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the digital witchcraft institute

Sacred interoperability to fix this spiritual crisis









Keywords: prototypes, magical thinking, speculative design

Ours is an exploratory process on the future of technologies that has an affirmative vision rather than a reactive focus on the current threats. We will showcase and promote post-capitalist practices in dissident spaces, and to do so, we propose a methodology of magical thinking for advanced prototyping.

We engage and connect with people in the global south, with migrant communities, with gender non-conforming individuals, with anyone who has a dissident vision on our current dystopic surveilled existence. This area of work incorporates a vision where the internet will operate as a heterotopic space in which posthuman connections will be created and the verticality between the north and the south, the human and the non human, will not be the norm anymore.

The importance of this project is that it will position the act of speculation as a form of witchcraft that is a central element in the design and application of digital technologies. It is a vindication of material intelligence and physical knowledge. With the emergence of posthuman technologies, theory will crystallize into companion objects built within a paradigm of limitless imagination.

The only thing we have to do is to begin.


Digital Witchcraft at JSConf
[Posthuman Technologies]
Honolulu
2020
Research, magical thinking
Danae Valentina presented thoroughly the Digital Witchcraft project facilitating an exploration of spirituality and technology.

Bots and Autopoiesis
[Posthuman Technologies]
Rotterdam
2019-2020
Research, academic essay, coding
Ongoing exploration on the context and digital infrastructures that enable automated artistic bots and evaluation of their contribution to the current literary landscape. Read paper Twitter Bots for an Autopoietic Literature >
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Digital Witchcraft
[Posthuman Technologies]
Rotterdam, Valencia, Havana, San Francisco, Shanghai, Kyoto
2019
Research,collaborative workshop, speculative design, video 17’
The core of our practice, the space that allowed us to understand that magic is the mother of technology. Go to the project website >


Towards a Posthuman Theory of Dreams: Aesthetic Examples
[Posthuman Technologies]
Rotterdam
2019
Academic essay
In order to think of the potential of dreams as a force that will de-center the human in our current cultural setting it will be necessary to evaluate the cooptation possibilities of the act of dreaming. The examples reviewed in this essay provide an appropriate reference to assess these biopolitical threats. In the case of eventual machines that attempt to access dreams it will be necessary to incorporate Giorgio Agamben’s vision on the process of “desubjectivation” perpetrated by technological gadgets. To him, what defines the devices we find in the current phase of capitalism is that these do not act through the production of a subject (as prisons or factories) but through process that could be called of “desubjectivation”. This is why Agamben negates the possibility of solving the problem of biopolitical control of digital devices through an “appropriate use”, it will always be just control and the people who promote these well-meaning discourses are only the result of the mediation device that has captured them. Read the article >











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︎ info [at] digitalwitchcraft.works ︎