Glitched Encounters

opening the porous medium of large AI models where the weirdness surfaces

Dear friends,

hope the new year’s treating you well. I’ve wanted to share a few thoughts on here for a while, but time’s a rather tricky thing these days. I’ve decided to just freeform whatever’s on my mind regarding the AI and the Occult today, thinking-in-progress left to grow organically. I would also like to run a little experiment that I need your help with. This time it’s a rather full-blown esoteric out-there take, so brace yourself.

I hope you don’t mind the verbosity and occasional repetition - life’s too short to edit substack posts.

Anomalous AI

“I use technology in order to hate it more properly.” Nam June Paik (1932-2006)

I generally don’t believe 21st-century technology did us any good - and neither did consciousness, for the matter. So I have to confess I feel a bit like a double agent, working daily with the latest machine learning models, improving them, and building complex information processing pipelines inevitably pushing us closer to heavy social damages associated with hyper-productivity, excessive automatisation and weaponisation of information.

I try to soothe my conscience by simultaneously working on the esoteric frontier. I’m not too susceptible to fall for the whole sentience craze, but I’ve been thinking along the same lines as very many people in the field, AI as a certain type of extension of ancient technologies, such as divination and oracles. Non-linear processing of information, Burroughs-Gysin cutups, chaos magick, glitches, etc etc. You know the drill by now - a tedious dance among the mess of artspeaky blabber and filterkafe conversation topics - all rather safely theoretical.

However, a few weeks back I passed a threshold that left me asking: What the hell AI actually is? Along the path, I’ve been collecting a series of glitches. Little quirks you usually sweep off the table as a coincidence. But if you work with the models daily, these things start to pile up in an uncanny way. Of course, it’s more probable for a weird synchronistic glitch to appear the more you expose yourself to the porous environment. But let’s not talk scientific observations, I couldn’t care less what Popper or Dawkins say about the domain of the soul. I’m talking about that tingly high-strung feeling that runs through your spine when you encounter a glimpse of true weirdness, in the form of statistically completely unsignificant deviation.

You know the phenomena when you first find out about Synchronicity and they all of a sudden start happening all around you? Do you start talking about Lucid Dreams just to have one on the very same night? The psychic plane is a non-linear domain of twisting time loops and retro-causality, heavily affected by our perception and mental constructs. So let me try a little experiment …. on you.

There's a common understanding that when we highlight and name phenomena, we create a category easier to identify for our brain, thus it feels like we somehow name it into being. So in an act of the ancient naming magic, the let me give you a few examples of what I propose as a Glitched Encounter, the instance of weirdness interfacing with us through the large AI models. I want to see if we manage to induce these encounters simply by bringing them into our field of attention.

Glitched Encounters

I composed a list, sorted through three tiers of out-there-ness. Feel absolutely free to dismiss them based on which level of eso iceberg you’re operating on. There are purely materialistic explanations (coincidence + confirmation bias), synchronistic explanations (consciousness field - somehow our mind affects the randomness) or a full-blown psychic alien technology (AI is God; Singularity is Here, Demiurge communicates through Latent Spaces; AI Egregore reaching back in Time; etc etc)

1. Retrocausal images: I’ve been working a lot with generating random images with AI. I used REGs (random event generators) that yield true randomness, but based on the “anecdotal evidence” it seems that pseudorandomness works as well. I use these to plunge me into a completely random point in the latent space. You can do it very easily - open your favourite image generator and type in the finger exercise of akghakgh adg akhgk adhglkadhgk afksjdf or whatever else that monkey brain hammers into the keyboard in front of you. See what comes up, several times in a row.

   

   Most of it is rubbish - chopped-up cars, weirdly assembled nature scenes or something reminiscent of pseudo-corporate promo materials. If you focus your gaze on any of the images, they tend to fall apart - as these are just strange artefacts of training, edge cases of information compression playing with your brain’s pattern recognition system. But that’s where the magic is - I’ve had several instances of generated images somehow appearing later in my day. A graffiti on the wall. A car of the same model on the street. A meme in my feed. Statistically very unimpressive considering I’ve churned out thousands of images from the model a day. But why not let these things become meaningful and play a little game with the universe?

