User:Zuhui//PMOMMs/Put a spell on you

What is it?

obsolete media witchcraft and poetry, using old plotter machines and HPGL language as kind of a ritualistic grammar to perform/stage an act of curse.

Why make it?

few months back i thought about putting a curse on someone but also in the same time i wanted to automate it to optimize the effort.

act of cursing (at least the way i see it)is an act of will and declaration performed through official/unofficial rules and protocols and often carries out with heavy repetition. what happens if i delegate this to a machine? if i write the hpgl command as kind of an incantation for the machine to utter, and then the slow and loud machine executes it again and again. can i make it count as a curse or does it become something else?

Previous practice

not sure if this falls into the category of previous practice but the idea and the motivation of this PMoMM first came from the experience of having to witness political moments back home where superstition and shamanic logic tempered governmental decision making + state affairs at the highest level. for 3 years.

Independant

The Guardian

Chosun biz

De Volkskrant, "South Korean first lady, surrounded by shamans and scandals, now also goes behind bars"

Relation to a wider context

(abstract)

Automation and agency :

Belief without belief :

Code performativity :

Political ritual & performativity :

Media archaeology & Obsolete ritual :

Political counter-ritual :

References from personal reader / annotated bibilography :

• Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler
  
• Political Ritual and Social Integration by Steven Lukes
  
• Victor Turner's Ritual process
  
• The Dramatic Function of the Curse in Shakespeare’s Richard III
  
• W.I.T.C.H. - Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
• HUMAN PARSER by THIJS van Loenhout

Choice made

Why use obsolete tech(old HP plotter series), obsolete language(HP-GL) for this? :

at first I didn't know why I wanted to do this with an old machines where i would have to risk the effort of learning HP-GL which is a dead language(or practically have one foot in the grave).

to figure out why it has to be the old machine, i've compared the HP7475A plotter with the newer and fancier one, AxiDraw. AxiDraw is seamless, smooth, fast, and transparent almost. it's really just an immediate input-output operation type of thing. on the other hand, the old HP series are super slow, noisy, and full of frictions which is exact why it's obsolete, it goes against the virtue(?) of technology as we normally expect. but for me it feels like this exact friction of the old machine creates a kind of ritualistic tension. its temporality feels right for something as absurd as performing or staging a curse.

same with HP-GL language, it's a dying language. it's a legacy code that no one really uses(as far as i know). so the whole manual, which i bootlegged the other day, can be read as a kind of ritualistic grammar for this project.

Fred Note:

AI handwriitng synthesis

https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis