The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present BY Alice Bucknell (Opposite) Haroon Mirza, stone circle (detail), 2018. Courtesy: Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas. Photo: Emma Rogers (Above) Haroon Mirza, stone circle , 2018. Courtesy: Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas. Photo: Rowdy Dugan Mousse Magazine 69 233 Mousse Magazine 69 232 233 Mousse Magazine 69 Pagan worship sites, ancient tongues, quasi-religious deities, and forgotten origin stories are resurrected in the kaleidoscopic works of a crop of contemporary artists fusing mysticism with advanced technology. Combining video installation, costumed performance, interactive sculpture, and virtual reality (VR) soft- ware, they conjure ambient, high-tech atmospheres wherein mul- tisensory experience enables temporary cohabitation of spec- ulative worlds. Saya Woolfalk, Ian Cheng, Tabita Rezaire, Zadie Xa, and Haroon Mirza are at the forefront of this emergent prac- tice, which I’m calling the New Mystics. Their works bring ancient belief systems into the context of the present in order to imag- ine alternative futures soaked in magic. (Opposte) Zadie Xa, Grandmother Mago , 2019. Masks by Benito Mayor Vallejo. Performance part of Meetings on Art, 58 th Venice Biennale, 2019. Courtesy: Del fi na Foundation, London and Arts Council England. Photo: Riccardo Ban fi The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present Mousse Magazine 69 Mousse Magazine 69 234 235 A gust of hot wind rolls over the Texas high desert, where a ring of black marble megaliths poke out from the soil like the maw of some ancient creature. Suddenly, a full moon slips out from the clouds, and the eight jagged stones, each emitting a fl uorescent blue glow, begin to buzz with a low hum. An adjacent “mother stone”—identi fi able by a he ft y solar panel strapped to her back—translates absorbed so- lar energy into electricity, communing with the concentric marble far belowground. As more solar power is shot into the ring, the sounds begin to stretch apart, transitioning into a lo- fi techno beat. Simultaneously recalling the mystic aura of Stonehenge and a semi-religious experience found mid-high deep in the bowels of Berghain. Haroon Mirza’s stone circle (2018) is perhaps the most site-speci fi c work of the New Mystics, a practice utilizing advanced technology to invoke mystical ideas and magical thinking. From Zadie Xa’s sonic subaquatic environments that trace the migration patterns of orcas to Ian Cheng’s sentient Shiba Inu simulations, the New Mystics share a psychedelic aesthetic characterized by dimly lit digital land- scapes, ambient soundtracks, technicolor palettes, and cos- mic symbolism. Embedded within these worlds are com- plex narratives spun from science fi ction or infused with para fi ctional elements that merge personal experience with speculative gestures of communality. Here, the boundaries between memory and the unconscious become supple and porous; fantasy folds into the real as systems dissolve and egos dislocate. Sensory properties of light, shape, smell, taste, and sound become a temporary bridge between artist and viewer, o ff ering an elevated space for a ff ective under- standing. The New Mystics favor multisensory experience over explicit knowledge production. But it would be a mis- take to consider these works a nostalgic look back to sim- pler times. Instead, these artists are using the atmospheric po- tential of new technology to resurrect ancient belief systems bleached out of history, repositioning them as a powerful communal cipher into the present. Inside their ambient installations, race and identity politics are explored, for - gotten folklore is resurrected, and the violent superstruc- tures of colonialism and capitalism are critiqued. While the world and its contemporary art microcosm convalesce under an increasingly stark narrative that hypes disorder, the New Mystics look inward and upward to create a gen- erous, generative space infued with magic. While the technology they employ is rather novel, the artists’ desire for an alternative reality is not. In collective hangover of World War II, a similar strain of avant-gardism emerged from art and its surrounding disciplines. The 1940s birthed Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes: a column-less futuristic architecture to anchor the technological utopia of “Spaceship Earth.” In 1950s Japan, members of the radi- cal Gutai performance artist collective shrouded their bod- ies in buzzing technicolor lightbulbs and threw themselves through canvases, literally breaking