Points of interest

An overview of the points of interest within the publication.

interviews

Kathy Melcher

By An Mertens

This interview took place in June 2018 in preparation to the worksession in Z33 in Hasselt. Kathy Melcher and her husband Frank Coppieters offer trainings in universal shamanism and Reiki initiations. Kathy also works as a therapist from a Transpersonal perspective. The Transpersonal is a school of psychology that studies the self-transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human experience. Within that perspective she uses a number of tools from the disciplines of Interpersonal psychology, Jungian and Gestalt psychology, Cognitive Behavioral therapy, Dialectical Behavioral therapy, Universal Shamanism, Reiki and Meditation to help people gain insight into how to free themselves from the narrow confines of their symptoms and self definitions. https://livinglightcenter.com
interviews

Frank Coppieters

By An Mertens

This interview took place in June 2018 in preparation to the worksession in Z33 in Hasselt. Frank Coppieters and his wife Kathy Melcher offer trainings in universal shamanism and Reiki initiations. Frank Coppieters Ph.D. is also the director of the Living Light Spiritual Center which he started in 1986 in Portland, Oregon. He is a native of Belgium where he taught graduate students full time at the University of Antwerp in Theory of Literature, History of Drama and Non-Verbal Communication. Frank works as an intuitive counselor, shaman and Reiki practitioner and always focuses on the empowerment of his clients and students. He helps people to access their inner teacher and to work creatively with the challenges that are happening in their lives.
scores

Secret Alcho

By Annie Abrahams, RYBN.ORG

Would it be possible to create an algorithm that includes human behaviour, that could evolve over time and in the process could integrate aspects of the personalities of all the participating individuals? During the Alchorisma residency in Z33 in Hasselt, Annie Abrahams and RYBN.ORG ran a test.
dreams-fictions

Tarot Reading

By Malgorzata Zurada

This Tarot reading was conducted in the early afternoon on December 6th, 2018 by Malgorzata Zurada, with the use of Hexen 2.0 deck by Suzanne Treister. It took place during the Alchorisma worksession, in the former beguinage that now comprises part of Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt. The modified three-card spread was used to gain insight into the nature of Alchorisma, its past, present, and future.
visuals

Alchorismyxias

By Peter Westenberg

'Alchorismyxias' are digital collages of the photo documentation of the worksession at Z33. I made them in an attempt to let new meanings emerge. Making -myxias has an anti-asphyxia effect, it is a remedy for absoluteness-anxiety, my outlet for distrust against belief in efficiency- and solution-oriented technological charisma. Human fiddling, cutting and pasting, shifting and trying without a direct goal. The result: something that doesn’t have to exist, but that brings a dose of valuable visual undefinedness into the world. 'Alchorismyxias' are visual formulas, spillings, cantings and question marks. They are called and spell. Mineralmatter, Swarmal, Ritual activist, Vogue operators, Mauro machine, Gestendings. They cast and name. Turn plane polarized, Kompelator, Topospectre. They merge, ripple, disrupt, filter. Rythmiks, Kapitaeel, Green powder monkeys. They are mixings, mikings, blends, moksies that erode, extract and interpolate.
visuals

Exile

By Isabella Aurora

The practice of grafting observed extensively in the walnut trees surrounding the Beaulieu estate was the starting point for an online meditation script sewn together by the images of scar tissue in the bodies of participants of the Alchorisma summer camp. Tree and human bodies alike are here seen through the borderlines within their flesh that connect memory of times past and times to come.
visuals

Linear chains of the phantom body-mind

By Malgorzata Zurada

Tracing the invisible presences subjectively observed during the Alchorisma worksession in Beaulieu. Mapping the energy flow with the use of diagrams, symbols and notes. Quantification of prana in entities, thought-forms, objects, and locations. Things that are no more, but their energetic imprint is still present. Phantom ontologies and ghost trees, grafted entities with dual-energy matrix. Human and other-than-human apparitions and etheric doubles. Intangible structures, invisible codes, subtle anatomies of entities and their habitats. Ghostly algorithms, orphaned data, lingering syntaxes; traces left by the programmer. Mapping the energetic pathways, body-mind reflex chains and cause and effect relations. Detecting vibrational residues, recognizing transfers between the physical and non-physical. The energy body, the subtle body, the etheric body, the phantom body, body without organs.
scores

