Speaker 1: Cools Media.
Speaker 2: Tricker treader. I heard, ah, hello, welcome to it could
Speaker 2: happen here the Spooky Special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis.
Speaker 2: Once again, there has been far too many important world
Speaker 2: events taking precedents that we here at the show are
Speaker 2: unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth
Speaker 2: of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is
Speaker 2: for many millennials, so I've taken it upon myself to
Speaker 2: produce two spooky episodes to book and the Holiday, this
Speaker 2: episode that you're listening to right now, as well as
Speaker 2: another that will release Monday morning or Sunday night. As
Speaker 2: the world is becoming an increasingly spooky, scary play, I
Speaker 2: needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and
Speaker 2: eerie fright that comes from living in America and the
Speaker 2: world in general in twenty twenty five. So last week
Speaker 2: I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up
Speaker 2: with my close personal friend and colleague Hinton, and then
Speaker 2: took the train to Germany. Very scary indeed, once in Germany,
Speaker 2: I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols people
Speaker 2: spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that
Speaker 2: appeared via my black scrying mirror the iPhone, which, upon deciphering,
Speaker 2: led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin.
Speaker 2: I entered this dark, looming building and inside the air
Speaker 2: was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all
Speaker 2: black emerged from the fog, witches, wizards, and magicians. I
Speaker 2: followed them into a candlelit room where hooded A cultists
Speaker 2: conducted a ritual welcoming us to the twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: A Culture Conference. A Culture is a bi yearly conference
Speaker 2: that's once every two years, focusing on the intersection of
Speaker 2: occultism and culture, pop or otherwise. This is arguably the
Speaker 2: most prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been
Speaker 2: wanting to attend four years, and I was finally able
Speaker 2: to go this go round on the condition that I
Speaker 2: make four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this
Speaker 2: week and next will cover some of the core magical
Speaker 2: and topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel
Speaker 2: discussion between myself and three other attendees, and then before Christmas,
Speaker 2: I'll have two fully scripted episodes interrogating these concepts further
Speaker 2: and discussing the use of a cult practice in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. So to start, let's meet our panel lists.
Speaker 2: I should introduce my magical travel team for this conference.
Speaker 2: Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist which
Speaker 2: I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure. Delta
Speaker 2: say hi, Hello, what do you do Delta? What's your
Speaker 2: magical specialty?
Speaker 3: I suppose, Well, it's kind of.
Speaker 2: A mix into the microphone.
Speaker 4: It's kind of a mix of things where.
Speaker 2: Part of it is just into the microphone. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: how you can you can you can get you can
Speaker 2: get ptty close to it?
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of a mix of things really between
Speaker 4: conventional chaos magic and more theoretical like weird theory stuff
Speaker 4: like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things.
Speaker 2: We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some landstuff, meta fiction, theory, fiction, hyperstition,
Speaker 2: and Delta myself talk about magic through the Internet quite
Speaker 2: a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which
Speaker 2: is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left.
Speaker 3: I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan.
Speaker 3: I practiced the Vajrana, a Greco Egyptian magical practice, and
Speaker 3: also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that,
Speaker 3: I was also an academic for a good period of
Speaker 3: time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy
Speaker 3: and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide
Speaker 3: and varied.
Speaker 2: We've been making a lot of hegel jokes this weekend,
Speaker 2: so many hegel jokes to our last crew member, which
Speaker 2: people may have heard before on various shows.
Speaker 5: Hi'm my name is Elaine, and I make art and
Speaker 5: research a lot of Renaissance script mark magic, and so
Speaker 5: most of the things I do are a lot of
Speaker 5: idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos
Speaker 5: magic and Balcan folk magic.
Speaker 2: Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests,
Speaker 2: let's start by discussing the word a culture, the namesake
Speaker 2: of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the
Speaker 2: word occult and culture, and it describes how the two
Speaker 2: influence and possibly undermine one another. To read a quote
Speaker 2: from the person who originated the term quote, a culture
Speaker 2: is a word that was inevitable during the hyperactive phase
Speaker 2: of the Temple of Psychic Youth. In the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: we were casting around for an all embracing term to
Speaker 2: describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified spiritual philosophy
Speaker 2: with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible.
Speaker 2: At any given our sensory environment is whispering to us,
Speaker 2: telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue
Speaker 2: between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions
Speaker 2: is what we named a culture that is from Genesis. B.
Speaker 2: Purreage a musician, magician, artist, cult leader, and hashtag slightly
Speaker 2: problematic queer icon. In the seventies, they started the band
Speaker 2: Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later started the Chaos
Speaker 2: magic organization, the Temple of Psychic Youth and its associated
Speaker 2: band Psychic TV. Though a culture did not just describe
Speaker 2: this sort of personal spiritual movement, it carried a strong
Speaker 2: offensive element targeted against society and perceived systems of control
Speaker 2: through their many projects, including Throbbing Gristle Psychic TV. In
Speaker 2: the Temple of Psychic Youth, Purage utilized art and magical
Speaker 2: practice to conduct a quote unquote war on culture. Similar
Speaker 2: to another figure that will soon get to william S Burrows,
Speaker 2: a culture describes a process of cultural osmosis. The occult
Speaker 2: bleeds into and morph's culture, affecting everything from pop culture
Speaker 2: to politics and philosophy. But as a part of this osmosis,
Speaker 2: the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe, territory, marketable. The
Speaker 2: hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden despite
Speaker 2: its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture.