through tradition and into a nascent art form. In the 1970s New York experienced an equally radical tear in the art world, from performance to expanded cinema, as the boundaries of the white cube dis- solved. In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus shi ft ed away from smashing boundaries and toward a new collective living. Poet, painter, architect, and artist duo Madeline Gins and Arakawa aimed to out-design death with their Reversible Destiny Foundation in New York. Teetering, psychedelic color chambers and undulating landscape projects aimed to stun the visitor into a new plane of consciousness wherein we could all live forever. Meanwhile, sonically attuned New Yorkers tripping around Church Street could drop into the Mela Foundation’s Dream House, designed by compos- er-artist duo La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, which o ff ered a sparse, quasi-spiritual chamber of light, sound, and space to get lost in. While these twentieth-century movements overlap aesthetically with the work of the New Mystics, there are some key di ff erences. The New Mystics put greater stock in integrating mysticism with contemporary issues; their work is best understood as a para fi ctional strategy, not escapism. Second, the mystical has transitioned—or transcended—its abuse as an appropriated symbolic a ff ectation by western art circles in the twentieth century to a intersectional so- cial process in the present. (Instead of a white male artist hanging out in a Manhattan gallery with a coyote under the name of shamanistic experience, artists of color can reclaim and explore their diasporic heritage.) Finally, the technolo- gy used by the New Mystics has the radical ability to create new worlds that are largely unbound to place or time, and therefore capable—like the mythologies inspiring them— of being resurrected in in fi nitely many environments. Hanging on the fringes of lost Korean folklore and marine biology, Zadie Xa’s Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation (2019) uses the matrilineal family structure of or- cas as fodder for a multimedia origin story. Spoken-word poetry and sonic interludes mimicking the underwater clicks and screeches of orcas revisit the creation myth of Grandmother Mago, who conjured both human and natural forms out of her excrement and mud. I witness the piece at the Walthamstow Library, London, in June 2019: blue spot- lights illuminate the cavernous Victorian building, where- in a sea of bodies spreads out beneath a video projection of crashing waves. Fiberglass dorsal fi ns rise from the blue car- pet fl oor. An ambient soundtrack elevates the space into a dreamlike scene, which melts into the beat of an approach- ing drum. A procession of performers wearing whale masks with fl owing neon hair and elaborate costumes made by Xa suddenly enter. They writhe around on the fl oor, slinking between viewers, moving together in some arcane rhythm (perhaps akin to sonar) while CGI blue fl ames lap at GIFs of diving orcas on the screen behind. Through her psychedelic performances, Xa wants to open back up the myths and cultural histories of minority and female groups erased by male scholars. As the piece has been performed in more locations, from public Carnegie libraries to the 58 th Venice Biennale, its ambition grows like a living creature. And yet it’s entirely possible to fall into the hypnotic rhythm of Xa’s work, as many at Walthamstow did that night, and let its meaning pass through you like an orca cutting through the sea, driven by some unknowable force. Like Xa, Saya Woolfalk dives into mythology with blinged-out costumes that take on a life of their own. Since 2009 the Japan-born, New York–based artist has worked on a series called The Empathetics . A fantastical tribe of wom- en-plant hybrids devoid of race and possessing a hyper-at- tuned sense of interpersonal understanding, the Empathetics (and their corporate arm, ChimaTEK) appear as elaborate textiles, videos, and sculptural installations, as well as AR and VR works, collectively characterized by celestial, futur- istic forms and a psychedelic color palette. Woolfalk, who comes from a family of textile makers, infuses her knowl- edge of costume making with sci- fi narratives. In the woods of upstate New York, the story goes, a group of women discover a supersaturated skeleton whose bones contain a ALICE BUCKNELL is an artist and writer based in London. Trained in visual anthro- pology, her work concerns itself with the intersection of art, architecture, and tech- nology and their socio-cultural productions. She writes for publications