This page contains some reflections on my work as a digital and electronic occultist, which is to say that I express magic and other occult subjects through electronic and digital media in much the same way as a digital or electronic artist does with their visual or performance art. Sometimes I call it electronic thaumaturgy…
In the 16th century, the word thaumaturgy entered the English language meaning miraculous or magical powers.
The word was first anglicized and used in the magical sense in John Dee‘s book Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements (1570). He mentions an “art mathematical” called “thaumaturgy… which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived and of men greatly to be wondered at.”
In Dee’s time, “the Mathematicks” referred not merely to the abstract computations associated with the term today, but to physical mechanical devices which employed mathematical principles in their design. These devices, operated by means of compressed air, springs, strings, pulleys or levers, were seen by unsophisticated people (who did not understand their working principles) as magical devices which could only have been made with the aid of demons and devils.
(By building such mechanical devices, Dee earned a reputation as a conjurer “dreaded” by neighborhood children. He complained of this assessment in his “Mathematicall Praeface”: “And for these, and such like marvellous Actes and Feates, Naturally, and Mechanically, wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a Conjurer? Shall the folly of Idiotes, and the Malice of the Scornfull, so much prevaille… Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion of the hellhoundes, and a Caller, and Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites?”)
Thus thaumaturgy means making and operating physical devices, based on early engineering principles, to produce an effect. However, some who used the title thaumaturge related thaumaturgy to theurgy, a Greek term for a branch of magic concerned with spiritual matters. In this view, the material effect produced by a thaumaturgical device was considered to actually be caused by a spiritual ritual (theurgy), which influences the material sphere by way of the more subtle, ethereal realm. (Wikipedia [1])
My work re/combines both senses of thaumaturgy to “imagineer” hybrid artifacts both seen and unseen, mechanical/digital and mystical/spiritual. I make machines that do impossible things (miracles). I use technology to mediate occult practices and express occult ideas, creating a synaesthesis of magic and technology, i.e. a conflation of magical and technological sensations and experiences.
Many of my designs are based more in plausibility than utility. I might look at something that someone asserts as true about occult experience, and consider ways to express or expand that idea through technology even if I have not much corroborated it in my own occult experience. The Electronomicon/PsiBorg project is an example of that; based on Pete Carroll’s equations of magic, I designed something that might plausibly work if Pete’s model is valid (in other words, if a is true, then b is plausible). In my experience with the occult, there is a lot of variability in what works for one person vis–à–vis another. The PsiBorg design might work for one person but not another for reasons that are still unknown and widely debated because we do not yet have means of proving one way or another. Most of any evidence is anecdotal; much of it is story, and I am alright with that. I am not on a quest for the truth; I am creating machines of wonder, and sometimes applying them to practical ends.
Some stuff that I make comes out of my daydreams and night voyages. There is a praxis about giving form to those ideas, that transcends utility even it expresses so-called low magic.
High Tech, Low Magic
(Psiberpunk?)
Most of my designs express what is sometimes called low magic. Various occult authors have defined it differently from one another, but low magic typically connotes folk magic that is generally practical and performed with tools and ingredients naturally found in the practitioner’s environment. Witchcraft is often viewed as an example. Juxtaposing it is high magic, which is usually more concerned with spiritual evolution/attainment/apotheosis/etc., and often involves meticulous ceremonial rituals performed with ornate tools.
My own so-called natural environment is populated more with computers and electronics than herbs and tools of rural life, and I consider ways of applying those technologies most accessible to me, to sorcerous ends.
Why Magic?
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
// Arthur C. Clarke
People sometimes ask me why I use the word magic to label my work, or suggest that I use a more modern and less loaded term. Even some of my occult peers feel that the word has too much baggage; is associated with too much that real magicians do not actually do; that it popularly denotes legerdemain or connotes “primitive” thinking; and is persistently contradistinct from science and rational thought, at least in the popular mind.
