“Without magic we are mindless robots, our choices are predictable,” says the prologue to Peter J. Carroll’s The Ouranos Rite, an occult operation that exemplifies both the methods and ethos of chaos magic. Carroll’s conflation of machines and predictability echoes Ada Lovelace’s claim from nearly two centuries prior, that the Analytical Engine, a direct ancestor of today’s computing machines, is incapable of originating or revealing anything truly new; it can only assist us in making available what we already know. Machines cannot surprise us, cannot generate novelty; and as Carroll’s statement suggests, there is something inherently magical, and perhaps even necessarily occult or hidden, about that ability. This image of the machine (
Imago Machinae) as an essentially mindless or soulless automaton is deeply entangled with questions about whether living entities, and humans in particular, are merely biological machines, or endowed with some divine spark that grants us an aspect of our image of the divine (
Imago Dei).
Generative art is created in collaboration with autonomous systems to produce works that are not consciously determined by the artist. For example, in the 18th century several composers made music by rolling dice to select from a set of precomposed phrases, and in the mid-20th century John Cage composed music by drawing a staff on a sheet of paper and then placing notes where tiny imperfections occurred in that paper. The avant-garde artist George Brecht indicated two aspects of chance that may be involved in generative art: images originating in psychic processes at unconscious strata of the mind, and images derived from mechanical processes not under the artist’s control. I assert that these correspond to two broad categories of magical divination: signs received via dreams, clairvoyance, and automatic drawing and writing; and signs resulting from mechanical processes such as what randomize the positions of coins or cards, or that determine the courses of flying birds or floating tea leaves, or that shape the physiognomies of sheep livers or human hands.
Although generative art predates computers, computers have become its chief instrument due to their ability to algorithmically generate and assimilate stochastic, chaotic, and other kinds of variety and render it in diverse forms and media. Such functions are employed also to add unpredictability to electronic games. In the same way that a cup of dice or deck or cards may be used for playing games or making decisions as well as foretelling fortunes or communicating with spirits, the technology that allows us to play and create with computers also enables us to divine with them, even venturing beyond simulation of known mantic designs to invent novel expressions of divinatory play and playful divination.
This paper explores these themes through the lens of an actual, robotic performance of the Ouranos Rite, combining algorithm and ritual to examine the possibility of programmable, performing objects that transcend autonomous mediums of art to become numinous mediums of the daemonic and divine—the
Imago Machinae reaching toward the
Imago Dei.
Read Robotheosis: Art, Magic, Cybernetics