Magic

Jamie Sutcliffe

• Publisher: Whitechapel Gallery
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780854883028
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and complex bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary arts varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of re-enchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical cultures tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a magical-critical thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present. Artists surveyed:
Holly Pester, Katrina Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, Anna Zett, Monica Sjöo, Sofia Al-Maria, Jack Burnham, Jeremy Millar, Susan Hiller, Mike Kelley, Morehshin Allahyari, Center for Tactical Magic, David Steans, Porpentine, Travis Jeppesen, Linda Stupart, Caspar Heinemann, Elizabeth Mputu, Faith Wilding, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, Henri Michaux, Kenneth Anger, Benedict Drew, Mark Leckey, Robert Morris, Jenna Sutela, Haroon Mirza, Zadie Xa, Saya Woolfalk, Ian Cheng, Tabita Rezaire, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Elijah Burgher, Pierre Paulo Pasolini, Sahej Rahal Writers:
Charles Fort, Victoria Nelson, Gary Lachman, Yvonne P. Chireau, Randall Styers, Isabelle Stengers, Alan Moore, Simon O Sullivan, Lucy Lippard, Louis Chude Sokei, Patricia MacCormack, Mark Pilkington, Æ, Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Michel Leiris, Aimé Césaire, Austin Osman Spare, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Elaine Graham, Jeffrey Sconce, Giulia Smith, Esther Leslie, Alice Bucknell, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Hannah Gregory, Kristen Gallerneaux, Mahan Moalemi, Jamie Sutcliffe, Gregory Sholette, Aaron Gach, Eugene Thacker, Diane Di Prima, Allan Doyle, Aria Dean, Emily LaBarge, Lou Cornum, Joy KMT, Scott Wark, McKenzie Wark, Phil Hine, Jackie Wang, Sean Bonney

Erik Davis

Techgnosis: Magic, Memory and the Angels of Information//1994

One of the most compelling snares is the use of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipulating […]. There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, magic – all of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed. For example, the screen as ‘paper to be marked on’ is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, and typewriting […]. Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important […].

–Alan Kay, ‘User Interface: A Personal View’

While allegory employs ‘machinery’, it is not an engineer's type of machinery at all. It does not use up real fuels, does not transform such fuels into real energy. Instead, it is a fantasized energy, like the fantasized power conferred on the shaman by his belief in daemons.

–Angus Fletcher, Allegory

Within the armor is the butterfly and within the butterfly – is the signal from another star.

–Philip K. Dick

We begin with a digital dream. As computers, media and telecommunications technology continue to collect, manipulate, store, represent and transmit an ever-increasing flux of data, they are installing nothing less than a new dimension: the space of information. This proliferating multi-dimensional space is virtual, densely webbed, and infinitely complex, a vast and sublime realm accessed only through the mediation of our imaginative and technical representations. How powerfully we engage this information space depends on how powerfully we both manipulate and inhabit these representations, these phantasms ghosting the interface.

For things do not work the same through the liquid crystal looking-glass, with its codes, hypertexts, simulated spaces, labyrinthine network architectures, baroque ‘metaphors’, colossal encyclopedias of memory. Inevitably, information theory mutates into an information praxis: how does one move through this space? What are its possible logics, cartographies, entities, connections? In constructing environments that mediate between brains and information space, computer interface designers are already grappling with the phantasmic apparatus of the imagination, for these are questions for the dreaming mind as much as the analytic one.

Far beyond Palo Alto and MIT, in the margins and on the nets, phantasms hover over the technologically-mediated information processing that increasingly constitutes life in the world. Today there is so much pressure on ‘information’ – the word, the conceptual space, but also the stuff itself – that it crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic. […] As I hope to show, by superimposing the notion of information on the vast arcana of esoteric, religious and mythological traditions curiously resonant stories, images and operations emerge. My intent is not to analyse lines of influence but to invoke a network of resonances. In this regard I am inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion, outlined in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, that when one ‘grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite early one’, one ‘establishes a conception of the present as “the time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.’ For my impulse is not only to contextualise the more spectral dimensions of cyberculture, but to call forth its millennial spark.

While the possible objects for an imaginative archaeology of information are vast – ranging from trickster tales to mystical conceptions of the Logos to divination – I'll concentrate on certain aspects of the hermetic imagination: the magical art of memory, demonic cryptography, and gnostic cosmology. We derive the word ‘hermeticism’ (as well as ‘hermeneutics’) from Hermes, the trickster, craftsman and divine messenger of pagan Greece. A central source of hermeticism is the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of wisdom literature thought to have been composed by Hermes Trismegistus, an amalgamation of Hermes and the Egyptian divinity Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe of the gods. When the West rediscovered this material – which actually dated from late antiquity – Trismegistus was believed to be a spiritual contemporary of Moses. He was deemed so important that when Marcilio Ficino was translating classical texts at the onset of the Florentine Renaissance, Cosimo de Medici ordered him to work on the Hermetica before translating Plato.

The French scholar Festugière divided the Hermetica into ‘popular Hermeticism’ – astrology, alchemy and the occult arts – and ‘erudite Hermeticism’, a more sophisticated Gnostic philosophy which emphasised the ability of humanity to discover within itself the mystical knowledge of god and cosmos. Man was considered to be a star-demon in corporeal guise, able to recover his cosmic powers through gnosis, the moment of mystical illumination. The texts emphasised two loosely differentiated modes of such gnosis. So-called ‘optimist’ gnosis saw the world as a manifest map of divine revelation, and held that, as John French put it, ‘by inscribing a representation of the universe within his own mens [higher mind], man can ascend and unite with God’. This positive gnosticism drove the proto-scientific impulses of later magicians, for whom the universe was alive with sentient stellar forces in constant communication with the earth, forces which could be discovered and manipulated by the magus.

The Hermetica's ‘pessimist’ gnosis was derived from elaborate allegorical cosmologies which saw the world as a trap ruled by an ignorant, often malevolent demiurge. The true God was the distant Alien God, and to hear his liberating call, man had to awaken the ‘spark’ or ‘seed’ of light buried within. This moment of gnostic revelation was not just an ineffable mystical oneness, but an influx of cosmic knowledge.

From the beginning, the her...