Please welcome TiamatsVision and Danny Chaoflux to Technoccult. Danny is the designer of the Technoccult logo, and my co-conspirator for both Portland Occulture and Esozone. And you probably know TiamatsVision for her prolific commenting here at Technoccult. I’m looking forward to seeing what they share with us.

The designer reality festival Esozone is just around the corner, but many primates (like myself) can’t make the event due to lack of funds, the atlantic or just general bad karmic energy.

So luckily the lovely people at Someday Lounge have put on a virtual stream that you can catch from the comfort of your own altar.

If you haven’t heard of Esozone (seriously where have you been?) then check out the fantastic website here.

Any occultists in Calgary I don’t know about? I remember meeting one or two on Barbelith, but I am too lazy to log in there. Lil’ ol’ me will be in Calgary for the next few days so if anyone wants to drink or have sex intellectual conversations with me, now’s the time. If you do live in or near Calgary, it should be an okay time. I’ll be putzing with some designer friends and photographer wunderkind seventytw0dpi. And just plain ol’ rockin’ out, as only Albertans can.

Leave a note here if you wanna grab a drinkie-drink. That includes coffee. Or tea. Or gin.

I just finished reading Abe Burmeister’s master’s thesis, Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics. It’s available as a free pdf or as a printed book. This is the “public draft.” It’s still pretty rough, but still quite good.

This book is very straight forward and easy to read. I don’t have much of a background in economics, but I found Abe’s writing clear and accessible. Abe’s a designer by trade, not an economist, and this book/paper was written for the Interactive Telecommunications Program, not for an econ program.

Abe seems to be mostly inspired by this quote by Manuel De Landa:

I believe that the main task for today’s left is to create a new political economy (the resources are all there: Max Weber, T.B. Veblen and the old institutionalists, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fernand Braudel, some of the new institutionalists, like Douglass North; redefinitions of the market, like those of Herbert Simon etc) based as you acknowledged before, on a non-equilibrium view of the matter? But how can we do this if we continue to believe that Marxists got it right, that it is just a matter of tinkering with the basic ideas? At any rate, concepts like “mode of production” do not fit a flat ontology of individuals as far as I can tell.

Abe takes this and runs with it. This book lays the ground work. He doesn’t have all the answers yet (he’s mentioned he’s already working on a complete re-write), but this is a great starting point. Abe’s mostly focused on designers, but this book would be a good starting point for anyone interested in the idea of “economic hacking” – activists, artists, and yes, magicians.

More links:

Abe’s research blog.

His main blog.

Bonus: More “edge” economics.

Fell continues to work towards his theory of occult-design:

I remember speaking to a fellow by the name of SatsUrn on OccultForums.com some time ago. He works as a physicist in the U.S. dealing with electromagnetic radiation and had gotten involved in the occult with his interest in sacred geometry in ancient temples. Turns out that much of the ancient holy architects had some sort of esoteric knowledge of how particular angles, shapes, dimensions, and spaces could warp and affect the natural electromagnetic forces and other radiations and/or energies that were naturally occurrent. These structures could also focus human energies while within and, for lack of better terms, magnify or amplify them. Thus, sacred temples were actually, yes, houses of the gods. Not in that they were hanging out in the rafters looking down upon us, but as it welled up exotic energies that essentially entrained the people within to be drawn into either ecstatic states or lower EEG states, perhaps from the normal, waking beta state down to more introspective, “mystical” states that are normal when the mind’s EEG is entrained to alpha or theta waves.

In art, it is the realm of the artist to exact their inner visions of reality upon a canvas, whether it be clay or by brush. We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. But a designer learns the tenets of her or his craft in order to bring an order, hierarchy, and structure to that which there is apparently none ? something especially true in an “Age of Information,” an age named after an abstraction. The methods of magic are similar in that the will of the individual is fixed and, through a projection of desire into the substratum of reality, events unfold that can bring about changes in apparent accord to the magician’s will. It is an attempt to place an abstract order of control over the randomness of life. (Love Women, Hate Stupid).

[Tried to post this as a comment over at Mutato Nomine but couldn't, so I'm posting it publically here instead]

To reply but briefly – I was very skeptical, even embarresed at the religious content of ceremonial magick starting out… but hey, it works. Michael and others have speculated part its power comes from using such heavily charged symbolism.

Also, I’m weary about throwing the baby out with the bathwater… for my part, the concern over religious content is dogma, and thankfully most occult programs either dispense with it or leave you free to create your own. In the case of Christianity, the symbolism was there before the religion.