Speaker 2: Like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated.
Speaker 2: Even creative works which are genuine explorations into the occult
Speaker 2: fall into this recuperation herodigm They get turned into products
Speaker 2: consumed by a mostly secular audience, the works of Dueling wizards,
Speaker 2: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Now, some occultists rejoice, knowing
Speaker 2: that this wide exposure will influence more people to become
Speaker 2: interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while
Speaker 2: others bemoan this dilution and commodification of what to them
Speaker 2: is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival,
Speaker 2: along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement, deterritorialized
Speaker 2: Christian hegemonic religion. Now the occult itself has been re territorialized,
Speaker 2: which is not to say that the occult is no
Speaker 2: longer a field of play, which is what this conference
Speaker 2: attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel.
Speaker 3: In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later,
Speaker 3: the term a culture very specifically seems to be focused
Speaker 3: on the study of the interrelation of magical practic and
Speaker 3: the material aspects of a cult culture and its influence
Speaker 3: and appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political
Speaker 3: projects or social projects, you can probably relate this. I
Speaker 3: think that it would be fair to say that it's
Speaker 3: something like culture jamming if we're looking for some familiar
Speaker 3: concepts for people to map onto. That is to say,
Speaker 3: a focus away from simply solitary practice in the ways
Speaker 3: in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society
Speaker 3: or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through
Speaker 3: various artistic practices, or even the production of for example, film,
Speaker 3: television movies. So I think that's a fair assessment of
Speaker 3: the impacts of a culture.
Speaker 2: And relevant to our discussion later. It's influenced in the
Speaker 2: tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current
Speaker 2: manifestation of has some heavily occult origins regarding around a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of people in the nineties who were writing
Speaker 2: about AI as this as this occult project, and that
Speaker 2: influenced many a AI engineer and coder who are now
Speaker 2: building this stuff and it's becoming an ever present part
Speaker 2: of our lives, and the occultists now are trying to
Speaker 2: incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss
Speaker 2: in a sect any other notes on a culture as
Speaker 2: a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept.
Speaker 5: I think a culture is a concept is something that's
Speaker 5: basically been around as long as there's been magical practices,
Speaker 5: just looking at so much of things, like you know,
Speaker 5: the concept of the British Empire being invented by John
Speaker 5: d because of conversations he was having with angels. So
Speaker 5: I think that naming it and calling it something is
Speaker 5: also very much felt like an attempt to sort of
Speaker 5: regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater
Speaker 5: society seemed to influence each other there as opposed to
Speaker 5: a more unintentional way that they have been going back
Speaker 5: and forth for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Speaker 3: There may also be one other aspect that's important for
Speaker 3: our American audiences. Given that we're recording this in Deutscheland,
Speaker 3: this conference varies significantly from other American equivalents, or something
Speaker 3: that might be an American equivalent formerly Panthea Con in
Speaker 3: and around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon
Speaker 3: in the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of
Speaker 3: a New Age neopagan reconstructionist And so most academic discussion
Speaker 3: is viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say
Speaker 3: that there's an anti intellectual trend because I don't necessarily
Speaker 3: think that's true. However, there is a resistance to the
Speaker 3: kind of academic styling that we saw very prevalent at
Speaker 3: this conference to talk about the occult, but more generally
Speaker 3: as an area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic
Speaker 3: practice or part of a larger social neopagan movement, which
Speaker 3: is again very much the focus of most US based conferences.
Speaker 2: As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify,
Speaker 2: we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic
Speaker 2: with a K that is rituals and practices based on
Speaker 2: occult knowledge. It seeks to cause change in accordance with will,
Speaker 2: whether that's change within yourself or in our consensus reality.
Speaker 2: Occult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism,
Speaker 2: an alternative religious practice, or an alternative to religion, with
Speaker 2: its beliefs in practice largely influenced by historical esoteric orders,
Speaker 2: mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermetic philosophy, and alchemy,
Speaker 2: and all these things are influences. I'm not saying that
Speaker 2: the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same
Speaker 2: as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things,
Speaker 2: because often these can be wildly varying, especially when you
Speaker 2: talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been
Speaker 2: misinterpreted or reconstructed into completely new forms than what the
Speaker 2: historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of
Speaker 2: modern day ocultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality
Speaker 2: containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of
Speaker 2: something like Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestantism. Many
Speaker 2: conferences have an opening ceremony and as I previously mentioned,
Speaker 2: A Culture had an opening ritual. This accomplishes a very
Speaker 2: similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in
Speaker 2: a certain headspace, to prepare them for the rest of
Speaker 2: the conference, and set a certain mood in which the
Speaker 2: the rest of the events will kind of follow suit.
