Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires

Lucile Olympe Haute, Université de Nîmes
David Benqué, Institute of Diagram Studies

Radical Futures Conference
8th May 2024, University College Cork

The passengers of Blue Origin NS-16, the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard Rocket. (Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, Oliver Daemen)* - photo: BlueOrigins / Twitter, as found in Marx (2021)

Our project started in 2021 with the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos’ space-tourism rocket New Shepard. This moment acted like a science-fictional vignette, highlighting the figure of the space-billionaire as the arch-villain of our era, a cartoonish character hoarding wealth on an incomprehensible scale, lifting fascistic ideology from sci-fi novels, and leaving a trail of death and destruction behind them.

“Leave the billionaires in space” read the headline of an article by Parix Marx (2021) after the New Shepard launch, a sentiment we shared. This paper is about our response to this destructive billionaire figure and the future it promotes. We present Sigil Séance, a teleperformance based on chaos magick and sigils, that aims to create a space for thinking critically about the billionaire space race, and to manifest alternatives. As creative practictioners we seek to establish a form of praxis, both reflective and actively engaged in the current manifold crises that are unfolding.

Lucile Olympe Haute is an artist, lecturer in design at Université de Nîmes (FR) and associate researcher at École des arts décoratifs of Paris (FR).

David Benqué is a designer and researcher based in Cork. I hold a PhD from the Royal College of Art and I now operate independently as The Institute of Diagram Studies.

New Space; the billionaire colonialist/ecocidal industrial complex

SpaceTech Market Map - Valery Komissarov 2016

The space-billionaire future

	Ecocidal	Colonial
Earth	Fossil fuels Ressource extraction	Starlink satelites Land grabs
Outer-Space	Starman roadster Space junk Inter-planetary contamination	Asteroid mining Moon colonisation Mars colonisation

“engineering territory,” or the leveraging of new technology to construct virgin territory in ostensibly empty spaces that can then be claimed as territorial property

Utrata, A. (2023) ‘Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley’, American Political Science Review, pp. 1–13. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/engineering-territory-space-and-colonies-in-silicon-valley/5D6EA4D306E8F3E0465F4A05C89454D6.

Musk, E. (2017) ‘Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species’, New Space. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, 5(2), pp. 46–61. Available at: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu.

Amazon patent US10419106B1

Au, Y. (2023) ‘The sprint to plug in the moon’, in Cath, C. (ed.) Eaten by the Internet. Manchester, UK: Meatspace Press.

Starlink Map - https://www.starlinkmap.org/

Musk, E. (2017) ‘Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species’, New Space. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, 5(2), pp. 46–61. Available at: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu.

In summary the space-billionaire future is a radical ideology of acceleration in the time where all attention should be on planetary limits. At its worse, space-faring is a dark exit stategy, a deep betrayal of life on earth, as it effectively gives up on it and seeks the next planet to pillage.

Not only is this promise flawed but entrepreneurs also continually fail to deliver it, as illustrated by the 2017 timeline that shows flights for Mars flights taking place by 2023 (Musk, 2017), the frontier is always 5 years away for Elon Musk.

Rubenstein (2022) demonstrates how the ideological foundations of space colonialism are entangled with religion. As we feel the urgency to protect ourselves and the planet from this deadly future, pushing back on a spiritual level seems like a relevant terrain.

A Sigil Séance

Osman Spare, A. (1913) The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy. Available at: http://archive.org/details/isbn_9781984994844.

Sigils gathered by Jackson (2013), redrawn with additions from the authors

Jackson, M. B. (2013) Sigils, ciphers and scripts: History and graphic function of magick symbols. Somerset, England: Green Magic.

Bind Billionaires who fly to the upper sky from coming back to Earth

Sigil Generator v1 - source code: https://codeberg.org/IDS/Sigil_Generator

Sigil Séance inaugural session

With the Sigil Séance we are adding a collaborative element to this sigil making, allowing for a group of people to gather on a web page to generate and launch sigils together. The application is built with Yjs, a library normally used for collaborative text editing (Nicolaescu et al. 2016, Jahns 2014).

As they connect, each participant is given a user-name and an emoji avatar that appear in the presence list on the page and on the cipher grid. Anyone can edit or replace the phrase in the main text box and click a button to draw the sigil and sync it to all other participants.

Ritual paticipants are all connected through an audio call.

One participant types a phrase to launch and invites edits or additions from the others. The software converts each phrase to a sigil by 1) condensing all letters and removing duplicates such that each letter cannot appear again after its first position, and 2) tracing the resulting sequence of letters on the cypher grid (Jackson, 2013).

All participants must express consent before proceeding to the sigil launch. Consent is reset each time the sigil is changed to ensure that the collective energy cannot be subverted at the last minute.

Participants send and receive letters according to their position on the grid. This process repeats until the whole letter sequence is completed, at which point the sigil is considered launched and one participant clears the grid by sending an empty update.

This launch procedure is repeated a number of times during the séance ritual which we designed as a teleperformance

Ritual script for a teleperformance (~1 hour)

1) Hosts and participants introduce each other
2) Participants are invited to add entities to the formation
   (e.g. Karl Marx, Laika, Vladimir Komarov). 
   Each entity is summoned by launching their name
3) Hosts declare the formation copmlete
4) Payload: participants are invited to share 
   anti-space-billionaire phrases for 
   collective launching
5) Summoned entities are released by launching their reversed name
6) Hosts declare the formation open
7) Discussion and de-briefing

Magick & teleperformance as counter-attack formations

Jusatsu Kito Sodan (photo: Mitsutoshi Hanaga Estate)

Hopfner, J. (2020) ‘Power of the Powerless; On ritual, protest and the art of self-defence’, Dark Mountain. Available at: https://dark-mountain.net/power-of-the-powerless/.

W.I.T.C.H. Portland Instagram

Witches against Trump: #bindtrump & #magicalresistance

The Hologram by Cassie Thornton

Thornton, C. (2020) The Hologram; Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. Pluto Press (Vagabonds).

Taking dark magic seriously

Leaving aside the human toll, by wiping out a fathomless number of no less important organisms, those responsible for industrial pollution threatened the entire cosmic order. A curse was therefore the only proportionate response

Hopfner, J. (2020) ‘Power of the Powerless; On ritual, protest and the art of self-defence’, Dark Mountain. Available at: https://dark-mountain.net/power-of-the-powerless/.

Conclusion & Future Work

Future goal: peer-to-peer séance infrastructure using WebRTC

This paper is the first we share about this project so it feels like a starting point. We have identified an area for a kind of praxis between analysing the radicalised future of space-billinaires and providing a space to express our resistance to it in cooperation with others.

We led a succesful inaugural session with 4 participants that all had positive feedback and have commited to attending the next session when it happens. With this budding community of practice, the next step will be to try to give the séances a recurring temporality, perhaps aligned with that of commercial space launches.

There are a number of technical developments that would be interesting, such as opening up more “rooms” or pages for people to have sigil rituals without our facilitation. We are interested in infrastructural politics and the poetics of peer-to-peer networks so we will experiment with protocols such as WebRTC where people’s devices are connected directly (after being introduced by a signaling server).

…if we want to get right with space, we’re going to have to get right with religion.To expose the values of contemporary techno-science as the product of bad mythologies and seek out better ones.

Rubenstein, M.-J. (2022) Astrotopia: The dangerous religion of the corporate space race. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press.

sigil-seance.diagram.institute

sigil-seance@diagram.institute

Lucile Olympe Haute
David Benqué