Welcome to Seven Prophecies of the Future, a Future Studies program series that will take you on a transdisciplinary journey of discovery into the unknown. Each episode brings together two guests who will act as oracles, revealing a secret password to enter a realm filled with poetic images and intriguing phenomena. Oracle oracles are part of a wider divinatory speculative endeavor, the Future Studies Program, and they will share their vaticinations of the future on the occasion of the Venice Biennial Italian Virtual Pavilion. I, Andrea Cetrullo, will be guiding you through the corridors that lead us
to these oracles of futurity. On this episode, we will enter the dimension of the nothing, the experience of zero, the form, the encoded, the secret, the encrypted. Password, cipher. The word cipher comes from the Arabic ziffer, which means zero. It often carries a connotation of that which needs to be deciphered or discovered. I welcome her two oracles, Amy Ireland, theorist an experimental writer focusing on questions of agency and technology and modernity, and Etta Keller, architect, designer, professor, writer, and musician. So Amy, could you start by answering the question that our oracle from the previous episode has for
you? Nora Khan has summoned you and her question is, in a moment that every aspect of our lived existence is mediated and decided by ciphers that we have little access to by design, what are the ciphers by the technological priesthood that we really even need to decode, and which ciphers can and need to stay disguised? Okay, I don't think that there is an absolute answer to this kind of question. I think that it is always going to be contextual and need to be decided in the moment because ciphers are like technology um they're two-sided so they can equally be used for devastating means as well as um
potential potentiating productive and um uh emancipatory means so you know um it can be just as important to be able to lock someone out of access to something if you're vulnerable and need to keep them away as it can be to break through someone else's encryption in order to access something that they're keeping from you. So I think it depends on who's in the position of power in any given scenario. So yeah, I guess it's just really to say it's a question that is relative and doesn't have a like specific answer. I think it's important maybe to note that talking about the like temporality of encryption, it's a lot faster to encrypt something than it is to decrypt
it. So there'll always be a kind of I think cat and mouse game between powers that encrypt and powers that decrypt. And sometimes it'll be powers that like the minoritarian powers might be using the encryption but other times they might be needing to use decryption as a power. So I think, yeah, I think I can't really give you a specific answer just to say that both are always going to be in play. It's complicated and you can't kind of sort it out once and for all. So is there any example of one that you would say we should be deciphering or should aim at deciphering or is there is there any example you could think of or probably not um yeah i mean to
kind of i guess stray a little bit from what i was talking about in a kind of abstract um mode just then the one thing that i think uh should be encrypted and this is i guess maybe a different kind of encryption to maybe what nora was talking about is the body i think it'd be awesome to be able to decipher the codes of the body like not just genetics but the endocrine system the way that it composes the things that we use to tag people to hold them to specific identities in order to be able to completely unravel that and i guess be a bit more creative with the material instantiation that we all currently still have to exist in yeah that's very interesting yeah that's very interesting because then it would be complementary
to any speculation on culture or as you say in the body to actually access um biology in different realms that's why it's also transdisciplinary now what we're trying to do here yeah yeah that's I think that kind of tech speak and the kind of like projects that the technological priesthood typically connected to are often more often than not ways of trying to escape matter and the body and materiality and sort of disappear into a kind of like realm of freedom, freedom from the flesh. and while I kind of respect this sort of cyberpunk narrative I am very much an advocate for
the continuation of materiality and if technology is going to be used in interesting and productive ways in the future I think a big part of that is going to be through matter not mind. very good yeah so Amy this leads us to our first example for this episode based around futurity and the cipher or the concept of cipher so yeah I would invite you to show us or share your mythic example of the cipher okay so Cool. So for my myth, I'm going to talk about something that happened in Cairo, Egypt, on the 8th, 9th and 10th of April in 1904.