Execute

By RYBN.ORG

This paper describes the workshop ‘Execute’, an exercise on algorithms conducted by RYBN.ORG at Alchorisma’s first worksession at Z33 in Hasselt. It can be taken as a tutorial and be reproduced or re-enacted. In the context of the rise of algorithms as magical techno-solutions for every problem or situation, RYBN.ORG initiated a workshop that would give everyone the basics to understand the logic behind algorithms, their biases and their complex relation to the world.
scores

Alcho

By Annie Abrahams

In Alcho Annie Abrahams asks: Is it possible to create an algorithm that includes human behaviour, that evolves over time and in the process integrates aspects of the personalities of all the participating individuals? Because there are humans involved Annie thinks the project will probably turn out to be an erratic, iterative, evolving, experiential happening. She is interested in the written traces; in the written instruction sets, as markers of the evolving Alcho processed through humans by writing and performing.
dreams-fictions

Apple Soup

By Rares Craiut

As a chef in residency during the Alcorisma summer of 2020, Rares Craiut was impressed by the landscape around. He was reminded of foraging trips during his socialist past. Participants in the residency foraged in a very small quantity, since the house garden and orchard were very generous. Rares thought about teas and drinks from plants in the area that he recognised, and he thought of cooking with three bark. The one semi-foraged recipe that he did have time to cook was an apple soup, based on a classic Hungarian summer dish. His grandmother used to make it. His childhood disgust with it was surpassed only by the sour cherry soup, its other sweet and cold soup sister. Coming out from school he used to long for proteins, like any kind of pork products, or carbs, like mashed potatoes. Or both! Apple soup was just a cruel gastronomic tease, leaving him wanting for more… more, but not of the same.
scores

H(a)untology

By Artyom Kolganov, Arthur Gouillart, Gaspard Bébié-Valérian

One of the local witch stories of Hasselt includes ‘the fish stone’, which was used for cutting fresh fish during city markets. While the good parts of the fish were sold, the bad ones were thrown onto a dirt heap that was visited by cats searching for food. Cats had a negative connotation as they were thought of as signalling the presence of witches, and they were therefore expelled from the market. ‘H(a)untology’ is a ritual that was performed in Hasselt to reverse this historical inequity and restore the reputation of the witches. The text presented here was developed for the ritual and was read aloud during the performance.
dreams-fictions

🄸🄽🄲🄰🄽🅃🄰🅃🄸🄾🄽🅂 - 🅃🄰🄻🄴🅂 - 🅂🄿🄴🄻🄻🅂 🄰🄽🄳 🅁🄴🄼🄴🄳🄸🄴🅂 🄵🄾🅁 🄳🄰🅃🄰🄱🄰🅂🄴 🄰🄽🅇🄸🄴🅃🄸🄴🅂

By Anne-Laure Buisson, Axel Meunier, Isabella Aurora, Vesna Manojlovic, Sumugan Sivanesan

A spiral of concerns about representing faithfully or addressing respectfully the world out there, the world beneath and the world within. Knowledge retrieved from the computer. Database queried to access numbers. Numbers entered in the database. Trees identified by numbers. Labels nailed onto trees.
interviews

Into the Forest (of Technology)

By Malgorzata Zurada

A conversation with Jurij Dobriakov and Jogintė Bučinskaitė about technopaganism and related currents, (re)constructed pasts, and the current expressions of traditional knowledges on the Lithuanian contemporary art scene. The last time we met was during the 8th Inter-format Symposium on Rites and Terrabytes at the VAA Nida Art Colony in 2018, where Jogintė and Jurij were co-curators. That particular edition of the symposium had a research scope similar to the one of Alchorisma, and a focus on exploring the ‘practices of old’ in a digitally mediated post-contemporary world. Here Jogintė and Jurij talk about their views on the resurgence of pagan and shamanic motifs in contemporary culture in general and analyse why such themes have not only special prominence in Lithuania, but also a high level of complexity.
dreams-fictions

Letters - on the violence of naming

By Annie Abrahams & Ils Huygens

The second worksession organized in Beaulieu, Vercors (FR) took place during the corona crisis. ‘Letters’ were a means of entering into a dialogue with those who were unable to travel but joined us from other places. The letters are a mix of travelogue, notes, readings and thoughts exchanged during that week.
interviews