Speaker 2: The A Culture opening ritual called upon the attendees demiurgic capacity,
Speaker 2: how they are part of creating the reality of what
Speaker 2: this conference is and how it will continue for the
Speaker 2: next few days. Back to the panel, The framing of
Speaker 2: the ritual was a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance,
Speaker 2: and each person put a intention for the week, or
Speaker 2: for the conference, or for themselves into a stone, which
Speaker 2: was handed out to each person who entered the ritual,
Speaker 2: and at certain point these stones were placed on to
Speaker 2: the scales of balance to create an equilibrium between the
Speaker 2: two sides of the scale. Along with the you know, chanting,
Speaker 2: meditation and a lot of incense.
Speaker 3: A significant deal of incense given that we were in
Speaker 3: a former German forge warehouse. The you know, billowing smoke
Speaker 3: that existed throughout the conference, from fires to incense to
Speaker 3: various other inflammatory items was rather impressive, but in terms
Speaker 3: of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I
Speaker 3: found to be rather impressive. One it was encompassing of
Speaker 3: all of those elements that we would later expect to
Speaker 3: see in the actual body of the conference itself. In
Speaker 3: terms of like the artistic performances, the musical you know,
Speaker 3: metal goth music that was played, but also a very
Speaker 3: practical and open approach to ritual. It was highly inclusive.
Speaker 3: Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job
Speaker 3: I felt of actually bringing setting intention and adding to
Speaker 3: I don't know, at risk of sounding to new age,
Speaker 3: the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and
Speaker 3: were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say was
Speaker 3: also very much dark and spooky. Dark and spooky, but
Speaker 3: something to be admired. They did a very good job.
Speaker 2: Definitely one of the more high effort rituals of the
Speaker 2: weekend in terms of the sort of aspect, with there
Speaker 2: being little less than a dozen hooded cloaked figures stationed
Speaker 2: at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative
Speaker 2: state for probably over half an hour, standing still in
Speaker 2: a decision that would become uncomfortable and swinging incense or
Speaker 2: holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually you
Speaker 2: talk to these people. The first step of any kind
Speaker 2: of magical working is setting your intention for what the
Speaker 2: work is supposed to do or accomplish in you or
Speaker 2: out into the world. Mirroring the opening Ritual Culture twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five little booklet has a few paragraphs on the
Speaker 2: concept for this conference, talking about the cosmic craftsmen as
Speaker 2: the demiir to shapes matter and spirit alike embodies creation
Speaker 2: and transformation, revealing both the light and the hidden, the
Speaker 2: shadowed face of the divine, as well as having cosmic
Speaker 2: balance and balancing instruction with creation and order and chaos
Speaker 2: and the hidden and the scene. The last paragraph in
Speaker 2: which I will read I think relates specifically to this
Speaker 2: show and the cultural political aspects quote. In the age
Speaker 2: of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance.
Speaker 2: His patience and ritual discipline reclaim sacred time, restoring a
Speaker 2: rhythm beyond the acceleration of modern life. A Culture twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition,
Speaker 2: and the hidden divine converge, and with that we converge
Speaker 2: on an outbreak, Welcome back to the it could Happen
Speaker 2: here Spooky special on the Culture Conference. The figure name
Speaker 2: dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people,
Speaker 2: because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be
Speaker 2: an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most
Speaker 2: discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference,
Speaker 2: was not Alistair Crowley, John Dee, someone like Lena Blovatsky,
Speaker 2: but in fact william S Burrows. And now we'll return
Speaker 2: to the panel to discuss the Barosian current. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout
Speaker 2: this conference, what I'm gonna call the Burrosian current, relating
Speaker 2: to writer, beat poet, and mystic and occultist in his
Speaker 2: own right, william S Burrows and the magical technology that
Speaker 2: he either invented or popularized in the second half of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century and played a significant role in influencing
Speaker 2: successor movements such as chaos magic and even the work
Speaker 2: of the CCRU and Land and Fisher. The very first
Speaker 2: talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs, and Burroughs
Speaker 2: ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter and introduced
Speaker 2: a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of
Speaker 2: the conference, which we will discuss as specifically technology in AI.
Speaker 3: So our first talk by Castor Obstrop, who I believe
Speaker 3: was Swedish one of those.
Speaker 4: He was working at the University of Copenhagen, the.
Speaker 3: University of Copenhagen certainly Scandinavian of some flavor of variety,
Speaker 3: focused on William S. Burrows and Brian Geyson. I think
Speaker 3: that it's important and I appreciated this claim on the
Speaker 3: outset that they argued that both Geyson and Burroughs are
Speaker 3: actually closer to the late Surrealists rather than to the
Speaker 3: beat poets generation which we typically associate them with, which,
Speaker 3: interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more
Speaker 3: compelling to me my understanding of them. I mean, despite
Speaker 3: my familiarity with the cut up method, and you know,
Speaker 3: several of the things that Burrows had written, I always
Speaker 3: considered them far more beat and therefore less less of
Speaker 3: interest to me specifically. But this proximity to the Surrealists,
Speaker 3: especially the latter Surrealists, I found particularly compelling, and I
Speaker 3: think that brings us to the real focus of this
Speaker 3: talk was Burrows's cut up method and another book that
Speaker 3: he published on the third Mind, which gave way to
Speaker 3: the latter discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models.
