Work-in-progress to be exhibited November 2026 at Voltaje Art and Technology Salon in Bogota, Colombia.
Materials
- Custom PCBs and interface components
- Daisy +/-12v microcontrollers with 480Mhz ARM chips
- Custom C generative sound code
- TS 3.5mm patch cables
- Laser cut acrylic
- Metal and rubber standoffs
Artist Statement
A sigil is not a symbol nor a sign. It would be better in fact to speak of the process of sigilization. The artist Austin Osman Spare, a contemporary of occult practitioner and author Allister Crowley, developed the process of the sigil in relationship to his conceptual practice of chaos magick. The sigilist begins with an intention towards a potential becoming which she renders into a word or a drawing. These marks are sigilized as the practitioner deforms, distorts or destroys these marks, rendering them unreadable, unrecognizable, or even psychologically unrecallable. Unlike contemporary notions of “manifestation”, sigilization is fundamentally non-linear and does not pursue attainment or fulfillment. The process of sigilization transforms the practitioner’s relationship to themselves and their intention, catalyzing a relational becoming; it situates a perspective towards an ephemeral and ever-fleeting horizon.
In The Medium is the Massage, media theorist Marshall McLuhan includes several quotations from 20th century British mathematician/physicist turned philosopher of process metaphysics Alfred North Whitehead. McLuhan opens his book: “The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” How, then, could we re-orient the process of civilization? How to navigate away from such destructive advance?
Whitehead concludes his final book Adventures of Ideas (1933) with guiding principles for society: truth, beauty, adventure, and peace. His conceptualizations refuse pollyannish simplicity; they are not naive, stable, or Platonic ideas. Instead, they are ever transforming horizons that demand an intentional and consistent navigation. Equal parts philosophy, science, and religion, Whitehead’s work has been taken up by practitioners and scholars of religion as Process Theology. In Truth-Beauty Sigil I am interested in the reciprocal nature of these concepts. Beauty is the universe’s ultimate aim, interrelating components of appearance and reality. Beauty is more fundamental than truth, which merely speaks to a correspondence of appearance to reality. Truth may be ugly, neutral, or evil, but it is key in promoting beauty.
Work Description
Truth-Beauty Sigil enacts Whitehead’s dynamic between Truth and Beauty cybernetically through voltage control and digital signal processing. Using the custom printed circuit board / control voltage / microcontroller ecosystem I developed for my piece POST TENEBRAS LUX, BEAUTY modules pass signals to TRUTH modules, which either cohere with their “expectations” or do not. Coherence in TRUTH modules pass stronger signals back to BEAUTY modules, which increase their own activity in a positive feedback loop, until “expectations” change.
These modules are placed on top of a multilayered acrylic sculpture embedded with speakers. The signal activity of the modules, patched together with black cables, is sonified by custom DSP (see POST TENEBRAS LUX documentation for sound demos). The forms of acrylic are generated through custom software, in which outlines of the words “TRUTH” and “BEAUTY” are deformed by a fluid simulation algorithm – a sigilization (see mockup below). 2-3 layers of such distorted texts are composed in stacks spaced by metal standoffs.