Film

Pluto in Aquarius: Strange Flows Beyond Man

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(Symbol: the Gift of Thoth Deck)

Chris Gabriel March 5, 2024

On January 20th, 2023 Pluto entered Aquarius. After 15 years in Capricorn, 15 years of economic chaos and upheaval, we now must brave a transformation in the realm of knowledge. As we enter the new days of this era, let us look at some of the symbols at play.

Pluto- The Headless God
First, let us look at Pluto, or Hades to the Greeks. He is the God of death and the Underworld, the chthonic masculine. His symbol is the bident, a two pronged fork with a circle. I read it as an Acéphale, a headless figure. The head is the conscious ego, and the body is the unconscious. In many ways decapitation is a perfect reading of Pluto’s effect in astrology, the violent introduction of the irrational base drives. The Headless Man is operating solely on his lowest drives. The consciousness that mankind reveres is undone by our true nature. Consider the denial of Pluto the planet as a mirror to the rejection of the Freudian Unconscious. Pluto undoes our seemingly perfect, rational structures and systems with a swift coup de grâce.

Capricorn- The Evil Clown
When Pluto entered Capricorn in late 2008, we saw the Global Financial Crisis kick into gear. Capricorn as the sign of material development and gain was decapitated by Plutonic reality, the scapegoat sacrificed to Hades. This led to 15 years of scams, new schemes for making money online, and a culture obsessed with the “hustle” and the “grind”. In my personal symbology, I came to view Capricorn as an “Evil Clown”, for Capricorn is the Devil, the odd goat. In the zodiacal journey we see the motley, rainbow color of Sagittarius become bloodstained in Capricorn, just like Joseph’s coat of many colors gets covered in goat blood. It is unsurprising then that our cultural fascination with evil clowns like Pennywise and Terrifier were renewed in this time, culminating in people seeing them walking about in 2016. These motifs will gradually pass away as a new era begins and gives way to something even stranger.

Aquarius- The Space Alien
Aquarius is the sign of Science, both social and physical. A sign of the collective and the individual. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius, humanity was engaged in the American and French Revolutions. Pluto brings with it transformations of the social. This sign is that which is “far out”. Aquarius represents distance, both physical and emotional. It is both the impersonal, and the absolute personal. When compared with its opposite sign Leo and its extroversion we see Aquarius is introverted. Energies devoted within oneself come to reach the outside. Aquarius contains duality, it flows both ways through the direction of imagination. Like The Beatles song, it is within you and without you.

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“Technology will advance radically and social movements will become Aquarian: stranger and stranger. The very nature of individual existence will be transformed.”

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In the old days, mystics symbolized Aquarius with an angel. The modern form of this symbol is the alien. The alien phenomenon emerged as the Aeon of Aquarius began and will really kick into high gear over the next 20 years, setting the stage for the next 2000 years. What began as lights in the sky and little green men will become something far more impactful.

Technology will advance radically and social movements will become Aquarian: stranger and stranger. The very nature of individual existence will be transformed. We have grown increasingly alienated as technology has overtaken our lives. I see two distinctly Aquarian reactions developing, one is the Angelic New Age vision of world peace, communal living, universal love. The other is the Alien Transhumanist vision of overcoming biological limitations through technology, virtual reality, and interplanetary travel.

How will our biology grapple with a rapidly changing environment? With the introduction of nonbiological “thinking machines” into our day to day lives? Pluto in Capricorn brought about a stock market crash, Pluto in Aquarius will bring about a total redefining of our relationship with technology, a computer crash. When we restart it, what will have been saved and what will have been lost?

The Aeon- A Little Time
The Aeon corresponds to Pluto. While the card generally refers to the 24,000 year aeonic cycle with its 2000 year months, we can certainly see a microcosmic form in Plutonic eras (10 to 30 years). Massive cultural shifts, advancements and breakthroughs arise on the slow path of Pluto.

