creator, product manager, CEO, CTO, writer, and artist include: Playing a role in establishing and evangelizing standards and practices such as PDF, DVD,  Podcasting, ARG and digital video. I am an inventor. I have designed apps for iPhone, iPad and other mobile platforms. I am a published author of screenplays, white papers, technology, sci-fi, marketing and gaming books.

My pioneering work in Transmedia is chronicled in the University level textbook: Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat – University Press of Mississippi (May 17, 2011) Also see here. My transmedia work, Ong’s Hat, is known throughout the gaming industry and academia as the first, proto-ARG. (Alternate Reality Game)I have also been the executive producer and originator of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Podcast the first film festival to podcast from the event and the executive producer/director of the Los Angles Film Festival podcast. I  was also the podcast editor at .

I was one of the two founders/curators of the Greylodge Podcasting Company, an Independent film review site covered on MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, Boing-Boing, Dangerous Minds and Torrentfreak as well as a founder of Piltolite/Hukilau.

I have staged and orchestrated very successful, large-scale, mass media Alternate Reality Game/Transmedia style projects since the mid-80s, utilizing print, phone, fax, email, Internet, advertising, video, film, audio, CD ROM, DVD, and on-demand media. My work has been featured on CBS Marketwatch, CNN, CNET TV, Kiplinger’s, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NHK, MTV, PBS, LA Times, Clear Channel Radio, BBC, MSNBC,  Boing-Boing, and many other weekly newspapers, trade magazines, local and regional radio, television and newspapers.

My work was profiled in Games(TM) magazine, as well as Slate and Gizmodo. If you want to know “what it is“, these are probably the best profiles to date.

The Incunabula Papers CDROM was recently included by invitation in the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) digital art collection.

 

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Episode Info

Welcome back y’all! In this episode the gals cover the very haunted Houska Castle and New Jersey’s incredibly spooky Ong’s Hat.

Also, special announcement from us & Balefire Apothecary AND shout out to listener and friend of the show, TonyBony, for creating our amazing new intro

Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ghostsnheauxs/e/76528395?autoplay=true

Conspiracy theorizing as alternate-reality game
From Pizzagate Neon (2017) by Warren Neidich. Neon glass sculpture, installation view. Photography by Karolina Sobel. Courtesy Priska Pasquer, Cologne.

“Many quotes from a long and enjoyable conversation I had with the author made it into this article. I hope you find it as enlightening and thought-provoking as I did.”  -JM

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/

The alternate reality game began in the late 1980s, when multidisciplinary artist Joseph Matheny pioneered the format with Ong’s Hat, a transmedia narrative about an interdimensional cult run by Princeton scientists at an ashram in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Drawing on real people and places, Matheny crafted a series of documents as supposed evidence for the cult’s existence. He seeded them to the public through snail mail, posts on early internet bulletin boards (some of which can still be seen at alt.conspiracy and alt.illuminati), and Xerox copies planted inside independent weeklies and esoteric literature at libraries, book stores, and coffee shops. Over the course of a decade, the story’s media range grew to include CD-ROMs, books, video, and radio, including some interviews on the popular paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM, which exposed Ong’s Hat to a wider audience of conspiracy enthusiasts.

Ong’s Hat was a unique hybrid of speculative history and speculative autobiography that participants could co-author by joining the investigation online. It was meant to be defamiliarizing and immersive; Matheny envisioned Ong’s Hat as a playground for experiencing synchronicities and then comparing them with other players’ — an exercise in intersubjectivity. But immersive storytelling and the intersubjectivity it constitutes can have a dark side, wherein communities can form around shared delusions that take on a momentum of their own. To Matheny’s surprise, some participants confused his fictional narrative with an actual conspiracy. When he broke character to remind them it was just a game, these true believers accused Matheny of being part of a disinformation campaign or running a mind-control experiment. He lost final say over the universe he invented.

Engaging in conspiracy culture is like playing a secret game based on insider knowledge, and it is this feeling that propels Q’s current popularity

When I spoke to Matheny, he partly attributed this reaction to the Coast to Coast segments attracting conspiracy-minded participants, to those who used Ong’s Hat to fulfill their X-Files-inspired “I want to believe” aspirations, and to proto-trolls looking for a pot to stir. Eventually these elements escalated their participation in Ong’s Hat to harassment, threats, and attempted home invasions, and Matheny was forced to discontinue the project in 2001. The term ARG, he says, began to be used on conspiracy and trolling forums around this time as a euphemism for gamified harassment campaigns. Matheny told me that he has since seen hardcore Ong’s Hat believers resurface in other conspiracy movements, including Weinergate, Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon, and the coronavirus cluster of 5G, vaccine, and quarantine paranoia. To Matheny, the 20th century U.S. tradition of conspiracy theories was “great folklore, great Americana,” to be taken figuratively. But he perceived this rightward and more serious turn in conspiracy circles at the turn of the century, with a crescendo in 2014, the year that some of his formerly left-leaning friends came out as neo-reactionary monarchists.

