Joseph Matheny's Blog, page 10
January 21, 2023
The Liminal Cycle (A Trilogy) by Joseph Matheny
Information Golem: New Mini-Series from TOOWi Arts
January 20, 2023
Announcing the Incident at Ong’s Hat
Behind the Scenes Episode 1– David Metcalfe
From the Substack
A new series will premier on BBC 4 Radio Limelight on air and then as a podcast after every Friday broadcast for the next five weeks. The series starts on Fri, 27 Jan 2023. It is a five-part series titled The Incident at Ong’s Hat.
LINK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hg08
The series is inspired by Ong’s Hat: The Beginning along with elements from my personal life.
A new episode will premier every Friday. (Episode list can be found here.)
The credit list can also be accessed by clicking “show more” below the description. I make an appearance playing “myself,” or at least a fictionalized version of myself, as it were.
In anticipation of the premier, I am sharing some raw audio interviews conducted as background material by the producers. I will run one behind-the-scenes piece every Friday before the broadcast and podcast release of each episode. I am calling this series Behind the Scenes.
Here is an RSS feed for your convenience, or you may wait for this Substack to remind you each Friday for the duration of the series.
https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/232444.rss
If you don’t know about David, you should. I consider him one of the preeminent researchers into the nuanced world of liminal places and states.
From his vision document: David Metcalfe is currently a Scholar in Virtual Residence with the Windbridge Institute and the Editor-in-Chief for the Windbridge Research Center’s Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness studies – a researcher, writer, and multimedia specialist focusing on the interrelationship of art, culture, and consciousness, in 2011 he established the Liminal Analytics: Applied Research Collaborative to focus on testing and deploying a unique combination of applied scholarship, market intelligence, digital media, and social network development in order to build strategic, multidisciplinary lines of communication.
Enjoy.
Disclaimer: The Incident at Ong’s Hat was not written by me. It is a true crime podcast story using elements of the Ong’s Hat narrative, along with elements taken from my personal life, with my permission and participation. This is part of the reason I am sharing the interviews behind this story. I think seeing both sides, the facts and the fiction, will shine a light on the process.
1. The Incunabula PapersLimelight The Incident at Ong’s Hat
Episode 1 of 5
CREDITSSarah Larsen, a yoga instructor, and her friend Charlie Brill went in search of Ong’s Hat, a fabled gateway to another dimension. Now Sarah is missing, and maybe this urban legend isn’t a legend at all…
Cast:
Charlie – Corey Brill
Sarah – Avital Ash
Rodney Ascher – Himself
Det. Stecco – James Bacon
Casey – Hayley Taylor
Ringo – Benjamin Williams
Kit – Randall Keller
Denny Unger – Himself
Joseph Matheny – Himself
Newscasters: Elizabeth Saydah, Dean Wendt
Created and Produced by Jon Frechette and Todd Luoto
Inspired by Ong’s Hat: The Beginning by Joseph Matheny
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Jon Frechette, Chris Zabriskie, Anthéne, Macrogramma (under Creative Commons)
Editing and Sound Design – Jon Frechette
Additional Editing – Brandon Kotfila and Greg Myers
Special Thanks – Ben Fineman
Written and Directed by Jon Frechette
Executive Producer – John Scott Dryden
“Ong’s Hat Survivors Interview” courtesy of Joseph Matheny
Visit thegardenofforkedpaths.com and josephmatheny.com
A Goldhawk production for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds
January 2, 2023
Xen The Zen Of The Other – The Audio Drama, Free Version
As is my custom, after a year of commercially making Xen: The Zen of the Other audio drama commercially available, I am releasing the entire bundle for free on Archive.org and Youtube. It is released with a Creative Commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International. You may download and listen to it, share it, or post it, as long as it is not for commercial purposes, with no changes and full attribution to the source.
Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ezra-buckley-xen-the-zen-of-the-other-audio
Youtube:
A personal downloadable version
Reviews and more infoDecember 30, 2022
Ong’s Hat: The Beginning (Authorized Version)
Ong’s Hat: The Beginning (Authorized Version)Reissued, authorized, and final version, 2021.
Available as Kindle, Print, and Audiobook
Free versions on Archive.org and Lib-Gen
ONG’S HAT FAQREVIEWS
“…a bizarre Internet phenomenon: an “immersive” online experience—part mystery, part game, part who knows what—known as both the Incunabula Papers and Ong’s Hat. The Incunabula Papers/Ong’s Hat was, or is, a “many-threaded, open-ended interactive narrative” that ”weds an alternate history of chaos science and consciousness studies to conspiracy theories, parallel dimensions, and claims that computer-mediated environments can serve as magical tools…. the documents provoked a widespread “immersive legend-trip” in the late 1990s. Via Web forums, participants investigated the documents—manifestos—which spun up descriptions of brilliant but suppressed discoveries relating to paths that certain scientists had forged into alternate realities. Soon, those haunted dimensions existed in the minds and fantasies of Ong’s Hat’s many participants. That was evident as they responded to the original postings by uploading their own—all manner of reflections and artifacts: personal anecdotes, audio recordings, and videos—to augment what became “a really immersive world, and it was vast”.
