Barthes argues for textually received pleasure through “abrasion”: “the abrasions impose upon the fine surface” of a text provide us with pleasure. But it’s not displeasing, nor necessarily penetrative. In fact, looking up from the text is a rupture, a leakage of the private into public. Spaces, viewpoints, and texts seem to insert or obtrude. The thrilling and upsetting delivery to our living rooms is of course still achieved, whether they do it in another time (pre-made video) or alongside of us (we were in our homes while they were in their storage space we/ they were there all along). nerds” they are doing this in our time?). She’s an agent inside the text who can interrupt the flow of time, but she can still act inside of the new time created by the interruption: the Max Headroom mask talks to the viewer from an impossible time (a space inside of stopped time)-isn’t this part of the terror generated by the event, too? And how unsettling would it be, in the paused moment, to not know where or how this document for insertion was created (did the pirates make a video-say, two weeks before-to simply lay down in the television-space they opened up? Or were viewers imagining themselves to be seeing something created live, as in: the pirates are directly transmitting the talking-mask for all the “newspaper. This allows her to physically alter her space beneath others’ notice. Evie touches her fingers together and time stops around her. The pirating incident is a form of/ a text for modeling time travel in that it interrupts via pause, like the half-alien/ half-human Evie Ethel Garland from the syndicated television program Out of this World: a text from childhood, a thing that holds our attention, in part, because of its amazing enactment of fantasy. This still is drawn from the Sunday night intrusion upon WTTW’s broadcast of Doctor Who. Max Headroom 1987 broadcast signal intrusion incident. Interruption and anachronism: time travel. Who rewrites Holmes and Watson, which is itself a rewriting of Poe’s Dupin: a pile up of texts and allusions. Or, does the interruption become “that text” that Barthes says “we write in our head when we look up”? A distraction from the text and a nullification of the text’s authority? Is a signal intrusion a brief moment where textual authority and hierarchies are subverted? Paroxysm, an unplanned knock, superimposition, re-inscription, nullification, and translation: they wear a mask of Max Headroom and translate a thing in transition, attempting, we think, to remake Max’s anti-capitalist “disguise” into its actual content they intrude on a text, too, that is transitional: eras and planets, and faces that change even as the characters and situations remain. “We” re-inscribe the signal to show that “we” “own” the signal. Intrusions are more like graffiti, a means to reassert presence and expression. Here’s a starship now we’re talking peanut butter. But advertisements and intrusions share the quality of a superimposition. Or, pulled from the evening air, and wedged into a prior schedule. A kind of release, like gas or treasure, the old tie that binds entrails, hell, and gold. They appear disjointed, allusive, stupid, and eruptive. They have the quality of a threat, the paroxysms of a global crisis: capitalism’s death drive producing etchings of its own ruinous-ness. Then, WTTW’s Sunday night broadcast of Doctor Who. Subscriptions, Captain Midnight announced, were too expensive: “Showtime/ Movie Channel Beware!” The second and third happened in 1987, two separate broadcast signal intrusions within hours, same town. An HBO broadcast of The Falcon and the Snowman was intruded upon by a consumer complaint. Only three have ever occurred in the United States. “All of the Meanwhiles”: Signal Intrusion, Time Travel, Abrasion, Rupture.īroadcast signal intrusions are rare.
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