SERIES: Portals
About This Series
Funeral Procession / Portal (1) merges the technology of today with the mysticism and rituals of antiquity. Sampling a modern recreation of an ancient Greek funeral song, I have stretched the recording over 100 times so that the audible moments are abstracted to haunting drones and chimes. The recording is then imputed into a program that I have written, rendering visualizations from those sound frequencies.
Funeral Procession was featured in Empedocles’ Ghost, a collaboration with Noysky Projects and The Syndicate of Creatures at Warehouse9, an early 20th century slaughterhouse in Copenhagen’s Meatpacking District. The rustic gallery was formerly a holding pen where cattle were taken to be watered and cleaned after they were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The cattle were later shuttled to their final destination, where they were slaughtered in a nearby building. The video installation was inspired by this deeply charged place, referring to the fleeting moment when the spirit leaves the body as it travels between the transitory plane between the living and the dead.
About This Series
Portals is a series of new media works that weaves late medieval occult practices together with contemporary computational theory. The work reframes spiritualist philosophies within a digital framework, replacing traditional forms of mediumship with algorithmic processes. Through the use of randomness in code, the pieces generate images, forms, and ephemeral patterns that recall the aesthetics and sensibilities of occult ritual.
The project sits at the intersection of cybernetics, post-humanist theory, and medieval esotericism. Cybernetics, with its focus on feedback and control, offers a lens for understanding how code mediates the dialogue between viewer, machine, and image. Posthumanism shifts agency away from the individual, positioning image-making as a collaboration with intangible entities. The code operates as a spiritual medium—part conjurer, part collaborator—dissolving the boundaries between human, machine, and the spirit world.
The merging of technology and mysticism has many precedents. Esoteric futurists such as Erik Davis trace connections between electricity and alchemy, while Thomas Edison famously speculated about a “spirit phone,” a theoretical device designed to communicate with the dead.
Portals is an exploration of alternatives to capitalism and industrialization, rooted in pre-Christian mysticism. The works reflect a longing for reconnection with the planet—honoring ancient traditions while engaging technology as a tool for imagining more mystically-attuned futures.