Showing results by author "Joseph Matheny" in All Categories

This is the previously untold backstory of Ong's Hat, the Infinite Game, and proto-ARG. It weaves together early rudimentary Artificial Intelligence (AI), encounters with disembodied intelligence, emergence, and the budding Internet culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elements of psychedelic culture, Avant Garde art, punk rock, industrial music, experimental theater, improv, method acting, hermetic magick, beat literature, Esalen, the works of Philip K. Dick, and more converge to create this modern tale of a spiritual quest.

Incunabula/Ong's Hat was a bizarre Internet phenomenon: an “immersive” online experience—part mystery, part game, part who knows what... 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.

Fond remembrances of the life and work of Robert Anton Wilson, featuring Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Ali, Tiffany Lee Brown, David Jay Brown, Zac Odin, and Joseph Matheny.

The delightful legend of the Ong's Hat travel cult has been posted in the form of the Incunabula Papers since the earliest days of BBS and Internet communications. The mythos is an historical and cultural curiosity for that reason alone.