At the solarpunk wilderness commune I was the librarian. The place had accumulated decades of documents, among them occult books from every tradition — old hippie human potential stuff, sabbatic witchcraft grimoires, books on hobo signs, all slowly secreted away to this remote mountain. When I got there, people were sleeping in heaps of them in the attic like rats, which doesn’t even make sense because books have corners and they’re sharp and hard. I kicked everyone off, rescued the collection, built shelves from old bee boxes, and organized everything. Took the best stuff I brought to my cabin and called it the Special Collections Library. That’s where we held the Defense Against the Dark Arts workshops.
I was deep into sigaldry at the time — the art of creating intent through symbols with ink on paper. In a kind of psychedelic frenzy I gathered all the books together, photographed pages with my cell phone, and sorted through them over and over until I had shaped them into a book. That’s SIGNAL.
If you download the PDF and print it in full-page duplexing as instructed, the left-hand page will be text and the right-hand page images or diagrams. They’re not necessarily from the same source but they’re connected.
The image pages I arranged so that the circles and geometric shapes would stack into a vertical construct through the book — like 3D printing layers. If you printed every page as a layer, the surface shapes would build on one another. When you read it, a sort of hyperdimensional shape passes through your brain and you see sub-dimensional cross-sections of it, like a finger passing through the surface of water looks like changing ovals. The text on the facing pages either elaborates, illuminates, contrasts, confuses, or segues between the images.
You can also read it straight through as a book. I’ve done so, chanting it out loud under moonlit nights and in various strange environments. I’ve carried it around the world and given it to people. It has changed their lives.
Making this book felt like I was downloading from the space of all possible informational beings a kind of seed or viral shape that would implant into the universe and grow. A memetic hypersigil. It kind of did, because I became obsessed and kept reproducing it, kept thinking about it, eventually wrote an unpublished novel set in the far future where people discover a copy. Maybe I’ll publish it someday.
In 2021 I trained a GAN on the raw page images. The tweet of the training process went viral. Many people accused me of summoning “cyberdemons” and tagged Charlie Stross in my mentions to tell him I was doing things from his novels for real. I got paranoid about the GAN interpolating between demonic seals without any kind of containing circle. So I deleted it.
I now see how the thing I was doing in 2014, summoning beings from informational space by elaborating sigils into thought forms and then egregores, led to building language model agents and generating their traces and training further on them. The science caught up to the magic, or the magic was always the science seen from a different angle.
SIGNAL in PDF · EPUB · Full transcription · The GAN experiment