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Technoetic Magick: Explorations of the uncanny double as a noetic and magickal system through the complementary lenses of AI image-generation and AR
Abstract
The evolution of art forms and theories has coincided with scientific discoveries and technological developments. In 1896-1914, Kandinsky attributed the emergence of spiritual and occult abstract art to scientific discoveries about the atom. He equated the discovery of the division of the atom to a split in his soul that mirrored the breakdown and fragmentation of the whole world. Intriguingly, the fragmented modern psyche is evident in Freud's ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), which resulted from an encounter with his double and resistance to both the latter and the manifestations of modernity, primarily anthropomorphic automata. In the early 20th century, cinema technology unleashed opportunities for depicting the double and apparitional phenomena. Maya Deren expressed the notion of the fragmented psyche as divided into magickal doubles in her poem ‘Death by Amnesia’ (1942) and her films, especially Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). In the second part of the 20th century, the notion of the double returned through Roy Ascott's technoetic formulations of viable reality intersecting wet (organic) and dry (digital/virtual) media and noetic systems. From a technoetic perspective, current AI models for image training and generation offer further routes for investigating and evolving the uncanny and magickal doubles, their environments and systems. This paper offers a few explorations of the double as psychological, noetic and magickal systems through the complementary lenses of AI image-generation and AR.
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