And the status of this event as a myth is maybe a little bit ambiguous. There are those who will retell the story as if it was a concrete historical occurrence, and those who understand it as an ingenious work of self mythologization. But either way, it shares with tales that are commonly understood as myths two key traits. One, it involves the realm of the supernatural. And two, it serves as the basis for communicating a specific worldview. It also, much in keeping with the project of the Future Studies program, functions as a prophecy. So my first example, the cipher, is the cipher of the Book of the Law, otherwise known as
Liber Alve Legis or Liber 418, for reasons that I'll explain shortly. This is an image of one of the most studied pages from the original manuscript of the Book of the Law. The Book of the Law is the central text of the doctrine of Thelema, an esoteric sect developed and promoted throughout Britain, Europe and the US in the early 20th century by the magician Alastair Crowley. According to Crowley's own account of the events that took place in Cairo, he and his wife were traveling through Egypt on their honeymoon, where they'd organized a stay in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was here on the 16th of March in 1904 that Crowley conducted a ritual that concluded with Rose falling into a trance and saying to her husband over and over again, they're waiting for you.
And Crowley was curious about this strange message. So a few nights later, Rose once again agreed to go into a trance. Well, her husband invoked Thoth, the god of knowledge, in order to find out more. And to his surprise, his wife, who wasn't at all versed in Egyptology or magic, explained that the Egyptian deity Horus was the one who was waiting for him. And when she was asked to answer a series of questions about Horus that Crowley knew his wife wouldn't be able to respond to on her own, she answered every single one of them correctly. She also explained that her interlocutor, Horus' messenger, was an entity named Iwas. Charles spoke through Rose several more times before eventually giving Crowley the instructions
that would produce the Book of the Law. Between noon and 1pm on three consecutive days, Crowley was to enter the temple and record through automatic writing everything that he heard there. Crowley obeyed and from April 8th to April 10th he diligently transcribed the three chapters of the book. writes in his recollections later on, the voice of Iwas came apparently from over my left shoulder from the furthest corner of the room. It seemed to echo itself in my physical heart in a very strange manner, hard to describe. I had a strong impression that the speaker was actually in the corner where he seemed to be in a body of fine matter transparent as a veil of gauze or a cloud
of incense spoke. Eywass was an angel such as I had often seen in visions. Now although the book is written in plain English, Crowley, reflecting on the work later, maintained that the text was encrypted with a cipher that he was unaware of at the time of its transcription, for he quote, could not have prepared so complex a set of numerical and literal puzzles himself. And that after even more than a decade of study by Crowley and by his followers, the true meaning of Iwas's message was only just starting to be revealed for what it was. He later wrote in the introduction to the book of the law that Iwas must have done this
in order to prove not only its reality in the eyes of the skeptics, but also its superior knowledge and power, such that the prophecy concerning the fate of humankind that was being delivered in the book would have to be taken seriously. So the cipher of the Book of the Law, as well as hiding an extra layer of information in plain sight in the text, available ultimately only to adepts of Thelema, thus has a validating function. It operates both as a guarantee of divinatory authenticity and of the text's strange manner of reception since Crowley maintained that it wasn't until later on that he even understood that the message was encrypted. Cyphers also temporalize information. They impose a delay that's equivalent to the time
of decryption or deciphering. And this delay is increased in conditions where the existence of the cipher itself is something that needs to be discovered. Much of the cipher of the Book of the Law relates to the Hermetic tradition of Kabbalah, and in particular the method of calculating the numerical words, the numerical values of words, that's known as Gematria. In fact, Crowley would later begin referring to the Book of the Law as Libra 418, having determined that 418 was the number corresponding to Iwas, and also the magical formula of the new aeon that the book prophesies. Abrahadabra is the other word that corresponds to 418. Much effort has been poured into the task of deciphering the text, as can be seen in the image
here, where at the top of the text at the top of the page states, there are mysteries in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another. And because of this, people have done things like drawn grids across the official manuscript, looked at strange artifacts on the paper itself, counted how many letters there are of a particular kind in each line, all of this kind of wild stuff. And it's because of this that Crowley also determined that the original photocopier of manuscript was to be published with the book in order to continue to discover the mysteries of the actual original manuscript. Curiously, the exoteric book of the law also demands of its
readers the creation of a novel Gematria for the new aeon that's prophesied within the pages. So it says here in the underlying sections, thou shalt obtain the order and value of the English alphabet, thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto. So this has led to the invention of new ciphers, some of which have then been applied retroactively to the text itself, folding further temporal twists and turns into the otherwise more straightforward delay of the original cipher. Finally, the cipher of the Book of the Law can be understood as taking part in a much broader culture of mystical or divine writing, a tradition that understands madness as a kind of inspiration. To quote Crowley himself on this, he writes, salvation, whatever salvation may mean,
is not to be obtained on any reasonable terms. Reason is an impasse. Reason is damnation. Only madness, divine madness, offers an issue. The law of the Lord Chancellor will not serve. The lawgiver may be an epileptic camel driver like Mohammed, a megalomaniac provincial upstart like Napoleon, or even an exile, three parts learned, one part crazy, an attic dweller in Soho like Karl Marx. There is only one thing in common among such persons. They're all mad. That is, inspired. Fascinating. So let's move on now to the artistic image. So can you share an image from a contemporary artist who you feel has generated some representation, manifestation of the concept of the cipher?
