A creative workshop where we learn about divination as a new way of navigating through cyber-realities, the various (non-)traditional systems developed around the world, and imagine new methods of divination for the future.
A divination system is, strictly speaking, a very well-designed tool for Making Sense of the World. Practically every human society has developed some sort of tradition, using natural or abstract phenomena to answer questions or make decisions. These traditions were often dismissed as inferior in the scientifically pre-occupied 20th century. But with the arrival of the Internet and global culture, the world became a complex super-connected network and the approach to our environment in strictly rational terms is proving insufficient. It’s more obvious than ever that it’s time to stop the fetishization of the analytical ways of Knowing and embrace these hectic and unstable times as the right moment to revisit the wisdom of the past.
At Hermetechnics Inc. we believe that the great questions of our era cannot be answered by a cold, analytical mind alone; one of possible solutions is to rediscover the ancient divination methods and find new ways to use them in a networked society. We want to follow the great pioneers of the new era, who devoted their lives to charting the unknown territories of digital mysticism. We want build on the esoteric research of the past century - from the cut and paste techniques developed by Burroughs and Gysin, generative landscapes of first role playing games, TOPY’s use of TV as a scrying stone, to the navigation of the vast information systems by Philip K. Dick. The ubiquity of connectedness and abundance of computational power opens the door to designing new ways of exploring the mind space, placing the psychedelic black boxes like Deep Mind and AlphaGo on the piedestal next to Pythia and Dodona. Divination, or question-answering which acknowledges the complex, algorithmic and stochastic nature of our problems is once again a relevant topic.