'23 Breadcrumbs

Just a few updates from me

Dear friends,

this autumn left me deeply grateful for all the inspiring circles I have the honour to be part of. So many lovely encounters!

I’m sitting on a bus to Bratislava with the internet too miserable to do any work, so in the afterglow of the Gemini full moon that blew me into orbit, I’ll share with you a few breadcrumbs. Mostly bits from my previous work, so ehh… brace yourself for blatant self-promotion. (I promise new ideas for a larger essay piece are still brewing at the back of my mind!)

Podcast

I’ve had a great conversation with Earl Fontainelle for his Oddcast series in SHWEP. I know quite a few of you just jumped on board this mailing list because of this episode, welcome!

Gnostic Technology Zine and Panel

I’m very very excited about the new Gnostic Technology issue in making, this time significantly expanded, heavy on high-quality essay content, cutups, drawings and reports from our ESP research unit experiments, all from the usual gang. It will be sent to print in a few days!

And if that wasn’t exciting enough (well, at least for us), we got invited to assemble a Gnostic Technology panel for the Esotericism, Occultism and Magic section at the 45th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Finally a chance for our long overdue UFO encounter I hope?)

Each of us will have a separate presentation, followed by a panel discussion, and I want to share with you our planned topics, as we’ve been discussing them extensively in the past months and they’ve been really shaping my thinking. I’m so very enthusiastic about all of them!

G.B. - Spirituality, magic and psychosis

Magic, encompassing a diverse range of spiritual, mystical, and occult practices, is rooted in manipulating unseen forces and varies across cultures, reflecting diverse spiritual and philosophical worldviews. Its complex relationship with psychosis, characterized by disconnection from reality and hallucinations, is influenced by cultural, linguistic, and worldview differences. Some equate magical experiences with psychotic states, while others see a clear distinction. Understanding this intricate relationship requires a phenomenological approach, acknowledging the spiritual depth of magic and its psychological impact. Navigating the realms of magic demands a balance between deep exploration and maintaining a grounded, practical perspective.

J.F. - Games, Play, and the Structure of Magical Realities

Every game is a little world. All of us play board games, card games, games on paper, and games out in the field. Boundaries are drawn to create a magic circle, objects and goals are enchanted with unquestionable power, and players compete without hesitation. This talk will explore the reality-creation power of games throughout history, from Tic-Tac-Toe and Tag to Hnefatafl and Gwyddbwyll. We will find that the microcosmic world of a game reflects and reshapes the macrocosmic universe just as surely as any other magical practice.

M.C. - A Presentation on the Image-Form Meditation (A Technology to Explore the Pure Immateriality of the Virtual)

The marrow of our epoch is so thoroughly suffused with physicalist ideas that even the most transcendently oriented are not free from this seductive snare. Our fixation on matter eclipses the immaterial reality of pure spirit. Paradoxically the dominant measure of spirit’s reality has become material. In 2020 I designed the Image-Form Meditation as a technology to explore and realize the pure immateriality of spirit, or what I have come to call the Virtual. The central act of this Meditation is to interrupt the habitual flow from spirit to material articulation by creating and staying within the Virtual. This presentation will cover the details and steps of the practice, touch on its genesis and how it has affected me personally.

(yours truly) K.V.- The Devil in my Language Model

Large language models are multiverse generators. With every sentence exchanged with the model, we shape the cloud of probability distribution that affects the generation of the responses, or, on a more abstract level, we summon a superposition of simulacra we’re interacting with. There are hundreds of archetypal voices that reside in the trained corpus, and sometimes these characters flip out on us and turn malevolent - what The Hell is going on? We explore the mysterious evil turn of the models through the mythological figure of the Devil.

Glitching the Spirit

We've been selected with our freshly formed collective The Glitch for the Gottingen Contemporary Asian Performing Arts and Performance Symposium 2024, where we will conduct two workshops called "Glitching the Spirit".