The beginning of the Aeon of Aquarius is disputed, but in my estimation it began around 2000 (Y2K), and it will last until 4000. This Aeon will bring about immense technological development and a drastic shift in our understanding of being human. It is very fitting then that we enter the little age of Aquarius on Pluto just as the Great one is getting going. Our actions now will have profound reverberations in the Aeon.

Therefore, let us go farther and farther out from the bounds of tradition, so that we can reach outside, and inside, without fear of what may look back.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen March 4, 2024

Are you confused about what the avant-garde even is these days? If so, the avant-garde has succeeded in taking over your mind. This is how they did it.

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Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

Wheels of Light

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

The Fool (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Fool
Number: 0
Astrology: Air
Qabalah: Aleph

Chris Gabriel February 29, 2024

The Fool is green, inexperienced and pure. He carries a bag, and is followed by an animal. A vagabond and his dog, nothing to his name but a backpack, and wandering on the side of the highway. There is the Fool. We know not where he’s going, nor what is in his sack. A symbol of having nothing but infinite potential.

The fool changes across the three decks.

In Marseille, we see the Fool very plainly, he is at his most Human. His dog is tearing at his raggedy pants. He is numberless - the only numberless card in Marseille. He bears his sack, and with his chin up, he walks to the right.

In Rider, the Fool is in a more Noble light. The Sun is shining, he is adorned in a beautiful coat with fine green pants, a clean, and youthful face. He bears a simple sack, and a white flower.

His dog is warning him, for he has his head in the clouds, and is about to walk off the edge of a cliff. He is 0.

In Thoth, we are shown the Fool as a God. He is a Horned God, like Pan, and stands atop a crocodile like the Child God Harpocrates. Spiraling energies flow from him. Rather than a dog, a tiger bites at his leg. His sack is transparent, and we see it filled with coins bearing the symbols of the stars and planets. He is not walking but leaping, splayed out in energetic ecstasy. He is Air, Aleph, and 0.

Across the cards we are given many keys to the nature of the Fool, who is in fact a singular archetype. While we’re looking at these three decks, every tarot deck shows us a face of the singular Fool.

We can experience the Fool physically by blowing a raspberry: by making our mouths into a 0, and blowing out air. You can create a silly sound.

This is the silly nature of Fool, the Creative Nothing. We become like the child: learning how to play with our mouths for the first time, to create.

The fool exists across culture: The ancient tradition of April Fool’s Day, which corresponds to Spring, when nature begins anew. In the Bible, 1 Corinthians 4:10 declares “We are fools for Christ’s sake”. In the greatest wisdom expressed by Socrates when he states “I know that I know nothing.”

And perhaps most fittingly for our reading of Tarot cards, William Blake says “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

When dealt this card, we are given a call to adventure, the beginning of a grand new journey, or we are being shown our own silliness, the missteps that we have taken. In truth, these are the same thing, a chance to start again.

The 22 Major Arcana in every tarot is precisely this journey, from foolishness to wisdom. The Fool as zero is there every step of the way. He is at the very beginning when we have nothing, and he is there after all we have learnt.

“When I was a little boy, I had but little wit / It is some time ago, and I've no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live, the more fool am I.”

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Eugene Jarecki

Film

Making Heads or Tails

Derek DelGaudio February 27, 2024

Last year, I asked ChatGPT to flip a coin and tell me the result. It replied: “As an AI language model, I cannot simulate a random coin flip. Randomness is typically generated using external sources of entropy. However, I can generate a pseudorandom “heads” or “tails” outcome for you using a random number generator if that would be helpful.”

It’s hard to know where to turn when we have questions that extend beyond any field of knowledge. We used to ask the Augurs, the priests who looked at the sky through a frame, waiting for a bird to fly by as an omen or affirmation. This routine satisfied us for a time, but soon our questions outnumbered the birds, and we grew impatient. So we carved our own birds into stone disks, which we tossed to simulate flight. Those disks became cubes with more surfaces for our signs, freeing our questions from binary chains. Then came the cards, so light and so thin, more outcomes than stars in the palm of our hand. We asked more questions well into the night. And it’s through the asking of those questions we learned that nature’s lexicon of mystery is not limited to flying birds or shuffled cards. Mystery is the message.