Speaker 2: So Burrow's definitely popularized the cut up method which Guyson originated,
Speaker 2: that Burrows changed its different forms of manifestations to various
Speaker 2: mediums of art like the tape recorder and his own
Speaker 2: writings and just words and language. And I guess the
Speaker 2: reason why I think talking about this current is important
Speaker 2: to start is also revolves around this idea of magic
Speaker 2: as this form of like resistance or this like a
Speaker 2: culture jamming practice which Burrows framed his own work in
Speaker 2: his like a you know, work that we could could
Speaker 2: we could just describe as like esoteric or inspired by
Speaker 2: esoterism or achieving esotericals is specifically for this cultural infusion
Speaker 2: to to disrupt mainstream culture in some capacity, to go
Speaker 2: against the one God universe, sometimes in an anarchic way,
Speaker 2: sometimes in a libertarian way. Some there's a mix of
Speaker 2: a mix of like uh motivations that play here same
Speaker 2: thing with like Robert Anton Wilson, which I'm sure you've
Speaker 2: heard Robert Evans talk about before. These were contemporaries, These
Speaker 2: guys were friends and operating under like similar goals of
Speaker 2: disrupting culture through these techniques which which they thought literally
Speaker 2: like disrupted the linear flow of culture or the mechanisms
Speaker 2: of control such as like language and linear time, which
Speaker 2: later gets developed on by Land and Fissure.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think looking at some of my notes, some
Speaker 5: of the things that stuck out to me, especially in
Speaker 5: view of the fact that the other classes going on
Speaker 5: at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving
Speaker 5: into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions,
Speaker 5: was that language can shape reality, which is something that
Speaker 5: would also be held up by a lot of the
Speaker 5: classical magical ideas that sound and image have occult power,
Speaker 5: which is very true in a lot of magical traditions
Speaker 5: dating back to the Piatrix and more ancient texts, and
Speaker 5: that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument,
Speaker 5: which the tech available currently and for William Burrows is
Speaker 5: very different than classical tech, but is something that has
Speaker 5: been done for a very long time as well. What
Speaker 5: really changes is stepping out of the idea of a
Speaker 5: linear representation of it into something that could be edited,
Speaker 5: cut and reprogrammed, specifically using technology that allowed that as
Speaker 5: opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through
Speaker 5: say more spiritual magical acts. It's something that you can
Speaker 5: do with a tape recording.
Speaker 2: And this is like, you know, based on forms like
Speaker 2: social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality,
Speaker 2: which Burrows believes a language plays a key role in,
Speaker 2: even though I might disagree with him in a few
Speaker 2: ways on like the nature of like a language as
Speaker 2: a as a human concept versus this like alien concept
Speaker 2: which it's like infected the human delta. You should explain
Speaker 2: what the cut up method is.
Speaker 4: Yes, well the name itself kind of is self explanatory,
Speaker 4: but the idea of being essentially too thick any form
Speaker 4: of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces
Speaker 4: of sentences, jumble limup in a hat or a bucket
Speaker 4: or whatever, then kind of like play a jigsaw puzzle
Speaker 4: with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and new forms
Speaker 4: of poetry, especially which I'm just looking at my own
Speaker 4: cutups right in front of me.
Speaker 2: To force like randomized combinations of words that you would
Speaker 2: not choose to combine on your own volition, and seeing
Speaker 2: what sort of thought that generates what kind of meaning
Speaker 2: can be constructed through that combination.
Speaker 5: Exactly, we're on some of the first cutups done with
Speaker 5: books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing
Speaker 5: the other words that would appear underneath, and if new
Speaker 5: meaning would arise through the surprise combinations.
Speaker 2: Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves
Speaker 2: into a current present within the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think one of the Borough's quotes is when you
Speaker 4: cut into the present, the future leaks out, which.
Speaker 3: Is related to the concept of time sorcery that was
Speaker 3: talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think
Speaker 3: another element to the cutup mesas that's important, especially as
Speaker 3: it was framed in this a culture context is as
Speaker 3: the we quoted from the or as I wrote this
Speaker 3: quote down from the actual lecture itself, reality is made
Speaker 3: of words, images and vibrations, and sounds and images have
Speaker 3: occult power, and therefore these sounds and images and words
Speaker 3: can be marshaled or used, edited, cut through, rearranged for
Speaker 3: the purposes of reprogramming. It's fascinating. I think that this
Speaker 3: really is something that carries through to the whole conference,
Speaker 3: and not just the Burrow's method, but what this Burrow's
Speaker 3: method or the Barossian current of the conference. It seems
Speaker 3: that there was a problematic I mean, we started basically
Speaker 3: with dari Da and we ended with dari Da with
Speaker 3: discussions of like critiques of the master narrative that we
Speaker 3: get from you know, Deluze and Leotard and Baudriard and
Speaker 3: these people. But the goal of this method was to
Speaker 3: rewrite the master narrative. So again back to that concept
Speaker 3: of culture jamming. As Gerre said, this concept of the
Speaker 3: one God universe, this cut up method is meant to
Speaker 3: interrupt the linearity of words of language, that is a
Speaker 3: process of control. So I take issue with this concept
Speaker 3: of language as a virus because that implies that it's
Speaker 3: a foreign body, and I mean it's true post structuralists.
Speaker 3: I guess that I am. There is no outside to language,
Speaker 3: and I think that that's actually something that shines through
Speaker 3: in this third mind concept.
Speaker 2: As two people work together on something, there's a composite
Speaker 2: mind that like emerges and affects the work. Is the
Speaker 2: concept there.
Speaker 3: So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence
Speaker 3: communicates with you through the revelation of the new that
Speaker 3: was already present. And I think that that's really important
Speaker 3: to point out because it's it's not as though there's
Speaker 3: this this outside thing. The implication is from this method
Speaker 3: is that the new reveals itself through this process that's
Speaker 3: already present in language. Because this is a question that
Speaker 3: I had throughout, is that if if language is this
Speaker 3: foreign entity that dominates us through control, and the method
Speaker 3: itself is language, then how are we not just re
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess it's a kind of inoculation if
Speaker 3: we have a you know, a theory of language that
Speaker 3: is based in you know, what what do we call this?
Speaker 3: What is it that we all just got during COVID
Speaker 3: Kevin fever? No, No, the things that we inject into
Speaker 3: our body that created the INDI vaccines. There we go.
Speaker 3: That's the ticket inoculations.
Speaker 2: Not all, not all of us got vaccines.
Speaker 4: Okay, care.
Speaker 3: You heard it here first vaccine did not know where
Speaker 3: was it going with this? Okay?
Speaker 2: Speaking of methods of speaking of methods of control.
Speaker 5: I mean a lot of it.
Speaker 3: The new just came out there. Wait just one moment, Sorry, Elane,
Speaker 3: I likened this to this process of dialectics. But that's
Speaker 3: because I couldn't shut up about Hegel the entire time.
Speaker 3: We were there because I don't think enough occultists are
Speaker 3: talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel?
Speaker 3: Everyone should be talking about Hegel.
Speaker 2: I mean, as fun as it is to think about this,
Speaker 2: like third mind as like an egg grigor figure, which
Speaker 2: we've we've mentioned before, is like it's like a group
Speaker 2: thought form, like a being or a force that is
Speaker 2: generated through through multiple people believing in it.
Speaker 4: You make up an imaginary friend in a way.
Speaker 2: That's what a severtre but true in a grigora is
Speaker 2: as a is, yeah, a form of thought that they
Speaker 2: gained its own, like an autonomy, and becomes kind of
Speaker 2: like a like a little tiny god.
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 2: Or they also combined the third mind idea to like
Speaker 2: net work consciousness. The one last thing I will say
Speaker 2: on this before we get to the AI aspect, I guess.
Speaker 2: On this culture jamming nonlinearity is the concept of the
Speaker 2: circuit jump, which was playing back words from politicians in
Speaker 2: different contexts as a sort of like a Uno Reverso
Speaker 2: psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually works
Speaker 2: considering the current's political situation, but this is certainly a
Speaker 2: tactic to which I have employed many such cases and
Speaker 2: we see a lot of people attempt attempt to do this,
Speaker 2: and I think there are certain figures who have their
Speaker 2: own very strong magical force field protecting them, which has
Speaker 2: been pretty evident through the past ten years, including the
Speaker 2: President of the United States. But as a as a
Speaker 2: circuit jump is playing something from the wrong the wrong
Speaker 2: time in a different context as as a form of attack.
Speaker 2: The most famous version of this, which isn't necessarily for
Speaker 2: political ends, so this was for personal ends. It's the
Speaker 2: Burroughs cafe incident, which I've been a fan of for years,
Speaker 2: in which he was slighted by a cafe so then
Speaker 2: he started recording.
Speaker 5: All that happened was they changed their menu and he
Speaker 5: couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day.
Speaker 2: There's been some menus that have changed that I would
Speaker 2: continue using this tactic where he recorded sounds from from
Speaker 2: outside of like people talking or arguing or walking by
Speaker 2: or plates dropping, and then played them back outside of
Speaker 2: the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed.
Speaker 2: And this is like the funniest, the funniest form of
Speaker 2: this sort of magical obsession, because this really is just
Speaker 2: a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front of a
Speaker 2: cafe until they close. I mean it worked of yeah,
Speaker 2: playing back sounds of you know, arguing, fighting, plates smashing,
Speaker 2: which would probably create a negative aura around around in
Speaker 2: this building. But that is the most most funny of Burrows,
Speaker 2: the circum jump moment. Although I mean Burrough's life is
Speaker 2: full of these humorous and sometimes worrying of anecdotes.
Speaker 5: There's one other thing that stuck out to me, given
Speaker 5: what a lot of the other talks in that space
Speaker 5: ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was
Speaker 5: really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that
Speaker 5: for Burros and Geyson, the reproduction of reality is how
Speaker 5: control occurs, and so the goal was to manipulate the
Speaker 5: reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction
Speaker 5: of reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I
Speaker 5: don't think anyone went into nearly as much, but is
Speaker 5: something that we're seeing with say even the Republican Party
Speaker 5: releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend me does
Speaker 2: talk about, is how there's a quote from some neo
Speaker 2: cons about how how like democrats just have to kind
Speaker 2: of like you know, like react to reality versus the
Speaker 2: Republicans who generate it and they like decide what reality is.