Matheny now refers to Pizzagate and QAnon as “dark ARGs,” signaling their family resemblance. “There was a bonding that happened, and probably a cooptation of troll culture into conspiracy circles,” he says. “This converged with fundamentalist people who were also doomsday preppers, and they had all adopted trolling behaviors, speaking in bad faith, giving circular arguments. All these weird subcultures have come together. How it happened was gradual. There wasn’t a puppeteer, but there are definitely people who took advantage of it. Breitbart, Bannon, Spencer.” This convergence of fundamentalism and trolling in conspiracy culture proved to be a toxic brew, facilitating zealous delusion and selective insincerity simultaneously. “The irony helps these people sidestep criticism,” Matheny says. “‘I’m just kidding, I’m just trolling.’ So I shouldn’t take anything you say seriously? Then they react with anger. And now there are movements being crafted to take advantage of this.” Irony serves as a gateway to belief as well as a source of plausible deniability, the same dynamic that can lead anti-PC trolls to become actual neo-Nazis. As George Orwell put it, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/

An audio story told by Mark Moran with sound collage by Clay Pigeon. One of a series of Waking Weird episodes which can be heard broadcast live every Monday at 8:39 am (EST) at WFMU FM and WFMU.org. Hear the program archives at www.wfmu.org/playlists/WA.

The New Jersey Pine Barrens have a plethora of deserted villages, most of them simply abandoned decades, even centuries ago. One of the most infamous of these is Ongs Hat, which some believe to be a mysterious portal to another dimension. Continue reading → weirdnj.com/stories/ongs-hat/

Weird NJ · The Strange Story of Ong’s Hat

[image error] Header photo of Ong’s Hat Road by Michael Szul.

Even today, the origins of Ong’s Hat—although laid out on paper and in academic textbooks—is still vague. Was it based on a previous work? Who were all the players involved and what did they hope to gain from this experiment? The “game” as it is, is at an end, but the legend continues to live on like any good mythology. In many ways, like Slenderman, Ong’s Hat is a creation of the Internet that continues to have a “reality” online even if the real world has since understood it’s fiction. It’s become a golem of words, places, and ideas that continues to trap the curious, and for those that exist and explore the virtual world, it’s as real as any historical event for it is an actual piece of Internet history, showing us how the communication of ideas can virally propel the behavior of individuals across distances far greater than any folklore could imagine.

What Ong’s Hat shows us is how technology can change and propel narratives regardless of facts. Even as Ong’s Hat was shown to be a “story” in the traditional sense, many refused to believe that it wasn’t based on true occurrences. When I reflect on our current landscape filled with false memes and post-fact Facebook posts, and I look to a future of artificial intelligence-generated deep fakes, understanding how and why narratives behavior in this way is paramount to understanding how the future of media, disinformation, and politics is going to play out.

Read the entire article at: https://botsandbeer.com/issues/2×07-a-short-history-of-alternate-reality-games.html

Transmedia pioneer Joseph Matheny and Consciousness writer David Metcalfe join us to talk about Ongs hat, lucid dreaming, and more

Link to Randocast

If you’re not familiar with Randonauting I highly recommend you try it out.

Subreddit

Randonauts.com

Precursor: Ong’s Hat

In the 1980s transmedia artist Joseph Matheny[2] launched the Ong’s Hat game, inspired by play-by-mail multiplayer games run by Flying Buffalo.[3] Though Ong’s Hat may not have set out to be an ARG, the methods by which the author interacted with participants and used different platforms to build and spread its legend has been reflected in later games.[4] Also known as The Incunabula Papers, the game incorporated the practice of “legend tripping”[6] in which a group of people visit sites known in folklore for horrific or supernatural events. Matheny built a mythos around a supposed ghost town in New Jersey throughout the 1980s through works disguised as research shared on bulletin boards and physical zines.[8] One of the earliest archived theories about the alleged legend appeared in the October 1993 issue of Boing Boing and was posted online as early as February 11th, 1994.[7]

Between 1994 and 2000, posts about Ong’s Hat were planted on a number of different Usenet groups to spark discussion, including sci.math[9], alt.illuminati[10], alt.conspiracy[11] and alt.society.paradigms[12], among others. In 2001, Matheny stopped the project[13] and went on to publish two books about it, as well as archiving all the materials on the Incunabula website.[5]

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/alternate-reality-games

A very interesting article/review of Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Now, from the you-can-learn-something-new-every-day files, comes Michael Kinsella’s Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat.

Read it here: http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/the-surprising-online-life-of-legends/29221

From the article:

“The response of Joseph Matheny to Legend-Tripping Online suggests the success of Kinsella’s read on the Incunabula Papers. On his Web site, Matheny wrote that Kinsella “did an excellent job and only missed the mark with two or three of his conclusions,” which Matheny said he would clear up by writing a complimentary account.

In the context of the Incunabula Papers and Ong’s Hat, something about that statement echoes beguilingly. Is Matheny offering to perpetuate the project, despite closing it down?

Or perhaps he never did shutter it. In 2001, his announcement of the termination of the project said that he and a colleague “decided today to publicly announce in the near future that the Ong’s Hat Project has now concluded.” Not only do the tenses in his statement appear slippery, but he also tantalizingly mused that he did think the Incunabula Papers “would still make a good book from a cultural anthropology perspective.”

Is Kinsella’s Legend-Tripping Online not only that book but also, unwittingly, another phase in the whole, crazy Incunabula Papers caper?

Kinsella allows: “When you’re dealing with this…this thing, there are trickster qualities and pranks and hoaxes, and fact and fiction are so blurred that it’s really hard to make sense out of it.”

Also see this review from the Journal of Folklore Research

Welcome back to CT&C, on this episode we are going to look into a very fascinating conspiracy theory that originates from a tiny village with the odd name of Ong’s Hat in New Jersey where some say that a duo of rogue scientists who were living off-grid in a small commune created a portal to another dimension that still exists there hidden today

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Because I’m posting this on Halloween, I thought I‘d try to stick to the theme of trickery. However, I’m not going to be talking about deceptive demons or satanic rituals. It gets old. I think the subject I have in mind is much better than that. So let’s just jump right into it. – Nick Hinton

LINK: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189985756271521792.html