– The Chronicle of Higher Education—-
“Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media- is evident in every alternate reality game that came after.” – Games Magazine 2013
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. –Know Your Meme
The Incunabula Papers are arguably the first immersive online legend complex that introduced readers to a host of content, including what religious historian Robert Ellwood has called the “alternative reality tradition. – Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat
As a companion piece to understanding some of the history of the transmedia work that centered around Ong’s Hat you may also want to read Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat, reviewed here.
The Incunabula Papers CDROM was recently included in the BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) digital art collection.
Dedicated to the memory of my dearly departed friends: The members of The Formless Ocean Group (*) – Nina Graboi, Elizabeth Gips, Paddy Long, Betsy Herbert, and Robert Anton Wilson.
Also to my “non-fog” departed friends: Mickey Hollenberg, Dave, DW Cooper, Dr. Hyatt (Alan), humdog and Diane DiPrima.
November 27, 2022
ONG’S HAT SQUATCH TALKS PODCAST S3 / EP43
Tonight we just have some things to discuss about upcoming investigations, and look back on what we are truly grateful for. Especially ‘You’ our viewers. Added to this is some audio recorded on a night hike in the Pine Barrens with the UK BBC who came over the pond to investigate the mystery surrounding Ong’s Hat.
November 22, 2022
The Birth of Alternate Reality Games
Alternate Reality Games have existed for far longer than most people realize, I just wanted to talk about some of the first ones. (the outro has all the music used in order)
CONTENTS: 00:00
Intro 00:55
Ong’s Hat 04:17
Publius Enigma 09:13
Blair Witch 11:44
The Beast 14:03
ilovebees 16:04
Closing Thoughts
17:10 Outro
November 21, 2022
SPLINTERED STATES I ‘traveled back in time from 2036’ – the US capital will change after America breaks into 5 during a second civil war
He even included photos that were grainy and hard to make out of a vehicle he claimed to be his actual time machine, which was a 1967 Chevy CorvetteCredit: GettyLots of people wholeheartedly believed Titor while other people obsessed over errors and inconsistencies, becoming online detectives trying to uncover his truth.
Reda the article: https://www.the-sun.com/news/6712743/traveled-back-time-us-change-america-second-civil-war/
A multimedia artist said that the John Tritor story “was created as a literary experiment by people who were observing what I was doing with Ong’s Hat [a pioneering early alternate reality game].”
“And these people wanted to do something like that. I was a consultant on the project, [but] it wasn’t my project,” Joseph Matheny added, according to Thrillist.
Richard O’Connor, who listened to the radio station, said: “There was always the sense that Art was fully aware of the con.”
“This made the gullibility of the callers even better,” O’Connor stated.
He added: “John Titor, probably to lesser than most of the other ‘time travelers,’ didn’t seem to have a strong enough grasp of history (or the present, for that matter) to concoct particularly compelling stories.
“But Art had this fine skill of constructing drama from the little they said and pulling out just enough bits to make it fun,” O’Connor said.
November 8, 2022
Lifehacker-11 Famous Places That Don’t Really Exist: Ong’s Hat
Slide 8
Located in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Ong’s Hat was listed as a town on early maps of the area. It may have been the site of a small village, but it was probably just the site of a Ong’s hut, a place a farmer named Ong stopped on his way to market. But even by the 1930s, Ong’s Hat still appeared on maps of the area, although there was nothing there but the remains of an old shack in the middle of New Jersey’s ancient forest.
Fast-forward to the 1980s, when strange stories started appearing seemingly at random on bulletin board services and ‘zines detailing an elaborate conspiracy concerning a group of mystics and scientists who opened a door between dimensions at Ong’s Hat.
The story, created by Joseph Matheny and detailed in his book The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat And Other Gateways To New Dimensions, is a work of fiction, but many of the weirdos and cranks who followed the elaborate breadcrumb trail of clues Matheny and others left were convinced it was real. As late as the 2000s, truth-seekers were showing up at Matheny’s door looking for the true story of Ong’s Hat.
LINK: https://lifehacker.com/11-famous-places-that-dont-really-exist-1849754301/slides/8October 27, 2022
S01 E01 – Ong’s Hat and Weaponized ARG’s: A Conversation w Joseph Matheny, Ong’s Hat Creator & Transmedia Artist
The Prop Anon Podcast explores the life and work of American novelist, Robert Anton Wilson through interviews and discussions with some of the most cutting-edge artists and thinkers around today.
The Prop Anon Podcast presents interviews with Artists, Journalists, Comedians Comic Book Writers, Scientists, Community Activists, and Musicians as we think of ways to make existence, in the words of Bill Hicks, “a better ride” for everyone on Spaceship Planet Earth!
Joseph Matheny, transmedia Artist and creator of Ong’s Hat, the first Alternative Reality Game speaks about ‘weaponized’ ARGs, propaganda, how to free oneself from mental slavery, and works of Robert Anton Wilson
Tune In, Turn On, and Prop Out!