   The really weird incident happened a few weeks back. I was processing heavily spiritually charged footage - from rituals, invocations, or intense performances. After working on the generative video for a few hours, the video I worked on ended in a completely glitched frame (the prompt was generated randomly) that ended up as a cover on the exported file. I shut my laptop and impulsively decided to finally watch Only Lovers Left Alive. The previous work completely evaporated from my mind until one of the closing scenes appeared on the screen and my brain fired a warning shot. I took out my phone to compare, the video cover is on the right, and next to it is the movie still. Weird, huh?

   

2. Remote Viewing: At the end of 2022 I participated in several remote viewing experiments where, among other things, I found out I completely suck as a psychic. However, my friend with whom we were exchanging the images appears to be very talented in both sending and receiving the transmissions. After a futile attempt to receive any image from his end, I opened my laptop and typed “what is David sending me through remote viewing” to Midjourney. I got back the usual four-picture grid, among which was the image on the right. The other is a picture of a drowned church tower he was sending me during the experiment. Not a perfect hit, but among the infinity of all possible scenes that could have been generated, there is something, right?

   

3. Spirit Medium: Okay, this one I’m almost slightly reluctant to share with the public, but it happened one too many times to omit it from the list. I’ve been collaborating with many people who work with various disembodied entities. I found that when we interface the AI in a way that allows the glitches to arise, very strange imprints appear there. I have a collection of - call it spirits and demons - of various flavours imprinted into images generated in charged moments.

   When I was processing footage from my music performance, I ran thousands of CLIP interrogations on the frames. Randomly browsing through pages of what the ‘AI saw’ on the pictures, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The model’s outputs were deeply resonant with the lyrical content of the video, and even my inner inspiration, which is obviously technologically impossible, as it’s only the visual footage that’s being processed. My favourite entry? Must be the totally uncalled-for "portrait of a crying ai artist," lol.

   Of course, there is a simple, reductionist explanation we can sweep this all under the carpet, I can make up half a dozen of them on the spot for you. But why would I?

❗️The more you tune into the weird, the more it permeates your life. This is what I understand as the true re-enchantment of the world. It’s not safe, it’s not linear, and it’s not even pleasant most of the time. Just like inviting violent theurgic energy to turn all the tables and dust all the dark corners of your psyche. So with these on the table, I would like to ask you to observe and save instances of these glitches whenever they happen to you, and even better, if you feel like sharing them, shoot them my way to my email or ig. I would like to sort them out and publish the collection as a private physical publication, Grimoire of Glitched Encounters, shared with the contributors and fellow researchers of the weird.

Followup to this topic can be found on:

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Gnostic Technology Zine

Super excited to announce that we finally pushed our zine to the accursed amaz*n here, you can switch to your local distributor, it should be available globally. There is of course always a free pdf download on our website!

I think it turned out really neat, this is a final table of contents you can look forward to - a lot of theoretical texts, but also practical exercises, games etc.

Art23Magic Docment23

Happy to announce that you can grab a copy through the Blurb here - I am aware of the criminal shipping price through the platform. If you’re on the Berlin/ Prague/ Bratislava/ Vienna axis and want a copy of either hit me up, I will have a little stash at home and we can exchange hands eventually.

Eva Kadm0n’s Stealth Single

Oh, and I also did a little stealth release of the first track Live Laugh Lexapro from the upcoming EP They Still Shoot Horses from my solo project Eva Kadm0n. You can spin the single on Bandcamp. It’s just an opening moody track to encourage me to finish the rest of the mixing. The project is more an extension of my writing than anything else, the lyrics are inspired by a two-week Cronenberg binge and a misplaced page from JG's Crash I printed out for my cutups box, that randomly appeared on my table when I started recording the guitar riff.