Absolutely. Okay, so my second example is a work from 2020 by pioneering crypto artist Rio Myers called the Hash Gematria. It shares a lineage with the cipher of the book of the law insofar as both of them draw on gematria or the calculation of numerical values of words, but Myers uses Gematria in a wholly new way. So while traditional Gematria assigns numbers to letters and then adds the letters of a word together to find the value of that word, paying special attention to words that share the same values, Myers uses modern cryptographic hash algorithms to generate the hashes of her words and then searches for collisions in the numerical
sequences of the prefixes of the 64-character hexadecimal strings used to encode the much longer and more complex hash sequences. So while traditional gametria capitalizes on the lack of scarcity or uniqueness of possible word values, Myers's hash gametria works against this principle since cryptographic hash functions are designed specifically to produce scarcity synthetically. It's because of this quality that hashes are an indispensable part of the modern security infrastructure. They're used to validate passwords, authenticate data, and they're used for proof of work systems
in blockchains. The same hash algorithm will always generate the same hash from the same input, which is why they can be used to authenticate data. However, an incremental change in the input data will yield a wildly different hashed output that has absolutely no correlation with the previous hashed output, which makes the process basically irreversible. So while it's incredibly easy to encrypt a piece of information, such as the word cipher, by hashing it, it's impossible by design to reverse engineer a hash in order to find out what's encrypted in it. It's this feature that distinguishes cryptographic hash functions from more traditional ciphers for which the property of reversibility is integral.
Cryptographic hashes are also designed to be unique. Gematria, on the other hand, exploits coincidences. So since hashes are long, complex, unwieldy strings of numbers, they're made more tractable and readable for us humans by their representation as hexadecimal strings with each two hex digits encoding one 8-bit byte of the original hash. And Myers uses this to get around the problems of uniqueness and irreversibility by focusing the zone of coincidence on the prefix or the first few characters of the hexadecimal sequence that encodes the much longer hash sequence in the same
way that software systems like git or docker do so well for crowley using gametria as a means of deciphering the messages hidden in the book of the law function in the modality of revelation Myers sees her much more modern method as one of construction. She writes that the connections she finds are quote, useful irritants, spurs to the generation of actual structure that would otherwise not occur. As an artwork, the Hashka Matria isn't an object or an image, but a piece of executable code. So its status as an artwork is kind of unorthodox, even iconoclastic. It doesn't represent anything. It does something.
It immediately puts something into action or into being. So the image on the screen partially shows what the program looks like when you run it. I've given it the word cipher as an input. These are the names of the hash algorithms being used. These are the hex strings that are encoding the hashes. And the problem is searching for collisions in the first sequence of digits. So here we're seeing four digit or two byte numerical channels or resonances appearing between the word cipher and commie, emasculatory, producibleness, rougher, and stonemasonry.
This is using the Blake to hash algorithm. I wonder if that last one is a weird message from the Masons. Who knows? So the same goes again for intractable and over days, but using the MD4 algorithm. And at an even higher level of coincidence, you've got disapprobative with a five digit or two and a half bite length collision. A token of displeasure, perhaps, from the old gods. Well, that's certainly very intriguing, Amy. I had never heard of this before. Ria's work is amazing. I encourage people to check her site out, ria.art. One of the original artists.
