Thaumaturgy is that Art Mathematical, which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived, and of men greatly to be wondered at.
—John Dee
The Coniunctio of Cybernetics & Sorcery
What is magic, that a machine may do it, and a machine, that it may do magic?
ELDRITECH blends art, magic, and technology to innovate experiments in speculative sorcery, designing interfaces between physical and metaphysical ontologies. Proceeding in a manner akin to Heron’s mechanics and Ian Bogost’s carpentry, ELDRITECH performs occult philosophy by way of ontological theater.
If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology.
—Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing
In his preface to the English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, John Dee conflated thaumaturgy with automatopoiesis (the creation of mechanical automata), while protesting accusations that such creatures were animated (or knowledge of how to animate them was learned) via the conjure of “wicked and damned spirites.” ELDRITECH continues Dee’s conflation but seeks to restore and revere the daemonic reality of the conjurer, necromancer, and witch, manifested via machinic assemblages charged with sorcerous purpose.
ELDRITECH’s works span a variety of media but most can be broadly distinguished across three categories:
- Talismachines — Preternatural artifacts incorporating mixed media, found objects, materiae magicae, and computers and electronics.
- Robomancy — A portmanteau of robot and necromancy (< Greek manteía “divination”), like the latter it connotes much more than divining by robot.
- Hyperritual — Named after hypermedia (Ted Nelson) and hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard); the construction of blended spaces (David Benyon) wherein to perform ritual magic amplified by digital media.
ELDRITECH is the artistic enterprise of Joshua Madara a.k.a. tchnmncr. I am an occult technologist and techno-occultist interested in technologies both “high” and “low” that mediate magical activities, interactions, and experiences. I studied industrial electronics and robotics in order to understand how lightning and arcane language (i.e., electricity and computer code) animate matter and command spooky action at a distance. I work in mixed and multimedia, and although my works feature electronics and computers, I consider them part of the Great Work of all magical Arts and Crafts (ars magica), being especially the reification of spirit via techne. My basic conceit is that anything, including computers and robots, can be a spiritual as well as creative medium, and a locus of encounters with the bizarre, eerie, grotesque, macabre, numinous, sublime, uncanny, and weird.
Philosophically, my work is informed by existentialism, postphenomenology, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism — especially the encounter between ontological or speculative realism and the epistemological constructivism of cybernetics. I begin with it-narratives and the secret lives of objects but move away from anthropomorphism toward ideas of affect, agency, memory, intelligence, and soul that do not privilege humans as the provenance or pinnacle of such qualities. I am especially concerned with technical objects and how they mediate between a subject and its world (Gilbert Simondon, Don Idhe) while also being things-in-themselves whose reality is not exhausted by their relations to other things (Graham Harman). Most of my interests involve the juxtaposition and subsequent transposition (a classical act of stage magic) of object and subject or agent.
My occult philosophy is deeply rooted in chaos magic and the ideas “that altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking one’s magical abilities; and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself” (Peter J. Carroll) — complementing the cybernetic notion that our nervous systems “compute” a stable reality (W. Ross Ashby, Heinz Von Foerster), or cosmos.
Like the three categories of ELDRITECH’s strange works, the philosophies that most inform and inspire said works can be thrice categorized as follows.
Alien Phenomenology
Alien phenomenology, “or what it’s like to be a thing” (Bogost), seeks to understand the experience and existence of objects from their own perspective rather than through their (usually subordinate) relation to humans. ELDRITECH extends the study of nonhuman perspectives, hidden interactions, and object agency and experiences, into supernatural and preternatural domains where the mystery of objects and their relations is taken as a fundamental aspect of reality to be explored rather than explained away.
Occult Ontography
Ontography means the writing or drawing of things, their characteristics, and relationships; also mapping the physiographic environment onto the living organism (W. M. Davies). Harman later used the term (via M. R. James) to mean describing objects and their relationships and interactions without reducing them to anthropocentric meanings or uses. In the context of alien phenomenology, ontography increases the quantity and density of elements in an object to uncover its richness and depth. ELDRITECH practices ontography by mapping occult worlds onto artifacts that physicalize (Viola Spolin) those worlds.
Applied Eschatology
“In the context of mysticism, [eschatology] refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and to reunion with the divine” (Wikipedia). Apocalypse is legion; worlds are generated, revealed, destroyed, and concealed all the time as objects come into and go out of existence and relation with each other. Alien phenomenology and occult ontography resist and subvert anthropocentrism, and attempt to amplify the human’s awareness and appreciation of alterity and her becoming other. The anthropocentric Weltanschauung erodes as the Umwelten of nonhuman entities are revealed, illuminated. (This, for me, is the allegory of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep.”) It is a teleological directive that beckons from the farthest reaches of both inner and outer space.
Aesthetically, my work inherits chiefly from tech noir including elements of brutalist, cyberpunk, gothic, industrial, military, and technoscientific design, often combined with sacred art of diverse provenance; also avant-garde and experimental music, theater, and film; musique concrète; and assemblage and altered objects.
Krell’s Last Dreaming is the ELDRITECH blog.
Instead of deducing that we are ‘nothing but’ machines, let us increase the mechanical world to embrace mystery.
—Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), Words Made Flesh: Information in Formation