And at least in hermetic kabbalah, at least as far as I’ve explored it, JHVH and Kether are not the cruel invisible monster of most of Judaeo-Christianity, but closer the Hindu concept of “aum.”

I do see the religious context as a stumbling block for a lot of people – either they are scared off from will brain chanage and designer realities by the regligious content, or they become so fixated with the symbolism that they forget what they’re doing in the first place. I’ll have to look up those Altar Consciousness articles, I sort of forgot about them before getting a chance to read them… I’ve had an idea for “agnostic magic” for a bit now.

Daniel Pinchbeck, and the fine folks at FutureHi, are starting a project called Metacine: a Magazine for the New Edge. It’s about stuff like Burning Man and, like Future Hi, “new” psychedelic culture.

It sounds a lot like Mondo 2000, a magazine for the new edge that ran sporadically from the late 80s (under the title Reality Hackers) until around 1997. It had articles about Burning Man, raves, designer drugs, smart drugs, etc. and basically spawned the magazine Wired. Burning Man’s been going for nearly 2 decades now. Nothing new there. All the sustainable bio future stuff they’re talking about on the Metacine web site? Sounds like Mother Earth News or the Whole Earth Catalog.

So what’s “new edge” about all of this? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of what they’re doing. I’m excited about all of it, honestly. But trying to package it up as some sort of new movement sounds like journalese to me. I’ve been as guilty as anyone else about this. Just look through the Technoccult archives and you’ll find plenty of evidence.

Why this obsession with doing “new” things? Finding the trends, the edge, blah blah blah blah blah. Seems like we’re all still stuck in the past, rambling about sustainable energy and Leary’s 8 circuit model and all that. But is that really such a bad thing?

Then there’s Jason Louv’s attempt to create a new occult ultraculture. Rather than trying to document a new culture, Jason’s trying to will a new one into existence with his book. I admire what he’s doing, and I know he’s doing it for the right reasons. He wants to see a new generation of socially consciousness occultists. It actually reminds me a lot of Terrence McKenna’s stuff though, about the role of shaman as a healer for the community. McKenna called his vision of the future an “archaic revival,” because everything he expected to occur was actually ancient.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for Jason and for the Future-Hi cats, and I’m sure Pinchbeck has the best intentions. I’ll be pre-ordered Generation Hex and will probably be a Metacine subscriber. But I’m worried that an obsession with novelty and “the next big thing” will only hurt all our long term goals, stunt our personal development by making us trend whores, and blind us to realms of less glamorous possibility.

Designer Matt Webb and cognitive neuroscientist Tom Stafford are writing a book on the “design” of the brain:

To get where it is, the brain has made some fascinating design decisions. The layering of systems has produced a complex environment, with automatic and controlled highly mixed. This development over biological time has introduced constraints. As has the architecture–it takes time for slow signals to make their way from one area to another. And there are computational difficulties too: How much of its capabilities can the brain afford to invoke when a sub-second response is required? The tricks used leave traces. There are holes in our visual field that we continually cover up. There are certain sensory inputs that grab our attention faster and more thoroughly than we’d expect.

Link (via Dehiscence ).

But for those of you who aren’t, or for when you get back:

BASILISK | AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF FILM, ARCHITECTURE, PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND PERCEPTION
I’m surprised I’ve never seen this before. Basilisk doesn’t show up in a search of Technoccult, so I’m hoping this is new to a lot of you, as well. The front page seems to be broken, so after a quick ‘view source’, here are the links to Issue One, Issue Two, and Issue Three, which they say is almost done. Having quickly looked over what they have so far, I’m certainly looking forward to reading through their site.

The fantastic and surreal paintings of Peter Gric
This is a site I like to visit and I thought I’d share it with you. In the Other Projects section (it’s inside a flash movie, or I’d post a direct link), Gric was commissioned to paint three large machines that are used in textile mills. They came out looking like eerie pieces of alien technology. I’d love to have been able to customize some of the machinery I used to work on.

SIMIAN is the interactive Flash narrative of designer, Ross Mawdsley. Parts 2 through 6 are online and available for download as well. Loosely inspired by The Planet of the Apes, the site requires a bit of patience on the part of the user, as some exploration and experimentation may be involved in navigating between sections. It’s a nice place to spend an hour on a rainy day.

I’d like to thank Klint again for asking me to fill in while he was away at Burning Man. I hope you’ve all found something interesting within these posts. I’m going away to visit relatives out of state over the weekend, so this is probably it for me here unless my wife lets me bring my laptop along ;)

Have a safe and happy Labor Day weekend, everyone.