Carmelo Pampillonio: Apophenic Realism
Apophenic Realism is a media survey of the current “conspiracy” topographies as they’re being banished into self-reinforcing archipelagos outside of public discourse. It takes the form of two audio studies, “Frequency Cloud Operations” (13:48) and “Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity 02” (5:00), accompanied by this short text about the process behind their creation. The project unfolded through the navigation of banned media and shadowbanned communities, as well as through discussions with some of the most prominent conspiracy video creators and account administrators. The work stems from my longtime interest in epistemic subcultures of the digital sphere, and their uniquely participatory sense-making strategies. It draws upon conspiracism’s centrality of media and its methods of apophenia — the tendency to perceive connections or patterns between things that may be otherwise unrelated.
“Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity 02” is an unedited recording of a 5G cell tower’s electromagnetic signal transmissions, captured from the 700 MHz and 28 GHz consumer bands. The rise of conspiracies linking 5G technologies to [REDACTED] led to any such health claims being forbidden on traditional digital and broadcast media, leaving only channels selling general EMF-protective garments and orgonite crystals behind for conspiracists who read between the lines. These 5G claims float among the swathes of new [REDACTED]-related conspiracisms that have hastened the shifting role of media. As Mark Sargent, one of the most prominent flat earth proponents, recently explained to me in an email: “My channel for instance was almost bulletproof. I made only FE videos and everything was great. Then the pandemic started and I went off on rant after rant in regards to the virus, the vaccine, and the agenda. I was hit with a number of guidelines strikes and the channel should have been destroyed. For some reason it was spared, no reason was given. I have never made a vaccine video since.”
As this media study progressed, the work behind the composition “Frequency Cloud Operations” gradually emerged as the primary focus due to its sheer scope. It takes as its source material banned documentaries, videos from self-described “skywatchers” documenting chemtrails (as well as 5G towers and flat earth indicators), and frequencies used as atmospheric and bodily detoxifiers. The sounds trace a collective topography of field recordings generated from conspiracy communities across a wide network of media channels. The piece offers an introductory media study of general conspiratorial thinking — its capacities for meaning-making, propensities for both connection and isolation, and its increasingly overgeneralized debasement and censorship — and follows the sounds across these emergent complications.
Chemtrail conspiracy theories are arguably the earliest, most influential, and enduring of the internet-based conspiracies, making them even more significant for surviving what Mark Andrejevic calls the “infoglut” of the increasing complexity of circulating information. In 1996 the USAF Air University released a report titled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, which outlined “a strategy for the use of a future weather modification system to achieve military objectives.” Within a year, early internet forums began buzzing with allegations that some of the aircraft contrails in the sky contain toxic chemicals sprayed by government agencies. The speed with which the conspiracy spread through these scattered forums is striking even for today’s standards.
The theory’s popularity was concurrent with the advent of the cyberlibertarian dream to keep the digital marketplace of ideas free from any regulation and interference — to let beliefs and spaces sort themselves out. Despite remaining a prominent ideology in Silicon Valley, this utopian ambition was never fulfilled. Rather, we see steady consolidations of traditional and digital media, and the subsequent enclosure of acceptable interpretations of social phenomena and power structures. Consequently, as we have seen in the past few years, this centralizing, hierarchical media environment and the pressures of the digital infoglut have led to the deteriorating potential of communication and consensus, contributing to the need for alternative narratives. This is one way the internet has created as many conspiracies as it has refuted, as from this impasse precipitates an apophenic realism: there is nothing but sense making. Facing a chaotic world, the disempowered are turned into hermeneutic dot-connectors within a networked, participatory machine.
Today, chemtrail videos on a growing number of alternative media platforms still garner hundreds of thousands of views — and chemtrails are far from the most popular conspiracy theory. On YouTube there are communities of skywatchers running hobby channels hosting anywhere between 600 to 5,000 homemade cloud-gazing music videos. Yet the comment sections always gesture back to the alternative spaces, where the real conversations can unfold. The chemtrail believer has seen their ensnarement within the latticework of the sky increase in lockstep with the burgeoning complexities of the technologically accelerated world. As James Bridle writes, “there’s no outside to the complexity we find ourselves enmeshed in, no exterior point of view that we can all share on the situation.” On an intuitive level the conspiracist understands that we — the average people — have no exterior point of view to share and operate from, as only an unimaginably powerful entity or inner organization could. As to the existence and form of such entities: you will find radically different answers to this ontology depending on the conspiracist you ask.
The chemtrailer seeks to burst the clouds surrounding a global agenda of geoengineering; the flat earther pursues a planetary understanding beyond the containing ice wall; the UFO disclosure advocate seeks to pry extraterrestrial knowledge of our cosmic condition out of secrecy. A conspiracy can be an endeavor to comprehend one’s situatedness with an exo-planetary frame of reference, and in this sense it can inhabit a very pro-complexity standpoint (contrary to many characterizations). A conspiracy is the disempowered person’s pursuit for the external — or at least as close to the epistemic edge as humanly possible. Most importantly, the fundamental inclination behind conspiracist thought is to hold power accountable. It’s in this way that the labor of connecting links and exposing the esoteric (literally “belonging to an inner circle”) in part shares a materialist struggle, as again, only the innermost circles could have access to anything which would situate them “outside”.
Conspiratorial thought has shown itself to be the canary in the coal mine for possible dystopian futures of the media environment. Its overgeneralization is partially what led me to this experimental media study. Reductionist characterizations of conspiracies, such as the claim that they are categorically identifiable by their belief in an ordered or simplified universe, or that “everything is connected and nothing happens by accident”, exoticize and create collateral damages of thought patterns in discourse. Their social status continues to dramatically change, as the internet shows signs of slowly returning to its archipelagic state, with communities already having begun to balkanize themselves away from existing central hubs.
Emerging from the digital fragments of such alternative spaces, Apophenic Realism scraps together an invitation into these oblique sense-making strategies. As anthropologist Kathleen Stewart writes, “the internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place, floating through self-dividing and transmogrifying sites until you are awash in the sheer evidence that the internet exists.” It’s with this ecstatic momentum that the process of Apophenic Realism inhabits unprovable truths in the expanding sands of ‘epistemic cultures’, to borrow a term from theorist Adrian Ivakhiv. Rhythmically following algorithmic tributaries, I jump across information channels and to conclusion after conclusion. Answering the call to “do your own research”, I participate in pattern-spotting with the boogeymen of hyperspace’s boogeymen.
Detached from its visual referent, audio from chemtrail skywatcher videos and 5G tower hunters — as well as other popular “[REDACTED]-truther” banned videos which will remain unnamed — trace perceptual ambiguities in the ostensibly mundane. Apophenic spectres emerge through the noise, as if one can hear the crystalline cloud vapors weave and diffuse across the atmospheric firmament. There’s a sense that skywatchers view chemtrails as desire paths to meaning, following and uploading them like hyperlinks for others. Allowing myself to be led through these webbed channels of the vast participatory machine, a meshed soundscape unfurls and connects itself, tracing the matrix of the digital age’s oldest conspiracy.