Rods

I used to have this documentary on a home-made VHS in the early 2000s. I was fascinated by it.

I was also about 12 years old. I remember I even lent my VHS to my teacher at school on a quest to convince someone of authority of this new creature’s existence. He wasn’t as convinced as I was in my naivety.

All these years later, watching it for the first time in about 15 years, I can’t stop laughing at just how much these people were able to extrapolate from the now-obvious sight of insects caught on now-outdated camera equipment. It’s interesting how less credible this phenomena becomes with the steady advance of media technology.

As Robin pointed out whilst we watched this documentary one morning: are rods not a perfect example of what Francois Bonnet, in The Infra-World, calls the “infra-sensible” — that object that appears projected on the otherwise “invisible wall between the perceived sensible and the unperceived sensible”?

The invention of modern media technology has rendered this wall visible through the process of mediatization. Bonnet writes: “The moment of mediatization is thus the moment of a channelling, a second-order conditioning where it is no longer the object itself that is altered, but its deployment within the space of the sensible.”