Maker-Magician Mini-Manifesto

[Click here for a Greek translation. My many thanks to the translator.]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. // Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced work is indistinguishable from play. // Seb Paquet

The word magic (like machine) derives from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to be able or have power — a magician is a person who can. Sorcery comes from a Latin word that means the ability to influence fate — a sorcerer is one who can sort things differently. The Magician archetype suggests a person having extraordinary, even uncanny, control over her self and circumstances.

Technology can be a means of controlling our circumstances, and since the Enlightenment, has progressively superseded magic as such.

Magic receded, but did not die. It survives not only in the archaic arcana of atavists, Luddites, and so-called “primitives,” but also in a small but growing number of people who see that technology and magic are not fundamentally different, that they are both means of discovering and expressing our intentions, of looping through worlds possible as well as physical.

A new millennium — enter: the Maker movement. People making things by themselves (DIY) or with others (DIWO), to improve their lives. People freely sharing the knowledge of making things with other people. Not for profit or to exploit one another, but for fun, curiosity, and good will. People transitioning from consumers and victims of circumstance, to creators and masters of destiny.

Enabled people. Empowered people. People who can. Magic people, voodoo people.

Made possible by a simple truth of such complex adaptive systems as we: Anyone could do it.

Let us express magic through new media arts, just as our ancestors expressed it through traditional arts such as drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, singing, dancing, etc., yet differently than they. We shall author our own Charms of Making, spoken in electric tongues.

Let us conjure magical artifacts from 3D printers, instead of trivial trinkets.

Let us evoke daemonic visions and voices from strange dimensions of information.

Let us coordinate rituals by Geoloqi, not paying homage to dead gods, but participating more fully and deeply in the discovery and realization of our individual and shared purposes.

Let us be as gods, creating (in) our own images, giving flesh to our minds’ children.

The technology has never been more accessible.

The things I make here at hyperRitual are just a small pendant on the flagpole in the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with a synthesis of magic and technology. The world is ready. You are ready. Here is the place, now is the time. Dream it. Do it. Make it. Be it, the change you want to see in the world.