One of the original? Yeah, she had one of the first NFTs that she made in 2014, just sold it at Sotheby's for like a huge amount of ether. So yeah, interesting person keeps a very low profile. So I think she's worthy of a little bit of that. Well, this takes us directly onto our last question for the Aurigo. That would be, can you tell us about your chosen emerging phenomenon linking the cipher to futurity and why we should be paying attention to it? Sure can. Okay, so after talking about two ciphers, I wanted to take an abrupt about face here and consider a speculative vision from
hardcore cyberpunk writer Pat Cadigan's novel Fools, which may or may not be named for the zero card in the tarot of what happens in the total absence of ciphers or encryption. So this is the cover for the French translation of the novel, which I've included not only because it has a cooler cover, but also because the translated title is really interesting. It's not called Fools in French, it's called mise en ébime. So the term mise en ébime literally means to put into an abyss and it describes a mirroring effect if you directly hold a mirror up to another mirror with no mediation no interference no encryption no interruption or anything to break
the feedback of the signal you get something that looks like this so fools tells the story of marceline who's a memory junkie she buys the memories of famous people or people with more interesting and satisfying lives than hers and she has them jacked into her brain at a kind of back alley black market service known as a memory parlor through an interface in her eye sockets and she experiences these memories as if they're her own she also toys with something called a personality overlay in Marceline's world if you get sick of who you are you can buy another personality or sometimes steal one and have it superimposed over your own so that you effectively merge your mind, personality, memories, intelligence, etc.
with those of someone else. Professional method actors use personality overlays as part of their job, literally becoming their characters for the duration of a particular role. So most of the novel focuses on these mind to mind via a machine connection. And I've only given a brief summary of some of the ideas in the novel, but Cadogan explores the potential of this kind of technology in multiple directions. But it's important to sort of note we obviously have nascent versions of this mind-machine interface today, things like Elon Musk's neural lace, for example, being developed. But it's also possible in Cadogan's world to go not mind to machine, but mind to mind
directly with another person. So instead of buying a record of someone else's experience, their memories or a copy of their personality, you're directly plunged into the depths of someone else's psyche with no sensory mediation, censorship, or ability to withhold or protect yourself from information that you don't want to share or you don't want to know. Its singularity and intensity is all derived from the absolute lack of encryption. And this experience is so intimate in fools that not even lifelong partners choose to do it. So I'm going to read a quote from the book that describes the experience of going mind to mind with someone else. He was slow to manifest.
He kept putting some obscuring element between us, a waterfall, a fog bank, a dark pane of glass. But he would have had to have been in much better shape to maintain such a thing within the system. Like the unforgiving light in the dressing room, being mind to mind, showed no mercy. Actually, it wasn't so bad. It gave me time to get accustomed to what I was going to see. An environment was forming around us, something vague and semi-dark, like the inside of a cave or a grotto. There was no sign of anyone else besides us. Dark patches in the space around us began to swirl lazily like oil floating on the surface of water, as if a relaxation exercise had leaped through.
Except it wasn't completely abstract. Here and there, there were hints of pictures, faces mostly, but they didn't last long enough to identify. by. She was right, Sove said suddenly. It is more intimate than a married couple should be, than lovers should be, than we ever should be. There hadn't even been a time for second thought. When you're mind to mind in a system, the speed of thought makes the speed of light look like snail's pace. Perhaps if there had been time to reconsider, my nobler instincts might have won out, but I hadn't had that option, and neither had he." So Cadogan's main interest in the book, as in many of her novels, is the way that technology
exposes the fragility of personal identity. And actually in this scene, one of the characters discovers that they are in fact a member of the brain police in Deep Undercover, and Cadogan's story it turns out is quite literally about killing the cop inside your head. So I guess I'm going to leave it with that kind of like ambivalent idea about what it might mean to remove all encryption and connect with someone else directly. It might be highly undesirable. so now Amy to finalize but also give some continuity to this conversation I will invite
you to summon one of our oracles of the following episode and ask them a question related to their past quote which is temple so yeah they will be answering to both your and Ed's questions on the next episode of seven prophecies of the future cool Well, I wanted to summon Carla Leitao and ask her a question about her passcode of temple. So it's commonly known that historically in periods of great upheaval and innovation and formant that religious groups effloresce and blossom. And I think it's interesting that in
the West we kind of have this narrative of technological civilization being connected to secularism, as I think that we're starting to hit the end of the kind of disenchantment of the world that this signaled originally to come out the other side into a re-enchantment. So I wanted to challenge my oracle, Carla, to invent or imagine a sect, creed, order, cult, or church based on some kind of contemporary developing or existing, sorry, or future technology. So that's my challenge. Well, we shall look forward to Carla's answer
on our next episode of seven prophecy of the future thank you very much amy for sharing all this thanks andrea thank you so ed hello hello one second let me let me accept that recording in progress got it yeah i'll do the whole intro thing after so you don't have to worry about that i'll introduce you as you like as well I don't know. I have a very short, I have a very short term that you can use. Yeah, cool. So yeah, we will start with the question from our previous oracle of the first episode of seven prophets of the future, Jason Mohagic. So what he he has summoned Ed, he has summoned you
it and as an oracle and his question to the oracle is if the etymology of the word cipher which is the passcode for this episode from the arabic cipher which means zero is to be taken seriously what is the relationship between future prophecy and cipher with the concept of experience the experience of zero? Hi, Andrea, thank you so much. This is a really interesting question. And to approach it, I think we could situate the idea of cipher against the concept of noise within the discipline of encryption. You know, a cipher is an included block of information.
