Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI  ## Metadata - Author: [[It Could Happen Here]] - Full Title: Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/33be3492-d10f-4154-95b0-2352c2faf2b3 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Opening Ritual In East Berlin Warehouse** - Garrison attended Occulture 2025 in an East Berlin warehouse with a candlelit opening ritual and hooded figures. - Attendees received stones, set intentions, and participated in a theatrical demiurgic ritual to orient the conference. Transcript: Garrison Davis So to start, let's meet our panelists. I should introduce my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist, which I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure. Delta, say hi. Hello. What do you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty, I suppose? Delta Well, it's kind of a mix of things. Into the microphone. It's kind of a mix of things where part of it is just... Garrison Davis Into the microphone. Delta I'm sorry. Garrison Davis You can get pretty close to it. Delta Okay. It's kind of a mix of things, really, between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical, like weird theory stuff, like Mark Fisher and CCRU, adjacent things. Garrison Davis Mark Fisher, some land stuff, metafiction, theory fiction, hyperstition. Delta and myself talk about magic through the internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left. Ryan I've been recruited along ([Time 0:05:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cc092353-7b8c-4dab-80c1-274abb8a315b)) - **Occulture As Cultural Osmosis** - Occulture describes how occult practices and mainstream culture bleed into each other, producing both influence and commodification. - The conference framed this process as both a tool of resistance and a phenomenon that gets re-territorialized into marketable culture. Transcript: Garrison Davis I should introduce my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist, which I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure. Delta, say hi. Hello. What do you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty, I suppose? Delta Well, it's kind of a mix of things. Into the microphone. It's kind of a mix of things where part of it is just... Garrison Davis Into the microphone. Delta I'm sorry. Garrison Davis You can get pretty close to it. Delta Okay. It's kind of a mix of things, really, between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical, like weird theory stuff, like Mark Fisher and CCRU, adjacent things. Garrison Davis Mark Fisher, some land stuff, metafiction, theory fiction, hyperstition. Delta and myself talk about magic through the internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left. Ryan I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan. I practiced the Vajrayana, a Greco-Egyptian magical practice, and also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that, I was also an academic for a good period of time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy, and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide and varied. Garrison Davis We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend. So many Hegel jokes. Our last crew member, which people may have heard before on various shows. Elaine Hi, my name is Elaine, and I make art and research a lot of Renaissance-Criptomoric magic. And most of the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and Balkan folk magic. Garrison Davis Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests, let's start by discussing the word aulture, the namesake of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the word occult and culture, and it describes how the two influence and possibly undermine one another. I'm going to read a quote from the person who originated the term. Quote, acc culture is a word that was inevitable. During the hyperactive phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s, we were casting around for an all-embracing term to describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified Spiritual philosophy with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible. At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us, telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions is what we named a culture, unquote. That is from Genesis B. Peorich, a musician, magician, artist, cult leader, and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the 70s, they started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later started the chaos magic organization The Temple of Psychic Youth and its associated band, Psychic TV. Though a culture did not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it carried a strong offensive element targeted against society and perceived systems of control. Through their many projects, including Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the Temple of Psychic Youth, Peorich utilized art and magical practice to conduct a quote-unquote war On culture, similar to another figure that will soon get to, William S. Burroughs. A culture describes a process of cultural osmosis. The occult bleeds into and morphs culture, affecting everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy. But as a part of this osmosis, the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe territory, marketable. The hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden. Despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture, like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated. ([Time 0:05:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/02e5d9d2-ea6c-47f7-b1ee-18e7627a75aa)) - **Burroughsian Current As Culture Jamming** - The Burroughsian current tied cut-up methods to cultural disruption and technological practice. - Burroughs' techniques were framed as deliberate cultural jamming that reprograms language and reproduction. Transcript: Garrison Davis Relevant to our discussion later, its influence in the tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current manifestation of has some heavily occult origins, regarding around a Whole bunch of people in the 90s who were writing about AI as this occult project, and then that influenced many an AI engineer and coder who are now building this stuff. And it's becoming an ever-present part of our lives. And the occultists now are trying to incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss in a sec. Any other notes on a culture as a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept? Elaine I think a culture as a concept is ([Time 0:12:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c6e42a8-ca7a-4766-87aa-f181e81f6e2a)) - **Technology As Magical Instrument** - Tech becomes a magical instrument when it allows editing, cutting, and reprogramming of representation. - Burroughs moved magical practice into new tech media like tape recorders, altering the agency of language. Transcript: Elaine Other classes going on at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions, was that language can shape reality, Which is something that would also be held up by a lot of the classical magical ideas. That sound and image have occult power, which is very true in a lot of magical traditions dating back to the Picatrix and more ancient texts. And that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument, which the tech available currently and for William Burroughs is very different than classical tech, but is something That has been done for a very long time as well. What really changes is stepping out of the idea of a linear representation of it and into something that could be edited, cut, and reprogrammed specifically using technology that Allowed that as opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through, say, more spiritual magical acts. It's something that you can do with a tape recorder. ([Time 0:27:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3eb15b01-87ae-4900-a6af-d63ac92f997d)) - **Cut-Ups Reveal The Third Mind** - The cut-up method forces novel combinations that reveal emergent meanings and, in Burroughs' phrase, makes "the future leak out." - Collaboration produces a "third mind" that reveals rather than creates new content. Transcript: Ryan Which is related to the concept of time sorcery that was talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think another element to the cut-up method that's important, especially as it was framed in this occulture context, is as I wrote this quote down from the actual lecture itself, reality Is made of words, images, and vibrations. And sounds and images have occult power, and therefore these sounds and images and words can be marshaled or used, edited, cut through, rearranged for the purposes of reprogramming. It's fascinating because I think that this really is something that carries through to the whole conference. And not just the Burroughs method, but what this Burroughs method or the Burroughsian current of the conference. It seems that there was a problematic, I mean, we started basically with Derrida and we ended with Derrida. With discussions of like critiques of the master narrative that we get from, you know, Deleuze and Lyotard and Baudrillard and these people. But the goal of this cut-up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again, back to that concept of culture jamming, as Ger said, this concept of the one God universe, this cut-up method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words, of language that Is a process of control. So I take issue with this concept of language as a virus because that implies that it's a foreign body. And I mean, as true post-structuralists, I guess that I am, there is no outside to language. And I think that that's actually something that shines through in this third mind concept. As two people work together on something, there's a composite mind that emerges and affects the work, is the concept there. So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you through the revelation of the new that was already present. And I think that that's really important to point out. ([Time 0:30:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d86cdbd6-db23-49b8-ba63-02f043dc4285)) - **Burroughs' Cafe Playback Campaign** - Burroughs used playback of chaotic sounds outside a café until the business closed as a practical magical tactic. - He recorded arguments and plate-smashing sounds and repeatedly played them to create a negative aura around the café. Transcript: Garrison Davis But as a circuit jump, as playing something from the wrong time in a different context as a form of attack. The most famous version of this, which isn't necessarily for political ends, so this was for personal ends, is the Burroughs Cafe incident, which I've been a fan of for years, in which He was slighted by a cafe. So then he started recording. Elaine All that happened was they changed their menu and he couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day. Garrison Davis There's been some menus that have changed that I would continue using this tactic where he recorded sounds from outside of like people talking or arguing or walking by or plates dropping And then played them back outside of the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed. And this is like the funniest form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front of a cafe until they close. I mean, it worked. Yeah, playing back sounds of, you know, arguing, fighting, plates smashing, which would probably create a negative aura around this building. ([Time 0:35:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cb5a5fdd-bee8-433b-a19f-7fa4fdd6fd32)) - **Reproduction Shapes Reality** - Reproduction and dissemination shape consensus reality; hyperstition shows fiction can become real through circulation. - Political actors and media exploit this to manufacture realities and moral panics. Transcript: Garrison Davis Yeah. And this is something our materialist friend Mia does talk about