Post Bike Accident Train Demon Phenomena

On the night of February 21st, filmmaker, Allen Riley, was struck by a car while riding his bicycle in the Bedstuy’ neighborhood of Brooklyn.(1) A picture was taken of the offending vehicle, and Allen was taken immediately to Bellevue Hospital. He was not seriously injured aside from mild head trauma. After a short recovery, Allen went to the NYPD to acquire the driver’s insurance information. The police had no record of the accident as no one had called them before Allen was taken to the hospital. The police could not substantiate an accident for Allen's insurance company, even with the picture, because the police were now being involved after the fact. In an effort to work around the pen-and-paper bureaucracy of the police station, Allen checked the NYPD website, which proved useless.
I caught up with Allen to ask him about any sort of post-accident phenomena which lead us to the subject of ‘train demons.’(2) Our conversation then drifted elsewhere.

Allen: I think the idea for train demons comes from my post-accident experience with pencil and paper/analog/off-line bureaucracy versus digital/on-line bureaucracy where everything is accounted for. Stuff gets lost in messy heaps of paper, or in a big physical system like the trains, so I like the idea that the trains aren't actually a closed system but there are openings to other dimensions in there where train demons come out. It sort of explains where these people come from.

Me: So train demons are kind of like the inky leaks coming from the cracks of over wrought systems?

Allen: I guess it’s sort of that digital systems are kind of omnipotent and account for all their parts, where the train is a kind of system that cannot be wholly accounted for, and there are leaks into other worlds in there. But on a literal level it’s a place where you are put into a confrontation with people whose lives are totally different from yours at the moment.

Me: What does a train demon look like? How do they behave?

Allen: Train demons are people who are doing strange things on the train in a way that sort of turns into a performance for the other people on the train. This isn't people who are asking for money, this is people who seem possessed by something. It's also obvious when its drugs or mental illness, so I want to exclude that from what I'm talking about. I've also been having fun scaring myself by thinking of the slumped over person on the train as the "familiar" of the train demon because every time I've seen a train demon, I've also seen a slumped over person somewhere else on the train. It was Lucy's idea to call it a familiar. Before she told me that word I was saying "the slumped over person projects the train demon."

Me: Awesome. Tell me about analog systems versus electronic.

Allen: It isn't electronic, it's digital. Electronics are actually the field where the term analog comes from because in analog systems you're converting one type of signal into another and things get lost or transformed in the conversion. Although the fly is a movie that shows how digital systems can do this too. That movie is amazing because it understood the concept of file compression way before that even existed. What happens in the fly is the same thing that happens to music when it’s turned into an mp3.

Me: What happens to music when it’s turned into mp3?

Allen: The computer takes the original full-quality sound file and makes a smaller file with less information in it. The new file is less of a sound file than a compact series of guesses about what the original file sounded like. So the mp3 is actually very distorted and has lost lots of information, although we can't hear the difference unless we learn to. So when you play or burn an mp3, you aren't hearing the contents of the file so much as the computer program's interpretation of what the original sound was like. So in the fly, the human body is compressed into a series of guesses, then reconstituted by the computer. However, since he was in the chamber with the fly, the computer tries to put the two files together as one, which turns him into a HORRIBLE MONSTER!!!

Me: How does this analogy translate to analog systems like the MTA or NYPD versus the internet?

Allen: Not at all.

Me: Oh.

(1) According to an NYSDOT study of bicycle crashes between 1996 and 2003, slightly more than a third (34%) of all crashes resulting in serious bicyclist injury took place in Brooklyn.

(2) According to 2010 survey by the NYC Department of Homeless, the estimate of New York's homeless population came to 3111 people without shelter, 783 more unsheltered individuals than last year, 29 percent fewer unsheltered individuals than 2005–1,284 fewer New Yorkers.