And if it's perfectly encrypted, a cipher would be indistinguishable from noise. So the most perfect encryption is just seemingly noise. So from one point of view, we see only noise, or we perceive, or we decode only noise. But from the right position in space and time, decrypted, the cipher is readable. It's decoded. And so this makes me wonder about the concept of zero. From the wrong point of view, perfect encryption as noise is kind of in kinship with zero. Zero means an absence, an absence of information, an absence of everything, no information. But pure noise actually isn't zero. Pure noise is a kind of a presence. It's got a character. It's got a texture. In fact, you know, from many points of view, mathematical points of view, encryption points
of view, pure noise is very valuable. So it's not zero either. And there's maybe almost a messianic aspect to this. If we recall Walter Benjamin writing about this in Task of the Translator, he implies in that essay that the most perfect divine text would be universally translatable. There would be no need for translation of the divine word. There's also an interesting counter read of that point that Benjamin makes right at the end of that essay, which would be that the divine word would be untranslatable somehow. You could never translate it properly into any language. So there's one take on this response to Jason's question or prompt. Another way would be to say to experience zero subjectively might be the equivalent of non-being.
And that's also very different than noise. It would be the cessation of all subjective perceptions. So maybe an overwhelming flow of information on an individual, on a human, an animal, an ecosystem would be noise. But objective zero is harder to grasp for us. Zero as it sits in a number, say 2021, is a placeholder for a non-zero block of time. It's a non-zero time space in our world. Objective zero isn't that. Objective zero is non-being. So I wonder how we can situate this idea in relationship to the etymology of cipher? The absence of everything, perhaps even the absence of godlike beings, minds, entities? I'm not sure. Well, I think now we can jump into the second bit
of the question, which would be more your choice of three images that would illustrate this prophecy based on the notion of cipher. So also what implications these images have for the future? And we will start with the myth, then we will jump to the artistic image, and then finally the current phenomenon that has captivated you. So shall we start with the myth? Sure. I was interested in the very classic reference of the Book of Kells as an example of the cipher of divinity, or the concept of divinity, which would be formally and steganographically embedded in an image.