In the context of my work I entertain all such associations. My work is partially irrational — but not all irrational. My work does involve ritual, but not necessarily traditional rituals. It may involve illusion or appeal to what is not seen (i.e. ordinarily perceived). It employs myths and legends as well as measures and facts. It may involve sleight of hand (or robot end effector), and often does involve sleight of mind. It is nearly always about how altered states of consciousness alter reality because reality is not separate from consciousness [*], and that is something I can associate with nearly every example of magic I can recall: shamanism, ceremonial magic, stage magic, the occult, meta-physical/para-normal/super-natural, parasychological phenomena, reality warping, etc. Indeed, I cannot think of a better word than magic to bring together all of these ideas, because what I see as common to all of them is the possibility of extraordinary ability.
The jargon of magic — including words such as conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illumination, and invocation — is appropriate to my work so long as I endeavor to answer through electronic and digital media the questions: What is magic, that a person may do it, and a person, that she may do magic?
Arcanotechnology, or Dreams Made (Electric) Flesh
I studied industrial electronics and robotics after high school, to understand how code becomes electrical and mechanical activity, and because I recognized something sorcerous in the creation of automatic and autonomous machines that carry out our intentions. I also studied a variety of occult disciplines (most notably, Chaos magic), and became increasingly convinced of a meaningful relationship between magic and technology. As Wil McCarthy said in Hacking Matter: “‘Magic’ has been technology’s partner from the very beginning — a similar attempt to grasp and shape the forces of the world […] We use the levers and pulleys of technology to shape our world, but what we really want is a world which obeys our spoken commands, and reconfigures itself to our unvoiced wishes. What we really want — what we’ve always wanted — is magic” [2].
There is a mystical side to magic, too, that has relevance (and revelation) to our use of technology. As Norbert Wiener advocated, it is not enough to know how to change the world; we must know what changes we want to effect — “a clear understanding of what our purposes are and how we can best accomplish them” [3]. This is echoed in the magician’s choice of what to use magic for (trivial goals are often discouraged), and especially in the quest for her Dæmon, Genius, or True Will: “defined at times as a person’s grand destiny in life, and at other times as a moment to moment path of action that operates in perfect harmony with Nature” [4]. The quest-ion of what to do with ourselves and our resources may ultimately be answered only by inquiring within, although the answer may seem to come from without as of in-spiration or con-versation with spirits. I believe we would do well to develop less trivial technologies and relationships with our technologies. As a shaman applies resources retrieved from her visions (dreams and other altered states of consciousness) to the ceremonies, medicines, and other artifacts with which she composes her world and her relationship with it, so too might our dreams and technologies inform each other.
Technology is the extrinsic amplifier of our intrinsic abilities, abilities that historically have been associated with mana, élan vital, etc., and experienced in extraordinary dimensions as thaumaturgy, psi, etc. I use technology to assist in discovering the mysteries hidden within myself and my world, and these discoveries beckon me to design new technology for further exploration.
Arcanotechnology is a combined form of arcane, meaning esoteric, mystic, secret, known only to the initiated, and technology as the practical application of knowledge such as in arts, crafts, and engineering. Therefore it suggests the practical application of esoteric knowledge and the engineering of arcana; in another word: magic. It is a dream condensing into an interaction and dissolving again into the dreams of the interactors.
Here the dreams of magi are embodied in electric flesh that dances and sings and illuminates new vistas of reality.
Psibernetics
It can be argued that the rainbow arch between psi and cybernetics has hardly formed. Maybe it is a futurible, but I think not, there is too much evidence to suggest that the structure is forming. Maybe it is finally a dream, but as Montaigne said, defending in anticipation, no doubt, the futurible syndrome: “It is pricing life exactly at its worth, to abandon it for a dream” [Essays]. // Roy Ascott, “The Psibernetic Arch”
Roy Ascott coined the term psibernetics to suggest a synthesis of parapsychology and cybernetics that would generatively anticipate alternative futures through art [5]. This is a manner in which I proceed, and I consider my work to be part of the psibernetics movement.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaumaturgy#Magic (as of 14 August 2011 at 20:16).
- Page 18.
- Walter A. Rosenblith in Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1967 Avon Books), 280.
- “True Will,” Wikipedia, 12 Jul 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will. Cf. final and efficient causes.
- Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousnes, pp. 162–168.