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