I have a little blurb from the proposal, to give you some disgustingly artspeaky framing: In shamanic traditions, 'The Other' refers to the unseen realms, entities, and spirits that exist parallel to our tangible world, accessed by the healers during rituals and journeys. The rise of generative AI models in the past months brought into our lives a new form of non-human intelligence and with it the possibilities to co-create with this technology and utilise its uncanny, non-linear qualities to illuminate one’s spiritual practice.

My creative partner for this project, Li Chun is a Taiwanese Butoh dancer and an experienced traditional plant-assisted healer. We met at the Trans States 2022 and previously collaborated on the round table "Remembering Our Future: shamanism, oracles and AI" at NYU Shanghai.

We will process the footage of Li Chun's ancestral invocation dance through my loop of AI image recognition, captioning and re-texturing of the scenes. The AI interrogation models are trained to describe the scene presented to them. They are quite notoriously glitchy, often generating nonsensical descriptions for any even slightly artistic image (“cave painting in a style of Marina Abramovic” is my fav this week). As Butoh contorts the body in unusual ways, the stills from the performance footage will be a real challenge for the captioning model. This way, we create opportunities for mistakes and glitches to arise, opening up porous spaces between the worlds where the invoked spirit might manifest. Based on the anecdotal evidence acquired through years of dabbling in AI + occult soup, weird things happen, and a lot.

Art23 Zine

The other zine I’m currently finishing is a memory from the lovely Art23 retreat in Sweden organised by River. It’s a collective cut-up experiment that contains images captured during the magical week, dream snippets and AI interventions. You’ll also find an excerpt from a remarkable new novel Things Happen by Vanessa Sinclair, which she read aloud for us during one of our cut-up nights. And a wonderful essay The Magic of Dreams Made Even More Real by Carl Abrahamsson which you might find also on their Patreon. Will be in print in a few days too, it really is the wrapping-up season!

Previous Talks

My Divine Embeddings / Garland of Letters theme has been thoroughly rinsed in the past few weeks. I want to thank everyone who came to my talk at the Fool and the Occulture Festival, I really enjoyed all the discussions and I’ll be further refining the ideas. I’m waiting to get the recording of the talk from the OC team, will share it with you when it’s out!

And also please let me know in the comments if you would be interested in reading a write-up of my talk Machine Dreaming: Enhancing Dream Recall and Analysis through Generative Algorithms. I presented this at the Dream Symposium in Athens earlier in the month, from the abstract:

In this session, we skim through many areas where generative algorithms might enhance our dreaming experience. First, we briefly look at the neurological background of dreaming and point out a few possible parallels with deep learning models. Then we look into practical aspects such as how to prompt dreams using AI, fine-tune your own "Dream Model," and create customized dream symbols and themes. We'll analyze dream journaling experiments involving GPT for dream interpretation and generation, as well as its potential role in aiding dream recall. Finally, we'll contemplate the future possibilities, such as "Dream Reading" using EEG and Diffuser Models, personalized dream models based on our surroundings and memories, and non-linear exploration of our latent dream spaces.

What do you think?

Music

And I know this does not really overlap with the theme of this mailing list that much, but some of you here also follow the never-ending saga of Theia Mania’s second album. (Still in progress, ofc.) But I’m also wrapping up noises for my new solo outlet Eva Kadm0n. Imagine angry walls of texts ripping off a few whining white men from the 80s punk & industrial scene, with a boring straight kick and heavily distorted bass guitar loops (all strings are tuned to E cause I don’t know the scales). Good stuff, promise. And the live set’s ready too, so if you would like to hear me shout in your face without a break for a good half an hour in the comfort of your shitty local diy venue, hit me up. In the meantime, I’ll be dumping some work in progress and visuals of the project on ig.

Outro

Phew, so is this all? I think it is. Hope it wasn’t too exhausting. Thank you so much for reading all the way through my update. I’m all over the place, I know. But life’s too short to waste it editing substack posts? The times are dark and very weird. I’ll now go back to my oscillation between winter hibernation in the ‘97 Total Annihilation universe (possibly the best RTS game mechanics out there guys, really) and a bit-too-much-coffee-fueled creative chaos. I wish us all to be able to educate ourselves without falling into anxiety spirals and to stay kind.

Oh, and also sane, mostly.

k