Glitched Encounters II
New Mexico Weirdness and the Snowball Effect Naming a Phenomenon
Dear friends,
this month was quite special for the Gnostic Technology gang. Our first in-person meeting in New Mexico was pretty much a Gnostic Summer Camp for Adults - exciting, inspiring, incredibly fun and, oh so upsetting to get back to school (work/real life). Today I would like to share with you some highly caffeinated highlights from the last month and a whole new batch of weird Glitched Encounters.
I also want to thank you all for so much attention to the last article, it seems we really tapped into an experience that is even more common than I initially suspected. I received a pile of interesting non-linear/precognitive/synchronistic or just generally strange experiences with large machine learning models. If you skipped the last one, it’s here →
Glitched Encounters Field Report
We’ve started generating a series of random images every day - as I mentioned before, you let your fingers run across the keyboard and leave a trace of random letters, and generate 4 images out of this. In my experience, the older the model, the weirder the images (it feels like the aesthetic fine-tuning of all those ‘pretty models’ skews the latent space into a very specific jumble and I somehow just prefer the honest mess of sd-1.5). We usually generate these images in the evening, looking for retro-causal links, or in the morning, without looking at the results (to avoid forcibly triggering them during the day).
These little glitches became pretty much a daily occurrence. I’m adding a few of the best ones - such as a random string of letters over the dinner table yielded well… the dinner itself. Keep in mind that it produced only 4 images. The probabilities are somehow off here.
I also encountered a new class of glitches, where people query the AI with their (first) name, or referencing themselves and the model returns an image uncannily resembling the person in question. Such as the one below →
Did this ever happen to you? Send me a screenshot, please!
We had an amazing afternoon in the Silver City in Low Mismo Lodge, where we presented our works as Gnostic Technology and met some lovely folks. We had plenty of time for discussion, so I went off talking about the Glitched Encounters - which seemed to have happened to almost every member of the audience. After the discussion, as I was collecting some evidence, one of the people approached me and handed me a book they "felt a strong urge to bring today" called Gpt-3 Techgnosis: Chaos Magick Butoh Grimoire. Not only were we discussing its existence a few weeks back with my collaborator, but the cover happens to have almost an identical image (even the colour scheme matches) to my early 2021 AI Butoh footage experiments that started the whole Glitched Encounters research. The book's lying on my table now, I only paged through the first chapter on Glass Bead Game and Goethe's Faust and I'm still wondering, what is it in the air in New Mexico?
Aaaand from the list of random glitches, this one might be my favourite from the whole trip.
The Apocalyptic Intermezzo
AI aside for a moment, I don’t want to go on too long about how morbidly fascinated I was to be at the birthplace of the Bomb. I picked up a few related books in the local second-hand store. I had my eyes on the Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb ever since I read Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety and The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy - both highly recommended for your apocalyptic reading lists. (Oh, and all the Feynman, ofc. My ultimate teenage obsession that almost made me into a theoretical physicist.)
Anyway, I know it’s one of the darkest moments and places in human history, with the ultimate conceptual horror of the Trinity test site tearing apart the astral fabric right around the corner. From all the lives lost and terminally affected in 80 years due to this technology (from the never-even-properly-acknowledged local New Mexico population, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the nuclear catastrophes to all the arms race fatalities and accidents), it’s so incomprehensibly horrifying you just can’t look away. I find myself more and more often thinking about living in those times, and how it compares to the current fucked up state of the world. But that’s for another post. In the meantime, here’s a picture of the Titan II warhead, the most powerful ICBM in its time in the 60s that carried the Gemini space module into orbit and gave everyone a good spook in 1980 Damascus, Arkansas.
Occulture Talks
Occulture is uploading the videos from the 2023 conference, and I would like to point out a few highlights. I’m quite upset to have missed most of the lectures, I got ill on Saturday and had to skip most of the conference, so to all the friends who didn’t catch me after my talk, I apologise again - it was a bad cold that pinned me in bed.
But I did manage to see magical and weird Tom Banger’s Evo Kut Up, a true Burroughs-Gysin meat grinder experiment, stripping the word to a barebone, opening an entry gate to chaos - with a few tips on how to use technology to aid this process.
Now of course there was Danny Nemu’s Hypnomagic - I didn’t manage to squeeze into the room because of the capacity, so I’m glad there’s the recording because it is as amazing as any of Danny’s talks or workshops I ever attended. And if you haven’t yet, make sure to grab his book on language/cognition/representation, you don’t even know how much you need it.
And possibly my favourite Occulture talk was by Alkistis Dimech - Dark Dance, on Dance, Eros and the Body. The lecture/poetry hit intensely after seeing Alkistis’ breathtaking Butoh performance the night before.
There is much more on the Occulture YouTube channel, and I’m still waiting for uploads of a few talks I would love to revisit coming up next. Will share more as they go online!
Breadcrumbs
And for the last section, I’ll just dump here a few great links. For example the Cinematic Grimoire, an amazing resource for any Occultism-related movies. The lists are impressively vast, organised in sections on witchcraft, ritual magick, stage magic, folk horror, gnostic film etc. What a rabbit hole to get into!
I’m also currently really enjoying this 2008 collection of essays on Conceptual Horror, which features works from George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani aaaaand many more.
I’ve been feeling really inspired while reading Vanessa Sinclair’s Things Happen, and as this wonderful book promises: coming of age in 1990s Florida... Sex & drugs & dark music... Goth & Fetish Clubs... Abandoned Cocaine Gangster Hotels... Love & Violence... Friendships that last for life & beyond... it really has it all.
In parallel (of course) I’m reading and annotating the Book of Enoch with the Gnostic Technology group. I have to say, not many gospels could reignite my teenage misotheistic passion such as this one. Soundtracked by:
Uh oh and the last thing, I’ll be in Nova Scotia by the end of May for Devil 2024 conference, presenting my Devil in the Language Model extended essay. Very excited!
Thanks for staying with me, this was just a quick highly caffeinated report without much structure. I’m preparing more in-depth content on AI and Lucid Dreaming with some interviews for the next months, so that will be a bit smoother I hope!
Stay kind,
k