FINAL TASK OF THE COURSE "MEDIA CHANNELS & PLATFORMS"

As the time goes by things grow, disappear and change. Every medium requires a specific format. Is it a book that requires pages with letters and us to see in order to get the message or a radio that requires sound and us to hear in order to use the medium. Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher, declares: “Medium is the message.” He explains that the message is not as important as the medium itself. Medium shapes us and with us the whole world as we know it.

With the rise of internet and technologies world has never been the same.

Lev Manovich in his book “The Language of the New Media” talks about the five principles that are crucial when questioning what is new media. First principle of the five is “Numerical Representation”, he explains: “Converting continuous data into a numerical representation is called digitization.” This process reminds me of live beings who need to adapt to the changes in environment in order to avoid the extinction.

I find very entertaining to see ancient things in the internet. My final work is about magic and how it is alive in the internet. The practical side to it is a satirical magick site of my own.

First things first, the meaning. When I was looking up stuff I came across two terms - “magic” and “magick”. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), an English occultist, started using the term “magick” to differentiate what he was doing from stage magic. There’s some more reasons, but this is the most crucial one. As Urban Dictionary explains: “Magick is art of utilizing natural forces around us to bring about change. Magick is neutral, neither good, nor evil. The practitioner decides how they would like to focus this natural energy.” No matter the Crowley’s intentions still it’s possible to see people using the term “magic” more commonly.  

“Magic usually refers to:

• Magic (paranormal), the use of paranormal methods to manipulate natural forces
• Magic (illusion), the art of appearing to perform supernatural feats
• Magic in fiction, the genre of fiction that uses supernatural elements as a theme”

“Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, or language with the aim of utilizing supernatural forces. [..] The term magic has a variety of meanings, and there is no widely agreed upon definition of what it is.”

Magic sites

Every site is different, but they all share some things.

1. Semiotics is a big thing. In magic almost everything is based on the meaning of a thing, of what it represents, whether it's a sign, object or material. While trying to find things I stumbled upon a term “sigil”. A sigil is a symbol used in magic, especially in the context of chaos magic. What I found interesting was that Aphex Twin and Die Antwoord practices chaos magic according to this article.
   

   

2. There’s a fan base.
3. There’s an “about me” section.
4. Some are not that personal, but some are really personal. The person shares the journey of becoming involved in magic. So there’s some kind of a narrative.
5. Aesthetics. (Of course there are some very down to earth, minimalistic looking sites like this, but for me it’s more pleasing to look at the exotic ones since we are talking about the magic.)  
6. Spells.
7. Shop.

Here are some examples:

http://www.wicca-spirituality.com/

https://www.changeyourlifespells.com/

http://www.spellsandmagic.com/

http://sacredwicca.com/

Some other interesting things that I've found

Since my background is art I think that it is important to mention something that I've found.

“Problem Glyphs” is a project by Eliza Gauger in which sigils are drawn in response to problems you send in. You can read more about it here.

Molly Soda “8 Spells For The Internet Any Witch Can Do At Home”. I don't know why, but the page is not working properly, that's why you can just look here, it's easy to explore.

In Twitter there's usually a lot of bot accounts and there's also one about magic too. It's called Magic Realism Bot.

There's an app called “Sigilscribe” that helps you create sigils instantly.

One of the most entertaining things that I've found was called Meme Magic. This is a great article that explains why meme magic is the reason why Trump got ellected that it was not a coincidence and meme magic should be treated with respect.

Magic very often is associated with tricks. Technology is a very handy tool for making tricks seem more advanced & is widening the horizon. One example is AI, you can read about it in this article. Here's a great site with a lot of code based tricks.

Apparently you can cast spells using emojis.

Here's a guide for that. Vice has also covered it here.

Here's my final work presentation.

Here's my practical final work that I did not finish, but you can get the feel of it. 

There's really a lot of information about magick if you are willing to spend time to look for it. Books, videos, pdfs, articles so on. I actually got really tired when I started to write about it and put it all together afterwards. I didn't even go through a lot of youtube tutorials, videos, there was even one live stream for a ritual. If you are interested you can search for it by yourself.  

I hope that no one is going to cast a spell on me after this.