Speaker 2: And you can see this with all of the sort
Speaker 2: of like moral moral panics which have spread across the
Speaker 2: United States and around the world the past few years,
Speaker 2: whether that's gender ideology, whether it's immigration, whether that's this
Speaker 2: non existent crime wave where it is a genuine like
Speaker 2: creation of of reality. And then this this this goes
Speaker 2: into you know, the Burrows ideas later get developed by
Speaker 2: a group of academics and occultists that formed the c
Speaker 2: c R. You this included say plant Nick Land who
Speaker 2: then turned to the dark side and uh the since
Speaker 2: past Mark Fisher, who put a name to some of
Speaker 2: this sort of phenomenon called the hyperstition, which is Robert
Speaker 2: has talked about before in the show. But it is
Speaker 2: it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is a fiction
Speaker 2: that becomes true through the creation of the fiction and
Speaker 2: the dissemination of the fiction. And this is part of
Speaker 2: how reality can get formed, is through these falsehoods that
Speaker 2: that through through repetition and dissemination, become self manifest.
Speaker 4: The thing about that, though, is that the high perscisional
Speaker 4: model itself requires to the acceptance of the idea that
Speaker 4: everything is a fiction?
Speaker 3: Yes, like well, yeah.
Speaker 2: A lot of most things go through a process like this, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: but doing doing such a thing like intentionally and like offensively? Right?
Speaker 2: Which is which is the idea that we're discussing here
Speaker 2: in like a political context? Is this this this offensive
Speaker 2: reality formation where you literally decide what is real and
Speaker 2: like what isn't And you know, if you have hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions dollars in like a news company at your disposal,
Speaker 2: this can become easier.
Speaker 5: Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up
Speaker 5: reality to shape it in the image of the people
Speaker 5: who fund them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean they are. They are much It's
Speaker 2: it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people
Speaker 2: who are often.
Speaker 5: The clips are you going to use from the conference?
Speaker 2: And I will later in my written work, But I
Speaker 2: think on that note, I think occultists are a class
Speaker 2: of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic,
Speaker 2: because the people that are really good at this sort
Speaker 2: of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element
Speaker 2: of hiding their their you know, awareness of what they
Speaker 2: are doing, because they a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: them know what they're doing that you just actually keep
Speaker 2: it a more cultic whereas the magicians will not shut
Speaker 2: the fuck up because there's always a there's always a
Speaker 2: new book to sell.
Speaker 3: That was an excellent segue to an ad break Lane.
Speaker 3: Thank you for that, and now a word from our
Speaker 3: sponsors on this note, though, Gary with you completely as
Speaker 3: a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism
Speaker 3: going into any magical conference. I sat down, I listened,
Speaker 3: and I've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt
Speaker 3: to map on rather poorly magic onto a cultural figure,
Speaker 3: and I think Burrows is really unique here. But my
Speaker 3: academic pretense was to sit here and to listen and
Speaker 3: think about, you know, language as a pharmicon, think about
Speaker 3: dry Da, Delouze, Baudrard, Leotard when they're discussing the master
Speaker 3: narrative or rewriting the master narrative. But what's unique about
Speaker 3: Burrows and why I gave up that, you know, academic
Speaker 3: mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we having
Speaker 3: this conversation. We could just go read these texts. They
Speaker 3: talk about similar things. But the point is is that
Speaker 3: those texts talk about similar things. And what's unique about
Speaker 3: Burrows is that he's actually doing the doer. He's a doer.
Speaker 3: This is fundamentally the difference between the vida activa and
Speaker 3: the vita contempt of taiva. Like I'm thinking in terms
Speaker 3: of philosophers, and it took me half of this talk
Speaker 3: to be like, no, he's actually doing shit as soon
Speaker 3: as we get out to like, you know, him actually
Speaker 3: standing out in front of the cafe and doing this.
Speaker 3: He's not just developing a method, but by virtue of
Speaker 3: the fact that he's inviting other artists, like the slides
Speaker 3: upon slides that we saw of him, you know, working
Speaker 3: with new machines that he was creating and trying these things.
Speaker 3: He was actively involved in this practice, which again makes
Speaker 3: him far more magical than most occultists. Don't come for
Speaker 3: me absolutely.
Speaker 2: AI specifically be discussing debates and uses of generative AI
Speaker 2: in this conference because the last A Culture conference was
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three, as these large language models and
Speaker 2: image generation platforms were just just starting to gain popularity
Speaker 2: and now they have a stranglehold over at the stock
Speaker 2: market and many people's imagination. The first I guess real
Speaker 2: debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed
Speaker 2: to listen to a panel after the Willly mess Burroughs panel,
Speaker 2: as well as a Austin Osman Spare panel, a proto
Speaker 2: cast magician from the twentieth century. It was a contemporary
Speaker 2: of Alistair Crowley. I left to go listen to a
Speaker 2: mathematical thelemic ontology talk, which was probably less interesting than
Speaker 2: the panel. I'd like to hear you guys talk about
Speaker 2: the debates around AI and how they emerged in this panel,
Speaker 2: and then also juxtassing that to the different forms of
Speaker 2: like AI in discussions are an AI that dominated a large
Speaker 2: part of the rest of the conference.