including Ele- phant , Flash Art , frieze , Mousse , Harvard Design Magazine , Metropolis , and the Architectural Review . She has participated in international exhibitions, symposiums, and residencies, most recently including the CCA in Mon- treal, the Design Museum in London, MAAT in Lisbon, and L’Atelier KSR in Berlin. Her video essay High from Miami Beach will be exhibited in The Wrong Biennale in November 2019. genetic spore that penetrates their bodies and transforms them into Empathetics, a new hybrid species with a keen understanding of the fi nancial viability of empathy. Their “chimerism” allows them to cross species, gender, and race, as they move e ff ortlessly between human cultures—a skill that is sewn into their exoskeleton-like garments, which in- clude lacy beaded headwear, African textiles, aboriginal-like dotted celestial bodies, and cosmic symbols. Within her installations, Woolfalk allows view- ers to experience the powerful, psychedelic world of the Empathetics, known as ChimaCloud, through an iPhone app. Using interactive VR so ft ware that responds to Woolfalk’s garments, viewers can witness the Empathetics swap identi- ties against a convalescing backdrop. Describing ChimaTEK as the result of her interest in “what happens when utopian dreams get commodi fi ed,” 1 the Empathetics project visualizes near-future dystopian extensions of the wellness economy and ideas of transhumanism, cast in a digital playground with broad aesthetic appeal despite its heady subject mat- ter. Favored for their hyper-chromatic, metamorphic land- scapes, ChimaCloud projections have previously been in- stalled across the buzzing digital billboards of Times Square. Given the nature of the technology they work with, and their de facto entrance into a post-digital cultural land- scape, the New Mystics are predisposed to worldmaking. Ian Cheng and Tabita Rezaire work almost exclusively with digital media, creating immersive alter-realities that are au- tonomous, simultaneously critical and e ff ervescent. These works/worlds seem to operate within a warped chronology that only makes sense in the era of the in fi nite scroll. Cheng’s elaborately coded simulation trilogy Emissaries (2015-2017), for instance, situates its viewers in a dreamlike primordial scene built through the popular game development plat- form Unity. While the work was exhibited in a white-cube space, it swelled to life-scale, the cosmic, haptic events un- furling on gargantuan ten foot-tall projections. At this scale, Cheng’s characters—hooded ambling proto-humans and three-headed shiba inu gods huddled among drunkenly swaying postapocalyptic landscapes—were arguably more entrancing. But those who caught the work at home (it was hosted on Twitch for the duration of the inaugural Emissaries exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2017) might have experienced Emissaries in its native time frame: the dilated, ambient, multi-tab hydra of the internet. Describing Emissaries as a “video game that plays it- self,” 2 Cheng has architectured a matrix in which his char- acters can act on their own terms, but within a set of coded parameters. Contemporary cultural detritus, from iPhones to deck chairs, can be seen scattered among primitive camp- sites and druid symbols engraved into the spectral landscape. The scene is aggressively, almost ironically anachronistic, and feels no obligation to o ff er a linear or even legible nar- rative. The characters are equally opaque. Their movements are so inscrutable, their gurgling speech so infantile, that the work is, in a sense, excruciatingly boring. Yet something hypnotic about its lo- fi lethargy commands our full atten- tion. Perhaps it is the nebulous cosmic order of Emissaries and its staggered pace that makes it such a powerful seda- tive. Exiting the gallery (but not when closing the brows- er, for its pace perfectly complements digital expeditions), the choreography of street life feels sickeningly, almost vi- olently hyperactive. Tabita Rezaire’s Premium Connect (2017) adopts the schizophrenic speed, garbled language, and non-sequitur logic of the internet as a subject and symbol to deconstruct the oppressive colonial narratives it’s physically built upon (suboceanic fi ber-optic cables, the guts of your 4G connec- tivity, follow trade routes established in the colonial era). The infrastructure of the internet is built on black suf- fering, Rezaire argues, a cruel irony considering that the origin of computing science has roots in African mytholo- gy and divination systems. In her quest for a new “cosmos database,” Rezaire conjures