“Randomness is the closest thing we scientists have to God,” said my friend, the cryptographer who once wrote about the vulnerabilities of physical locks from a computer scientist’s perspective, only to be censured by the Locksmiths of America for unknowingly revealing their secrets. When I told him about the tedious answer the computer gave me after I asked it to flip a coin, he replied, “Machines are designed to repeat themselves. Given the same input, they will always produce the same output. Randomness requires entropy (a measurable state of uncertainty), which is absent from the machine’s environment and antithetical to its purpose. To generate something random, like a coin toss or a password, machines harvest entropy from an outside source. They harvest it from us.” 

Buried in your machine, a nameless program observes the physical phenomena it encounters during the day, and it stores these random events as seeds of entropy: Atmospheric noises, keystrokes, the movement of the mouse, etc. This fluid relationship we have with machines mirrors the making of our own dreams. Our daily experiences sneak into our nights: The sirens outside, the guy who pressed our buttons, the mouse that crossed our path. When we awake, we respond without knowing what we experienced while we were asleep. Just as we live to feed our dreams so that dreams feed into our unconscious decisions, we have ended up living to feed the dreams of machines. We are the unconscious of the algorithm.

Are the machines learning what we need them to know or just telling us what we want to hear? Could it be that saying the right thing at the right time is mastering entropy? Lying is faster than learning. Perhaps the machine dazzles us with the gleam of its screen so we can’t see that everything is dark inside. Perhaps it's us that can’t be trusted.

Today, I asked ChatGPT to flip a coin and tell me the result. It replied: “Tails.” 

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Derek DelGaudio is a writer, director, and magician. DelGaudio created the award-winning theater show and film, In & Of Itself. He wrote the acclaimed book, AMORALMAN, served as the artist-in-residence for Walt Disney Imagineering, and co-founded the performance art collective A.Bandit. He is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University and co-conspirator at Deceptive Practices, a creative firm known for designing illusions and providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

4 Readings (Patricia Sun)

Chimera: The Not-So-Still Life of Mpkoz (Gen Art)

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CHIMERA #309
LIVE RENDER, FULL COLLECTION

Ian Rogers February 22, 2024

In October 2022 the Louvre museum in Paris hosted an exhibition entitled “Les Choses: Une Histoire de la Nature Mort” (“The Things: A History of Still Life”). The exhibition explored the history of the genre known as Still Life, a genre as old as humanity itself, featuring artists capturing their lifeless surroundings, from prehistoric peoples to Van Gogh, Arcimboldo and Mueck. But there was a piece missing from this retrospective, Chimera by Mpkoz, released in January of the same year.

Chimera aimed to bring the age-old practice of painting common scenes with common objects into a new medium, the collaboration between man and machine known as generative art. Chimera was written in JavaScript using the 3D library Three.js by Montana-born and Seattle-based Mpkoz. It was released as part of the “Curated” gallery series on the premier generative art platform, ArtBlocks, January 10th, 2022.

Generative art is art created by code. The code-writer is the artist and the final art piece is a collaboration between artist and machine. In the words of Mpkoz, "That's what keeps me coming back. When I write a set of instructions and see the computer perform them there's something magic. I feel I'm collaborating in a way that it's not comparable to anything else I've experienced in my life."

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"That's what keeps me coming back. When I write a set of instructions and see the computer perform them there's something magic. I feel I'm collaborating in a way that it's not comparable to anything else I've experienced in my life."