Speaker 5: Well, actually AI came up because the initial discussion question
Speaker 5: for the panel was what does it mean to talk
Speaker 5: about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone
Speaker 5: was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between
Speaker 5: the creation process is magic when you can use AI,
Speaker 5: when you can use large language models to just generate things,
Speaker 5: and if the generative method using AI I was at
Speaker 5: all related to say, the cut up method or other things.
Speaker 5: So that was the initial conversation that began that whole panel.
Speaker 3: Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged
Speaker 3: by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss
Speaker 3: the Austin Osmond spare was about automatic drawing. So this
Speaker 3: conception and of you know, this drawing that is coming
Speaker 3: from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within,
Speaker 3: with all within one line. But more than that, it
Speaker 3: was a very traditional kind of European nineteen seventies lecture.
Speaker 3: You know, you had a lovely Italian man who stood
Speaker 3: in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette
Speaker 3: while trying to get through, you know, a very well formulated,
Speaker 3: well argued essay, while a series of images presented to
Speaker 3: us behind him that covered an overview of artists that
Speaker 3: are doing very similar things. He argued, exist in a
Speaker 3: similar kind of vein and the occurrences of not just
Speaker 3: magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently, so artists
Speaker 3: all over the world. The third talk by I believe
Speaker 3: Kate Lady. Yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora
Speaker 3: Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production which happened in
Speaker 3: Mexico City, I believe, So we had a few pictures
Speaker 3: of this, but Leonora Carrington's art very specifically has to
Speaker 3: do with this like hybrid of like animals and mythical
Speaker 3: figures and creatures, and the stage production was incredibly intense.
Speaker 3: I really appreciated this talk a lot. But then focus
Speaker 3: on talking about, you know, generative artificial intelligence in these
Speaker 3: large language models and the role of art or what
Speaker 3: it means to do art in this era was related
Speaker 3: to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing,
Speaker 3: of this concept of hybridity, of this like transformative or
Speaker 3: this discovering of the new through a synth putting together
Speaker 3: of different elements or images, words, sounds, costume ry, these
Speaker 3: kinds of things, So that it was a natural question
Speaker 3: to lead, but the audience members took it in a
Speaker 3: very strange direction that I would like you all to
Speaker 3: talk about.
Speaker 5: I mean, the initial question was really that people started
Speaker 5: asking after the panel topic was proposed, was so, what
Speaker 5: did the panelists think about AI art? Do the panelists
Speaker 5: think AI art is magic? Do the panelists think that
Speaker 5: AI art is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know,
Speaker 5: putting a prompt in a language model is the same
Speaker 5: as doing some sort of trans state automatic writing. There
Speaker 5: was a lot of variations on functionally that all of
Speaker 5: the panelists reaction was no, it's not and a lot
Speaker 5: of them did not immediately really want to even dive
Speaker 5: into that topic and were very annoyed at the question.
Speaker 3: That's actually not true, because I got triggered almost immediately
Speaker 3: because it was our first speaker that responded not to
Speaker 3: that first question, but to the second question. And the
Speaker 3: second question had to do with the role of technology
Speaker 3: and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools,
Speaker 3: you know, as a technology a techne in magical practice.
Speaker 3: And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and
Speaker 3: give us a tentative yes to.
Speaker 5: The tech, to the tech.
Speaker 3: That's correct.
Speaker 5: To AI, they were like, their initial reaction was still
Speaker 5: also no, but.
Speaker 3: Yes they they indeed got there, but it was unclear
Speaker 3: at first, and I was a little raw about it,
Speaker 3: given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that you
Speaker 3: know that he had mentioned before. There was a question
Speaker 3: about NFTs. Do you remember this question?
Speaker 5: Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head. Yes,
Speaker 5: that was the fact that it started with, like, well,
Speaker 5: NFTs failed because people like weren't ready to embrace the
Speaker 5: blockchain as a generative idea for making art, as opposed
Speaker 5: to the fact that why would I own an NFT
Speaker 5: if I can screenshot the picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves
Speaker 3: were part of this breaking up of the control process,
Speaker 3: the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it
Speaker 3: was related to the cut up method. It was one
Speaker 3: of those questions that was a narrative before it finally
Speaker 3: got to your question that really just invited the readers
Speaker 3: to respond. There were others that talked about this too
Speaker 3: and related their own personal experience to the generative AI
Speaker 3: process that you know, they approach AI not with the
Speaker 3: expectation that will provide sense, but it'll almost have this
Speaker 3: oracular or again this they related to the third mind.
