For a Blobbing in the Networked Zones

There is a slippery meeting place of thing and non-thing in the data-realm of visual-tracking systems, a place where matter and non-matter are blurred in that moment before classification, when both are detected and interpreted as data, but not yet designated by technology as one or an ‘other. ’ Until this mat-ter is analyzed, and then classified with computer algorithms it hovers in a space of indeterminate thresh-old where matter and nonmatter shift and merge, leaking into each other and into other fields. This can be read as a moment of becoming, as in animation—the time and place where in-betweens act to ‘generate life’: to animate. These in-betweens are not static, but in the process of mutation— uncanny forms that reminds us of what was and anticipate what may be. If we were to think of this process of mutation as like the emergent monstrous portrayed in science-fiction film, it would be close to the transformative process of emergent puberty/sexuality bursting out of Syl’s body in Roger Donaldson’s 1995 film Species.1 It is appropriate that this film is named not for an other, alien, or stranger, but for classification(s). If we were to choose a form for this monstrous, the archaic beast that emerges in Species would be a poor model. Instead, we would take the medium and the generator of form in Species as the model: “the alien is the genetic code for a woman picked up by a radio telescope … an idea that was first done in the British TV serial A for Andromeda”2 What is thi