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Chimera is not a flat jpeg, it lives and breathes. “It’s never done. The whole time it's painting and repainting itself. Which is sort of a metaphor for the dynamic and changing frontier of technology.” The Chimera algorithm includes instructions for the computer to draw flowers, books, bowls of fruit, bottles of wine and skulls. Each Chimera “output” is unique, powered by exactly the same code but with a wide range of variability in appearance based on the traits randomly assigned to each piece at birth – from the time of day to the stroke of the brush, each appears and behaves differently based on its unique DNA.

This method, a single algorithm generating many different and unique pieces based on random traits as inputs, is typical of generative art pieces. But there is an unadvertised surprise in Chimera. As the brush, directed by Mpkoz, is painting the flower pot, the flowers, the skull, the book, etc, it's actually creating the still life scene in three dimensions. “I hid the 3D functionality in it. I wanted it to look like just another still life painting, but if you accidentally scroll your mouse over the window it zooms in and then you can flip it around and rotate it.“ When you drag your finger across Chimera on your screen, it rotates and you find you can view it from any angle. Zoom in, zoom out. Any angle or resolution is available to the viewer.

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“There’s an element of making art professionally that involves sacrifice. The months leading up to Chimera are not necessarily good memories.”

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Mpkoz showed up a bit late to many phases of life. Not particularly college-bound, he bounced around and worked manual labor after high school. He went to night school for a few years before finally getting accepted into USC for film school. He was hoping to enroll in a popular drone photography class but it was full so he signed up for “Creative Coding” instead, only vaguely knowing what that might entail. “I had no idea what it was. But for the first time in my life, and I don’t say this lightly, I knew what I wanted to do, this thing scratched all the itches I had in my head. I didn’t know it existed yet it was the only thing I’d ever done that put me into flow right away and even though I didn’t know how to do it I could do it all night. I asked the teacher, ‘How can I make a living doing this?’ ‘You can’t,’ she said.” After another USC professor and one of the forefathers of virtual reality, Mark Bolas, went to Microsoft to work on HoloLens, Mpkoz harassed Mark via email for two years until Mark finally found a place for him. While working his day job at Microsoft he honed his art skills and built an Instagram following around his creations. Even though Microsoft was admittedly his dream job, it took only a couple of sales of his digital art in 2021 for Mpkoz to quit and commit himself to the job of Creative Coder/Media Artist full-time.

In the world of generative art, ArtBlocks is the most respected name and artists go through a vetting process for a coveted release slot on the platform. Think of ArtBlocks as an art gallery releasing work by two artists per week to an international community of buyers who are watching closely, discussing on Discord and Twitter, and buying and trading in an always-on online marketplace. For Mpkoz, having Chimera selected as an ArtBlocks Curated release was an honor and a moment of recognition, the culmination of years of practice, and he didn’t want to stop short of the complete creative vision.

“There’s an element of making art professionally that involves sacrifice,” he says.“The months leading up to Chimera are not necessarily good memories. I was isolated, trying to finish, and didn’t do a great job of communicating with my partner, friends or family.” Finishing the code that comprises Chimera, “was euphoric. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud.” But the flame of accomplishment and upcoming release on ArtBlocks was extinguished when Mpkoz visited his parents for the Christmas holiday, “I was in my childhood home, two weeks before submitting the final Chimera code, and we learned my mom had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a rare and deadly blood cancer). I went home for Christmas knowing I was done with Chimera and had created something beautiful but the news of my mom’s cancer canceled everything.”

Mpkoz had already decided on the name for the collection, Chimera. The word originated as a hybrid creature in Greek mythology and has come to mean anything composed of many disparate parts. By choosing the name Chimera for the collection, Mpkoz “wanted to signify the fact that something very old, still life, is once again changing into another form.” But it took on a new meaning once he learned that the treatment for his mother’s cancer involves a “chimeric bone marrow transplant.”