Speaker 3: They this idea that again you and the AI come
Speaker 3: together and somehow reveal the new which I at this
Speaker 3: point was absolutely seething.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think the closest actually that we had to
Speaker 5: some really like someone even trying to approach it was
Speaker 5: asking about, if you're making this art, if you're generating
Speaker 5: these new things, does it matter that corporations are controlling
Speaker 5: the algorithm by which you're doing so, Which started to
Speaker 5: touch on some of the problems, but still was definitely
Speaker 5: relying on the base assumption that using a large language
Speaker 5: model to produce stories or art that you're interacting with
Speaker 5: something else that's actually capable of creating it all.
Speaker 3: And to her credit, my girl Kate Lady, who was
Speaker 3: talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be
Speaker 3: kind of tangentially separate from the other two, but the
Speaker 3: hybridity really made it was the one that just gave
Speaker 3: us a great straight Marxist answer of like, no, this
Speaker 3: is bullshit. Let's actually look at the material implications as
Speaker 3: to where this is coming from and the environmental costs
Speaker 3: of running these programs of server farms, the destruction of
Speaker 3: space of you know, livable areas throughout the United States.
Speaker 3: That these are questions that we need to ask and
Speaker 3: are not separate from these questions of magic. So really
Speaker 3: shout out to her. I appreciated that response because it
Speaker 3: was instant, and it was it was heated.
Speaker 4: It is also, like I mean, from from my perspective,
Speaker 4: it's also a labor is she write because these large
Speaker 4: language models and generative AI just scrape like so much
Speaker 4: data that that's like writing from real artists and create
Speaker 4: created by real like painters and whatever. And it is
Speaker 4: the appropriation of human labor. To shout out some advertising
Speaker 4: essentially that is like my main well, aside from all
Speaker 4: the ecological and the political issues with it, it's like
Speaker 4: very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me.
Speaker 3: Well, in the context of the talk, it's really important
Speaker 3: to the ground. And this is the comment that I
Speaker 3: made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although
Speaker 3: I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me.
Speaker 3: You're right, thank you. Go on. So this burrows concept
Speaker 3: of the third mind this book that he wrote, right,
Speaker 3: when two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates
Speaker 3: with you, again, not about creating the new, but about
Speaker 3: revealing itself in what was already present. Yes, but the
Speaker 3: idea is that you have to have two minds in
Speaker 3: order to get this dialectical third mind that was inherent
Speaker 3: in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two.
Speaker 3: When one interacts with any form of large language model
Speaker 3: or chat GBT, I in my mind and with what
Speaker 3: I carry sit in front of a computer and type
Speaker 3: my input. That's one mind. Can you tell me where
Speaker 3: the second is?
Speaker 5: Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a
Speaker 5: mind in the book. There's a story, there's an actual
Speaker 5: thing there. There's a thing that you are interacting with
Speaker 5: that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you
Speaker 5: are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet
Speaker 5: bowl of human production.
Speaker 3: But even if we're going to be generous and say
Speaker 3: that these large language models are the ones that are
Speaker 3: doing the cut up process and you are secondary or
Speaker 3: tertiary or even further down the line to it, I mean,
Speaker 3: it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point. So
Speaker 3: just in terms of the you know, the Barosian current,
Speaker 3: it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions
Speaker 3: are such that it is not and cannot be a
Speaker 3: third mind.
Speaker 2: Where I would like to take this discussion is actually
Speaker 2: the very next talk that I attended was part of
Speaker 2: a three talk series called the Politics of Taro, and
Speaker 2: the specific one that I think continued on this line
Speaker 2: of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from
Speaker 2: Icon to Index by Thomas Leak the Generative Logic of Taro,
Speaker 2: in which he discussed I will have to check his
Speaker 2: name later, but discussed an author in the eighties who
Speaker 2: was trying to use Taro as a way to remove
Speaker 2: the human element of writing, try to create an automatic
Speaker 2: story using the Tarot archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling
Speaker 2: to generate a story based on the linkages between each
Speaker 2: of the cards and remove his own agency and directing
Speaker 2: where the story goes except for trying to bridge each
Speaker 2: card one to another. And the presenter was discussing if
Speaker 2: this bears any similarity to like generative text models. The
Speaker 2: presenter said no. The presenter said, this actually is not
Speaker 2: like llms, which purely operate on a people pleasing probabilistic
Speaker 2: capacity to follow one word after another in accordance with
Speaker 2: whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the AI
Speaker 2: wants it to generate. Though the presenter stated that this
Speaker 2: author who was using Tarot probably would have loved using
Speaker 2: an LLM to try to accomplish this goal of his
Speaker 2: trying to access. Kind of like a form of automatic
Speaker 2: writing similar to Mike Astn Honsman's Beare, but without human input.
Speaker 2: The shuffling of the cards and forcing the human brain
Speaker 2: to make connections between these archetypes still contains a creative
Speaker 2: human process based on randomness in the shuffling of the
Speaker 2: deck versus the people pleasing probabilistic generative text that lms produce.
Speaker 2: This concludes the first episode of My Culture twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five coverage, in part to releasing Sunday Night. The panel
Speaker 2: will discuss digital technomancy, traditional magical practice, and why people
Speaker 2: are doing accult practice in twenty twenty five. See you
Speaker 2: on the other side.
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