On Technoshamanism and Tecnoxamanismo

By Isabella Aurora

Fabiane M. Borges is interviewed as the articulator of the tecnoxamanismo and intergalactic commune networks. A psychologist and curator researcher (art/science), she holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology. The Tecnoxamanismo network has been articulating in Brazil since the early 2000’s and it has taken form as a festival in the years of 2014 and 2016. A Tecnoxamanism festival is a self-organized and self-funded cultural exchange of techniques ranging from applied programming and database creation to medicinal plants and healing methods, gathering a wide variety of participants such as artists, shamans, health practitioners, rural workers, software engineers and more. The festivals have been hosted in the south of Bahia in a cultural hotspot in Porto Seguro and in the Village Pará of the Pataxó indigenous ethnicity. http://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com, http://sacieartscience.wordpress.com
scores

Some lithic attunement exercises

By Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney, FoAM

As part of Alchorisma, Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney of FoAM worked with the geological substrates of digital technology in a series of lithic attunement exercises. These exercises are an invitation to reestablish relationships with local geological entities and glacial timescales by algorithmically re-confusing binary distinctions between nature and culture, human and non-human, life and death.
code-projects

Spirit essence listening session

By RYBN.ORG

Spirit essence listening session was made using a hybrid programme of Python and Pure Data involving a deep learning procedure that aims to analyse a series of images taken from a specific being – e.g. a tree, a forest, stone textures – in order to ‘extract’ the spirit essence of this specific element. The result is interpreted in sound layers. The process is based on the analysis of a convolutional network and involves the observation of uncanny patterns emerging in the training phase.
dreams-fictions

Tree Dream

By Tiina Prittinen

The map to get out of ‘the cover of the forest’ and the text of a dream are elements to remediate. They are healing from entropy, environmental and personal grief, intuitively using material from one tree, the work of the Alchorisma group and community, and Tiina’s own life experience and interactions since meeting the tree. In Finnish folklore, the cover of the forest – ‘metsänpeitto’ – is a state of invisibility or entropy for the lost one. People would search for you in the forest but not see you. There were simple spells you could perform to get out.
dreams-fictions

Writing Speculation Exercise

By Artyom Kolganov & participants to the worksession in Beaulieu

The summer camp in Beaulieu took place in the realm of pandemic ambiguity: while several countries reopened their borders, certain places, like Moscow, were still in a strict lockdown. The idea of an online speculative writing exercise arose from different regimes of presence in the camp as well as from the intention to document the multifaceted identity of Alchorisma through fictions. The intention of the exercise was to describe both the site-specific and de-spatialized experience of the collective self distributed through different forms of affect. Prior to the exercise, the participants were told to describe places around them and think of key subjects of Alchorisma, so that the fragments of the text would be centred around spaces and entities – forests, spirits, cities, trees – at once documenting the events of the camp and creating a multitude of collective experiences.
dreams-fictions

spiriTrees

By Annie Abrahams

spiriTrees is a short text on trees and spirits by Annie Abrahams that was written in the Irish Tree Alphabet. The Alphabet was developed by Irish artist Katie Holten in a project that explores language ecosystems and the importance of our words and the stories that we tell. You can download the font and write your own text in the Irish Tree Alphabet here http://treealphabet.ie.
scores

Becoming a walnut tree

By Malgorzata Zurada

The following is a set of instructions on how to shapeshift into a walnut tree. It was exercised twice as a guided meditation by the participants of the Alchorisma summer camp in Beaulieu in August 2020. The exercise was devised as an attempt to gain insight into the body-mind state of the Grenoble walnut trees cultivated in the Isère region of France. The trees growing in the local orchards are grafted – they are hybrids of two walnut varieties: sturdy rootstocks of Juglans regia L., the common walnut tree, and more fragile scions such as La Franquette, La Mayette and La Parisienne.
scores

I lost my training of thought

By Adva Zakai, Femke Snelting & Isabella Aurora

Adva, Femke and Isabella perform loops over multiple modes of training. Their spell moves through drawings, texts and hyperlinks to ask: how to be responsible with that which disappears without a trace? If yes: allow magic to emerge.
code-projects

Spell Generator

By Maeva Borg, Isabella Aurora

SpellGenerator is an automated hexing device coded with JavaScript. Developed by Maeva Borg, the script generates phrases containing new callings/rituals/spell-castings to call all entities (human or non-human). In a basic ritual/spell, there is a calling and also a demand, a wish. To create the script, a database was compiled of witching and magical terms separated into nouns, proper nouns and verbs. A second file was also made containing JavaScript libraries that enable the code to detect sentences or grammar forms (nltk, RiTa, tracery). Finally, the script was asked to read this database to generate spells. SpellGenerator was integrated in a performance by Maeva Borg and Isabella Aurora during the Alchorisma worksession at Z33. It is presented here as an online project generating ever-new forms of automated spells.
code-projects