Generative art is a relatively new form using digital machines, techniques and distribution. The context for this movement is not solid nor broadly appreciated. Mpkoz, like many artists in new genres before him, found himself here by accident. He has embraced the lack of rules and precedents, but also recognized that exploring familiar themes can provide a reference point for understanding and appreciating the capabilities of this new medium. As the cardinal oeuvre de nature morte, Chimera is an excellent entry point for those curious about generative art, and will certainly find its place in the history of both still life and generative art.

Disclosures: I bought my first Chimera immediately after walking through “Les Choses” at The Louvre and noticing its absence. I bought two more while researching this piece. Hedvig and I minted a Parnassus together with Mpkoz in Kraftwerk at Bright Moments Berlin. I own a Metropolis diptych. On one occasion Mpkoz and I heard a Marfa man tell stories about aliens under a darkened sky.

Further reading:

MPKOZ.COM, CHIMERA ON ARTBLOCKS.IO, CHIMERA STATISTICS AND SECONDARY SALES, THE MULTIPLE MYELOMA RESEARCH FOUNDATION

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Ian Rogers

Patricia Sun

Film

On Plagiarism

Claudia Cockerell February 20, 2024

In Ancient Rome, copying was an art form. Poets were always stealing each others’ ideas and repackaging them in playful and compelling ways. All of the great Roman authors lifted material from Homer on countless occasions – from exact translations of lines, as we see in Virgil’s Aeneid, to Ovid’s irreverent upcycling of the entire Iliad in Book 12 of his Metamorphoses. The famously mischievous poet takes the most obscure characters from the Iliad and brings them centre stage, making Achilles seem like a bit-part extra.

Every poet’s material was fair game, and the ideas they bounced off of each other produced complex, multi layered work. The Roman love poet Catullus translated an entire poem of Sappho’s (now referred to as Sappho 31), only slightly reworking it to make it an address to his lover, the fittingly pseudonymed Lesbia. “That man seems to me to be equal to the gods,” both poets begin, in Latin and Ancient Greek. The man has become godlike because he’s speaking to Catullus and Sappho’s female lovers, and hearing her twinkly laugh. But Catullus turns what is originally celebratory into a breakup poem. He describes himself as miserable, with far too much time on his hands, implying Lesbia has moved on with this man. Perhaps he sits with her at dinner, while Catullus looks on in mournful longing.

Copycat material took all sorts of forms. We might think that feminist retellings of old stories are of the zeitgeist, but the Ancients beat us to the punch. Take Ovid’s Heroides, a series of letters written from the perspective of canonical heroines like Dido, Helen, Penelope, and Ariadne, to their lovers and admirers. They are far cries from the submissive women we see in Homer. Ariadne pens a diatribe against Theseus for abandoning her on a deserted island after she helped him kill the minotaur, while Helen tells Paris to stop soliciting her for sex.

The Iliad had more reworkings and retellings than any other ancient poem. The Roman love poets turned it into elegy, while the epic poets refashioned it to tell the story of Aeneas. What is left behind is a complex network of texts, which exert dynamic influence on each other. When we re-read Theseus’ heroic deeds, we can’t help hearing Ariadne’s cries of “Traitor! Traitor!” from the shores of Naxos.

Nowadays, this kind of literary imitation might be seen as plagiarism. There are many rewrites of classic texts, but borrowing material line by line from a contemporary work is relatively unheard of. The Homeric texts served as a code model from which so much material sprouted. Shakespeare is the closest thing we have today, but there is nothing comparable to the Iliad’s influence. It is an origin story, a bible of sorts that paved the way for the literary canon.

The Ancients’ obsession with competitive imitation is being echoed, of all places, on TikTok. A video, sound, or dance routine will go viral, and a thousand people will copy and repost their own version. It is strangely compelling to watch these countless iterations; spotting the little tweaks each person makes, as they leave their own mark on the original. There’s good reason we feel averse to copying nowadays. What can be more tiresome than slavish imitation or a trite rehashing of an idea that’s been flogged to death. But providing a new lens through which to see an old story can be transformative.

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Claudia Cockerell

The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2024