And so here's a very famous plate from the Book of Kells, the Chi-Roh plate. Book of Kells is an illustrated manuscript. In Latin, it has some of the Gospels from the New Testament. And in the book of Kells, in this particular image, we can see that the intricacies of geometry work partly as a vector for the expression of divinity or a human conception of divinity, human creativity in the face of certain social constructs and social political frameworks. the proliferation of ornament in this image and in the book of Kells in general, it's a kind of an expression of an aesthetic encounter with the infinite, right? And
at the same time, you know, these forms emerge as Henri Focion talks about in his book, Life of Forms in Art. They emerge because of an internal vital force that they themselves have. And Focion's argument here is fascinating. You could almost compare it to the Deleuzian notion of the machinic phylum. It's an animate way of looking at base matter, physical chemical systems, weather systems, stone material systems, cultural production. These forms are alive. They evolve, they make themselves. You know, I'd like to read a quote from Phocion because it's incredibly beautiful, where he first meditates on form and then he specifically talks about the book of Kells. first he says speaking about form can form then be nothing more than a void
it is only a cipher wandering through space forever in pursuit of a number that forever flees from it by no means form has a meaning it's a meaning entirely its own a personal and specific value it has a significance it's open to interpretation an architectural mass a relationship of tones, a painter's touch, an engraved line, exist and possess value primarily in and of themselves. Their quality may closely resemble that of nature, but it must not be confused with nature. So, problem of cultural production, the cipher as an encoding of cultural beliefs, yet at the same time an internal logic that drives form. And then he goes on specifically
to talk about this example from the book of Kells. By copying the coils of snakes, sympathetic magic invented the interlace. The medical origin of this sign cannot be doubted. A trace of it persists among the symbolic attributes of Asclepius, but the sign itself becomes form, and in the world of forms, it gives rise to a whole series of shapes that subsequently bear no relationship whatsoever to their origin. The interlace, for instance, lends itself to innumerable variations in the decoration of the architectural monuments of certain East Christian sects. It may weave various shapes into single, indissoluble ornaments. It may submit to synthesis that artfully conceal the relationship of their component parts. Or it may evoke from that genius
for analysis so typical of Islam the construction and isolation of completely stylized patterns. In Ireland, the interlace appears as a transitory but endlessly renewed meditation on a chaotic universe that deep within itself clasps and conceals the debris or the seeds of humankind. And this is, of course, where the cipher functions now, you know, end quote. This is where the cipher functions. It clasps and conceals the debris or the seeds of humankind. And so this mythic cipher is an operation that encodes and casts forward in time a series of constructs, sociopolitical constructs. constructs. It twines, to return to Phocian, quote, the interlaced twines round and round
the old iconography and devours it. It creates a picture of the world that has nothing in common with the world and an art of thinking that has nothing in common with thought. You know, and so I suppose that it's important to note here that, end quote, it's important to note here that I feel that what Focion is pointing out is the cipher is a compression decompression algorithm. But what we need to pay attention to is what it's compressing and what it's decompressing. It's not only compressing socio-political beliefs, religious beliefs, and casting them forward into the future. It also has a life of its own and a logic of its own in terms of what it can capture and what it casts forward, the formal principles. yeah i was i was wondering as you were speaking at and presenting previously um your bit your
your answer you're introducing uh this idea of noise and now you're speaking in a way about animism and when you you mentioned minerals and everything having in this world life of its own then i was thinking you also mentioned translation i was thinking maybe it kind of resonates with Michel Serre. And I know that you're, I'm introducing him because I'm a bit of a fan, and I know you also are. So I was wondering if there are other, you know, kind of ideas around that we could connect to. Well, I want to jump to the contemporary cipher in a couple of minutes, but on the way there, that's perfect that you mentioned Michel Serre, because there's a, there's something about the balance between noise and formal systems as the natural world
constructs them that Sarah is always fascinated with. And so when he speaks of the relationship between the concept of thermodynamics that we hold from physics and mathematics and information theory and the way that matter itself organizes, and we look at an example like this, the silver crystal, which has been deposited as a crystal deposited out of solution, catalyzed by an electrical flow, we see the intelligence of matter itself and the way it reacts to gradients in the kind of atmosphere around it, in this case a liquid atmosphere, which is heavily saturated with silver. And so I would draw a comparison between the way that
matter can self-organize given certain kinds of energy flows or information flows, and the way that Focion talks about the book of Kells, and the way that the ornamentation and the life of forms itself has organized you know so here in both of these we'd be looking for yeah some sort of animate principle as you've pointed out and also we'd be looking for the the rule sets that make it possible for noise to reverse entropy and generate form generate form whether it's material form or it's life form yeah yeah that's excellent now i'm seeing the contemporary I suppose, example. Yeah. Well, the contemporary example, I wanted to jump to the film Annihilation,
Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer's novel. And, you know, in this contemporary cipher, we see a science fiction read of multiple ecological gestures and cognitive architectures, multiple ciphers laid kind of interlaced across each other and operating and Amy Ireland has actually written about this in one of her texts she says that decay sets in unnervingly quickly in area x which is the place where the novel and the film play out she says compasses and watches are ineffectual gravity is fractious radio waves, light waves, genetic information partake in an opaque commerce under a strange
logic of transversal refraction. Cause-effect relations are indecipherable if they even apply at all. And, you know, in Garland's film adaptation of the novel, which I loved and I felt was a very interesting kind of cross adaptation, it merges themes from Ballard, Ballard's Crystal World, that actually takes character names directly from Ballard's novel and it deploys them into Vandermeer's setting. I felt that one of the things it does is it meditates on a profound gesture between the human and the non-human. And as a kind of contemporary cinematic engagement and narrative engagement on Vandermeer's part with this, it's contemporary because it deals with
what it would mean for us to frame a gestural ecology, to use Nandita Biswas-Malamfi's concept of ecology and gestural notation. What does it mean when humans merge with the radically non-human? And this is, I would say, something that historically, we have for thousands of years, of course, dealt with. In the fable from mythology, Daphne is being pursued by Apollo, and she's rescued by her father, the river god, if I remember correctly, by being transformed into a laurel tree. She passes from one realm to another, as Phocion says. So this deep time mythic relationship between the human and the non-human is something that today we have to take on
much more substantially. As we see ecologies decaying, falling apart, as we see, as Ballard would have put it, time itself looping back on itself, as we see the potential creation of artificial intelligence, which attains nearly godlike proportions. And so I think that one of the other things that's particularly valuable from this film, Garland's film Annihilation, is it shows a shedding of the human diagram, but it nonetheless preserves some dignity, the form of life that Focion was interested in and that other thinkers like Legahman are interested in, which all of us share, all of us human, non-human, ecological, animal,
We should go, Josie. How long was your husband in the Shimmer? It's hard to say exactly. Theoretically, as long as a year. As long as a year. It's a long time to be inside and remain intact. Not so sure it was intact. I'm right. You brought the refractions, weren't I? Yeah. I checked my blood last night.
It's in me. It will be in all of us. It was so strange hearing Shepard's voice in the mouth of that creature last night. I think as she was dying, part of her mind became part of the creature that was killing her. Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives. I wouldn't like that at all. So we see she's already becoming Daphne.
Ventress wants to face it. You want to fight it. But I don't think I want either of those things. Josie. Josie. Josie! Henri Faucion talks about Daphne in the quote that you see on screen, but he also says,
held against the wind, spread out and separated like a frond. They, her hands, urged her on to an understanding of fluids. They provided her with numerous and delicately sensitive surfaces for knowledge of atmosphere and of water. My hands, in metamorphosis, experience even those translucent currents which have no substance and which the eye does not see. And so as Daphne's hands become tree branches, nonetheless Daphne is in contact with something that is a cipher from the human. And a cipher in the case of annihilation, even from the normal ecosystems, because in the science fiction narrative of annihilation, animal DNA is hybridizing with human, with plant DNA.
The shimmer area X is a zone, as Amy Ireland points out, that becomes a place where things are refracted through each other. And the interesting thing for me about the cipher here would be how ciphers can sometimes connect with each other and decode each other, but sometimes they can't. Good. Do we have to? Oh, yeah, that's perfect. Sorry, I couldn't see the screen. Now I can. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that, Ed. Now, do you think we can jump into the current phenomenon? So you tell us a little bit about something that has captured your imagination or attention these days,
some kind of emerging phenomenon related to the cipher, what you've been talking about, and futurity, of course. You know, I would look at the emergent phenomenon. It's very old, but it's also very current of feedback and feed forward loops. and we can see a beautiful example of this in the way that rivers will explore over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, a river basin. So in these drawings, these famous drawings of the Mississippi River meanders, we see the oxbows forming, we see the cutoffs. Each of the colors shows you a different layering across thousands and thousands of years. And we see that the planet itself is indexically thinking. You know, material systems bundle together different temporalities, and this allows for feedback and feedforward.
The Earth has these registers of what you could call, using Michael Whitmore's term, massive addressability. Massive addressability allows certain parts of the system to communicate with other parts or be connected to at another moment in time, another moment in space. and yet they're also blind to each other because if you think of the way that water moves the sand and the earth gravity is a universal force which constrains the water to a basin flow is something which drives the system across the basin and ecosystems are produced by the flow across the basin sometimes they're in direct communication with each other and sometimes they're ciphers for each other so humans have tried to handle this problem we've created closed world isolated ecosystems like the Biosphere Project. We imagine doing this in space.