Celtic map of trees

By Anne-Laure Buisson

‘Celtic map of trees’ is a proposal to help one find a tree species carrying a specific spiritual value, as defined in Gilles Wurtz’s book, Chamanisme Celtique: Ces arbres nos maîtres. Besides offering guidance, this application also shows the limits of politics around publicly available tree databases.
code-projects

Attunement Generator

By Malgorzata Zurada, Ils Huygens, An Mertens

This generator was created as a psychomagic tool. Based on a question for which you seek advice, it offers you different possible spiritual practices. This tool was created in the context of an art project as a hypothesis in a laboratory combining different paradigms and exploring possibilities. It is a first prototype. Feedback is welcome via this form.
dreams-fictions

3 a.m summer mosquito

By Elodie Mugrefya

‘3 a.m. summer mosquito’ is a conversation between two unidentified human beings, or maybe just one. They wonder whether they should dismiss altogether the notion of ‘worthy life’ and if so, how to escape the human-made hierarchies determining who/what deserves to be saved and protected and who/what doesn’t.
dreams-fictions

Night Shift

By Alchorisma participants, edited by Malgorzata Zurada

‘Night Shift’ is a collective dreaming practice that was held during the summer of 2020. At first it was exercised remotely once a week, then daily – during the Alchorisma summer camp in Beaulieu. Some of the dream sessions had a thematic focus on Beaulieu, other were more broadly referencing various Alchorisma threads. The aim was to simply explore the collective practice of dreaming and investigate the mutual relation – or feedback loop – between research strategies of the conscious and unconscious mind.
dreams-fictions

Daily Reflections

By FoAM Earth

FoAM Earth's involvement in Alchorisma’s worksession in Z33 consisted of designing daily reflections using the words and ideas proposed by the participants. They designed the meditative and poetic reflections by working with online documentation posted online daily by the workshop participants. The participants used the reflection as part of their 'morning practice'. It was an experiment in remote participation and facilitation, purely based on content generated during the workshop, without personal interactions with the group.
code-projects

Sounding stone ― an algolithic conversation

By Malgorzata Zurada

Sounding stone is a multiple-choice narrative that explores various ways of connecting with other-than-human entities. It is woven around an assumption that everything in existence possesses a unique frequency on which it operates most of the time. This vibrational signature carries the information about the entity and determines the way it starts resonating with others. The narrative branches into a maze of speculations about various methods for the interspecies and cross-dimensional data exchange. It draws on earlier research about frequencies and permutations initiated under the name ‘3-6-9’ by An Mertens, Mauro Ricchiuti and Malgorzata Zurada during the Alchorisma worksession at Z33 in Hasselt.
dreams-fictions

Stone Poem

By Annie Abrahams

A short poem on being stony.
essays

Tu(r)ning into trees

By Ils Huygens

This text untangles some of the lines that have run through the Alchorisma research. It elaborates on the basis of the knowledge we gathered from meetings with trees that took place during excursions and field trips, and uses these meetings as a pathway to revisit some of Alchorisma’s leading references, concepts and methodologies. The text uses these meetings with trees to unravel practices of attunement, attention, embodied immersion and care for other beings, opening up new ways of engaging with trees, landscapes and other beings from a multispecies perspective.
essays

We are all Earth

By Karin Ulmer

Karin Ulmer has worked for more than 20 years with Brussels-based civil society organizations engaging in advocacy and lobbying EU institutions on policies related to sustainable food systems, agriculture and trade, land and seed rights. Karin is a member of the photo collective tetebeche.eu. ‘We are all Earth’ is written in her new capacity as independent consultant and will be part of her forthcoming photo-note-book in 2021 titled [homo situs]. As an advocate in rights related to sustainable food systems, agriculture and trade herself, Karin Ulmer invites the lecturer to pause on themes like the effects that humans have had on nature and activities with whom we could collaborate with nature’s functioning. These themes are established with theories of different authors, like Hannah Arendt, Anna Tsing, and Bruno Latour, to name a few. K. Ulmer activates us to become Earth lawyers for a world where both nature and humans can profit from each other.
essays

Feedback Loops, Temporal Shifts

By Isabella Aurora, Artyom Kolganov

The logic of late capitalism is inbred from an actualization of archaic methodologies of domination. It shows practices analogous with those of classical schools of magic. In this experimental text, the artists co-create an enchanting essay that combines critical theory of contemporary economies and technologies applied to hypersigilic magic and the history of neural networks.