SPART Magick

About Psychonaut
As any lapsed Catholic will know, just because you don’t believe in something is no reason not to practice it. Psychonaut is a body of work exploring the phenomena of apophenia. Through the assumption of the persona of a modern day Magus, I’m attempting to understand, in an embodied way, the means by which we inscribe objects and events with personal significance and meaning. This search to understand is propelled by the desire to discover or re-imagine a personal spirituality through the manipulation of the detritus of consumer society. A spirituality that, like all spiritual faiths, is absolutely untenable in terms of proof yet is still useful as a vehicle for understanding, reflection and self-evolution.

Psychonaut is evolving in several different mediums simultaneously including: photography, video, sculpture, drawing, performance and writing. Links to some of these works follow.

The spirit of this body of work is best summed up by the manifesto Sorcery

Sorcery
A short SPARTIST treatise on the politics and use of magick
In a world where ‘being’ has been replaced by ‘appearing’ perhaps the most radical and pragmatic thing to do is find a way to disappear. Instead of producing a spectacle of revolution, why not instead revolt against the spectacle: Disappear. No more well documented political art ‘actions’. No more performance art shows claiming to manifest the great ontological problems of existence, no more half-cocked claims about art as a revolutionary activity. How can something intrinsically visual i.e. caught up in the act of ‘appearing’ be revolutionary? It’s time to disappear.
For the Gods are dead and so is Art and with these things have died any claim to the validity of subjective experience as an organising principle of society. Now only the mighty dollar remains. What to do in the face of such misery? Over the past several decades the socialists, that is to say those who believe in social concerns being the central organising principle in society, as opposed to the capitalists who fix the dollar as the centre, have attempted through various techniques of lobbying, protest and sabotage to change the dominant political order. However, in recent years it seems that such attempts to effect social change are less and less effective. The reason being that those who govern have become too clever; the vestibules of power have become too nebulous, even virtual, and thus such old school styles of attack have been rendered all but obsolete.
In considering this sorry state of affairs we find ourselves asking ‘why bother?‘ Since the invention of the nuclear bomb we have entered a phase of history where we are locked in the continual aggression of warlike engagement without the violence of nuclear deployment. In this climate information has become the main means of warfare and the minds of the populace the new territories of conquest. Perhaps, instead of lobbying to change the political apparatus of the social machine, why not instead change the nature of our own personal mental machine: the psyche? If it’s alright for government and big business to continually attempt to affect our mental states using images and ethics projected to us through TV and advertising then surely it is about time we reclaimed this act of mind alteration for our own ends.
Read the full manifesto click here