a world of glitching gifs, bunk science, bad Photoshop, and SMS hot takes. In a balanc- ing act between kitsch emulsion and sharp-toothed polit- ical critique, Rezaire’s practice reconciles the internet as a propagator of power structures, but also a digital womb to hatch a new internet. As invested as the New Mystics are in digital tech- nologies, they do not hesitate to draw on hard ruins as fodder for constructing alternative futures. Cheng’s nascent land- scapes are built upon the miscellaneous detritus of an old world, while Mirza, Rezaire, and Woolfalk latch onto icon- ic structures that are molded into our collective memory, from Stonehenge and ancient pyramids to radial city plans. Together, these failed monuments, when shot through with a para fi ctional or sci- fi narrative, seem to suggest a second life for utopian ideals of shared ownership and collective living. Selected for their mystery, symbolic potency, and promise, the structures, perhaps precisely because of their state of ruination, gesture toward an in fi nite possibility of resurrection into something else, somewhere other. Mining the past for quasi- fi ctional futures shouldn’t automatically signal a doomsday alarm for the present. Metaphysical encounter and mystical experience are about achieving a higher level of collective consciousness; once you’re there, the catalytic object or scenario that propelled you into that space hardly matters. Of course, in the art world, it’s going to look a little more luscious, more cov- etable—but ultimately, the work of the New Mystics is best understood as an act of teleportation. Perfectly engineered from contemporary aesthetics, it li ft s us into a space where it’s easy to imagine a future that’s more communal, more generous, and, of course, more mystical. 1 “In the Studio with Saya Woolfalk’s Empathics”, Internation Sculpture Center , April 5, 2017. See: https://blog.sculpture.org/2017/04/05/saya- woolfalk/ 2 Jace Clayton, “One Take: Ian Cheng’s Emissaries”, Frieze, April 22, 2017. See: https://frieze.com/article/one-take-ian-chengs-emissaries The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present Mousse Magazine 69 Mousse Magazine 69 236 237 A. Bucknell Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro Park . Showing Reversible Destiny O ffi ce—Yoro , 1993-1995. Yoro, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. © 1997 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins Zadie Xa, Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation , Walthamstow Library, London, 2019. Commissioned by Art Night 2019. Photo: Matt Rowe Zadie Xa, Child of Magohalmi and the Echos of Creation installation view at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2019. Courtesy: the artist and Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan. Photo: Pat Verbruggen The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present Mousse Magazine 69 Mousse Magazine 69 238 239 A. Bucknell (Top) Saya Woolfalk, Chimera , 2013, Migrating Identities installation view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2013. © Saya Woolfalk. Courtesy: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York (Bottom) Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space , 2015, Disguise: Masks and Global African Art installation view at Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2015. © Saya Woolfalk. Courtesy: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York Saya Woolfalk, The Storage System (detail), 2019, Expedition to the Chimacloud installation view at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 2019. © Saya Woolfalk. Courtesy: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space (detail), 2015, Disguise: Masks and Global African Art installation view at Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2015. © Saya Woolfalk. Courtesy: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present Mousse Magazine 69 Mousse Magazine 69 240 241 A. Bucknell Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods (still), 2015. Courtesy: the artist; Standard (OSLO), Oslo; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York Ian Cheng, Emissary Sunsets The Self , 2017, installation view at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2017-2018. Courtesy: the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Photo: Bryan Conley Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect (stills), 2017. Courtesy: The artist and Goodman Gallery, London / Johannesburg / Cape Town The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present Mousse Magazine 69 Mousse Magazine 69 242 243 A. Bucknell