is how there's a quote from some neocons about how how like Democrats just have to kind of like, you know, like react to Reality versus the Republicans who generate it. And they like decide what reality is. And you can see this with all of the sort of like moral moral panics which have spread across the United States and around the world the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, Whether that's immigration, whether that's this non-existent crime wave, where it is a genuine like creation of reality. And this goes into, you know, Burroughs ideas later get developed by a group of academics and occultists that formed the CCRU. This included City Plant, Nick Land, who then turned to the dark side, and the since-past Mark Fisher, who put a name to some of this sort of phenomenon called the hyperstition, which Is, Robert has talked about before on the show, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction and the dissemination of this fiction. And this is part of how reality can get formed, is through these falsehoods that through repetition and dissemination become self-manifest. Delta The thing about that, though, is the hyperstitial model itself requires the acceptance of the idea that everything is a fiction. ([Time 0:37:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba4cc1bd-fc2b-4f3e-8071-ecbc333bc2b5)) - **Critically Assess AI As A Magical Tool** - Question whether AI tools function like automatic writing or the cut-up third mind before adopting them in practice. - Examine material, labor, and ecological costs rather than treating AI as mystical channeling. Transcript: Elaine Well, actually, AI came up because the initial discussion question for the panel was, what does it mean to talk about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between the creation process as magic when you can use AI, when you can use large language models to just generate Things. And if the generative method using AI was at all related to, say, the cut-up method or other things. So that was the initial conversation that began that whole panel. Ryan Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss. The Austin-Osman was about automatic drawing. So this conception of this drawing that is coming from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within. All within one line. All within one line. But more than that, it was a very traditional kind of European 1970s lecture. You had a lovely Italian man who stood in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette while trying to get through a very well-formulated, well-argued essay while a series of images Presented to us behind him that covered an overview of artists that are doing very similar things, or he argued, exist in a similar kind of vein. And the occurrences of not just magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently. So artists all over the world. The third talk by, I believe, Kate Lady. Yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production which happened in Mexico City, I believe. We had a few pictures of this, but Leonora Carrington's art very specifically has to do with this like hybrid of like animals and mythical figures and creatures. And the stage production was incredibly intense. I really appreciated this talk a lot. But the then focus on talking about, you know, generative artificial intelligence and these large language models and the role of art or what it means to do art in this era was related To this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing, of this concept of hybridity, of this like transformative or this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together Of different elements or images, words, sounds, costumery, these kinds of things. So it was a natural question to lead, but the audience members took it in a very strange direction that I would like you all to talk about. Elaine I mean, the initial question was really that people started asking after the panel topic was proposed was, so what did the panelists think about AI art? Do the panelists think AI art is magic? Do the panelists think that AI art is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, putting a prompt in a language model is the same as doing some sort of trance-state automatic writing. There was a lot of variations on functionally that. All of the panelists' reaction was, no, it's not. And a lot of them did not immediately really want to even dive into that topic and were very annoyed at the question. Ryan That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately because it was our first speaker that responded, not to that first question, but to the second question. And the second question had to do with the role of technology and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools, you know, as a technology, a techne in magical practice. And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes. Elaine To the tech. Ryan To the tech. That's correct. Elaine To AI, their initial reaction was still also no, but. ([Time 0:46:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/03bca2dc-2172-4591-8736-a4a161a2af58)) - **Generative AI As Labor Appropriation** - Generative AI appropriates human labor by scraping artists' work and repurposing it as commodified outputs. - This raises political and labor issues tied to authorship, value, and ecological impact. Transcript: Delta Because it was instant and it was heated. It's also like, I mean, from my perspective, it's also a labor issue, right? Because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that that's like writing from real artists and create, created by real like painters and whatever. And it is the appropriation of human labor to shit out some, some advertising, essentially. That is my main issue. Well, aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it, it's very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me. ([Time 0:53:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7a742f9d-ebd9-41a2-a9b0-5574d89938bf))