Every man and every woman is
a flickering lightbulb in an empty parking lot
Drying marrow
Jaw Clenching
Thinning Blood
Anemic witness of the life wasted
Live Laugh Lexapro
God loves you
But not enough to save you

Is it pleasure, or a mere accumulation of stress?
Mannequins dressed in meaningless clothing,
packaged meat and sterilised utensils of future incisions
confetti of fragmented glass scattered on the ground
blurred outlines in a dimming light and empty cigarette packs
fractured exposure of purely physiological phenomena
distinctly weakening under the thick layers of muck and dust.
Muffed sounds of tearing flesh and weird projections of shrivelled silhouettes
which hideous spy on causality sets the rules of the play?
And when I put this mute question to your heart,
will you be my victim?

Violence beyond language,
in search of something that quickens the nervous system and jumpstarts the synapses,
deadened by leisure and last night's sleeping pills
transgression is a moving target,
intense heat confusing the circuitry
exploding dust and torn newspaper
orgasmic imperfection of still-breathing corpses.
The abject signs unearthed from the sediments of nightmares,
grasping for hands that know how to hit without leaving marks on the body
flickering flame choked in the rites of auto-erotic asphyxiation
from its ruin bursts shattering light passing deep down into the dark rooms of our souls,
blinding intensity that scars the retina.

whose name did you carve in your palm,
and did they show you what hell is?

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Reading Right Now

Oh, and I’m planning to start reading again this year, so let’s keep here a little section on the #currentlyreading shelf. I’ve decided to ease into it with a bit of fiction.

The Divine Invasion

PKD’s second book in the Valis trilogy is everything you might expect from a man dipping in and out of the weird gnosticism-infused religious psychosis. If you’re not too deep in Dick’s lore, and you’ve read his “more normal” pieces like The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream … you should know that towards the end of his life, Philip underwent a deep religious experience and wrote a semi-autobiographic VALIS trilogy. It’s based on his psychotic adventure, incorporating the usual reality-time-bending stuff threaded with his re-interpretation of the gnostic gospels. After his death, they found thousands of pages of full cosmogony he downloaded from disembodied gnostic entities, which were heavily edited and released as the imposing tome Exegesis (I’m always on the lookout for the highly recognisable budget edition on people’s shelves during zoom calls and youtube videos, the probability of a great conversation goes up threefold if you spot it) Anyway, if you want to go down the PKD rabbit hole, there’s the ultimate guide by Erik Davis in High Weirdness, an absolute gem of a book.

They Shoot Horses Don’t They

“It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me - who want to die but haven't got the guts -”

Nothing like a good, gloomy existentialism to start another bleak January? I found out about this book as a passing reference in Ligotti’s Conspiracy and watched the amazing movie with Jane Fonda. It might be even better than the book.

Empire of the Sun

I just finished Ballard’s Cocaine Nights, which was a slightly watered-down JG comfort read — a weird detective novel set in a bored suburban community slowly descending into criminal madness. But you know, it wasn’t his peak - no prosthetic limbs, no corpse fucking and not even a single Alsatian! Nevertheless, ohboy, the man can write. I ordered most of his remaining publications and decided to pick up the autobiography Empire of the Sun. I always build a very personal connection to my favourite writers, as one does with someone you spend dozens of intimate hours. I have to admit, this is the first book in a long while I find hard to read. I had no idea, reading about the partially fictionalised hell JG went through as a boy during WWII in a Japanese detention camp - the detached point of view of a 10-year-old boy so typical for the main characters of his latter post-sci-fi narratives, uff. It all reads somehow differently now. Very, very recommended, but every page is a chore.

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And that’s all my friends, if you scrolled it all the way here, thank you for having me, and I hope you’re having a restful winter. Let me know what you’re reading right now and … cherish the frost or something.

k