We've seen the problems of closed worlds. This is, of course, an image from Exupere's Little Prince, where he talks about a planet overrun by a system. In this case, it's the baobab trees. Now, there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince. These were the seeds of the baobab. A baobab is something you'll never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces, you know? And so the idea of an isolated world or an isolated system with feedback loops and feed forward loops that can overrun the system is what we're dealing with. Of course, the little prince
is a children's story. It's an allegory about a young human in space with trees. It's a beautiful image. It's a cautionary tale. What happens if we don't model our networks well? What happens if we misunderstand the feedback loops and the feed-forward loops? This is what happens when we misunderstand them. Someone designed a plastic bottle cap. Someone designed a lighter. It was eaten by an albatross, and it killed the bird. The designer of the plastic bottle cap, the designer of the Bic lighter never thought an albatross would eat them. Nonetheless, the plastic and the design was capable of futuring. It fed forward, it connected another system, which it was a cipher to, but only a partial cipher. Of course, the bird didn't have a light, you know, flaming in its belly, but it was killed by this plastic debris nonetheless. And so the ciphering of the feedback
and the feed-forward loops is what's crucial to us right now. And of course, across history, it's always been crucial to us. But it's ever more crucial to us as we start to leave our planet. If we think about the arcs of ecosystems, the hundreds of thousands of years, the millions of years of partial ciphering, and the places where a value is generated. Aldo Leopold talked about this in 1949 in Sand County Almanac. Leopold said,
corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic tundras there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands in between and in this annual barter of food for light and winter warmth for summer solitude the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March so a cipher once again who's there two hundred thousand years ago to hear the geese honking and dropping their wild poems. Other animals. The ecosystem heard it, but it barely registered it. Nonetheless, the geese have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years, and they've slowly been changing the face of the earth. So the question of how the cipher becomes deciphered by ecological gestures, to use
Nandita's term again, Nandita Biswas Melanthias has developed this concept of the ecological gesture as a sort of a grammatology in an incredibly beautiful way. This is the kind of crucial place of the gesture. And this is where it would tie back to the mythic gesture and Focion's notion of the gesture, and where we could jump forward in a fantastical way. You know, back to the little prince. This is a beautiful baby's book adaptation of the little prince. De charme au planète, je quitte ma planète. So will out-of-control feedback loops, will the breakdown of the cipher lead us to want to flee the planet? We've already begun fleeing the planet, so I suppose what we need to do is see if our departure will be as poetic as Exupere's little prince, who was a cipher not just for the author, but for all of us with cosmopolitical aspirations.
Or will we see this kind of culmination of the breakdown of the cipher? We're poised on the edge of a potentially superhuman intelligence. Some have called a hard takeoff looming in our future with artificial general intelligence, whether it's created by us as humans in fast-forward accelerated feedback loops and feed-forward loops with our planet, where ciphers break down and some run amok, out of control, or by an interaction with a non-human intelligence, as Kubrick and Clark have shown us in 2001. So this is the kind of contemporary problem of feedback and feedforward that I see us facing, where one decoding of the cipher would lead us to this actually fairly benevolent conclusion to a hard takeoff.
And there is definitely a connection between, or there's no discontinuity really, between the myth and the future as we see it now. It adopts different forms and it's transfigured and it is place in different contexts and but it is the same thing absolutely yeah so i think ed to finalize but also give continuity to this conversation um i would like you to summon or ask you to summon a future oracle from the future studies program um that you would like to ask a question to So the answer will be revealed on the next episode, and the password for this chamber is TEMPLE.
Who would you like to summon, and what is your question? I would summon Dan Malamfy, and I would ask Dan, if we dig deep, very, very deep, perhaps toward the center of the earth or perhaps far out into time, What foundations might we find? What most primitive algorithms might govern and constitute the rules which form the temples we have seen across history, and also the temples we might build today? What forms of society, politics, biology, love, and mind would these temples make possible? Excellent. So this will be answered in the next episode of Seven Prophecies of the Future. Thank you very much, Ed. Thank you so much, Andrea.