Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires is a protection ritual against "New Space" colonizing overlords and an exploration of peer-to-peer online gathering.
This project started in 2021 with the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos' space-tourism rocket New Shepard. This moment acted like a science-fictional vignette, highlighting the figure of the space-billionaire as the arch-villain of our era: a cartoonish character hoarding wealth on an incomprehensible scale. As a way to fight back and reclaim agency, the artists wanted to manifest a future where we simply "leave the billionaires in space" (as read the headline of an article by Paris Marx in 2021), and thereby protect the Earth and her inhabitants from their toxic influence.
They turned to chaos magic and created a sigil generator that produces a graphical signs from various sentences, such as "bind billionaires who fly to the upper sky from coming back to earth". Sigil Séances, the sigil-making collaborative ritual in the form of an online call, open up the space to discuss and negotiate the formula they want to load and launch. The meetings present opportunities to think and exchange about current exploitation projects and colonial behaviors, to formulate collectively what bothers us and to express a clear desire for change.
✹ Main exhibition @ Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
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Lucile Olympe Haute is an artist, researcher and educator based in Paris and Nîmes. Her research brings together spirituality, technologies and politics — understood in the broader sense of a committed and eco-responsible «living together» in Computational Regimes that goes beyond anthropocentrism and includes kingdoms of plants, animals and fungi, even the communities of bacteria in our biotopes. She combined these issues within her essay the Cyberwitches Manifesto, bringing together commitment (such as ecofeminism, queer/transfeminism, technological emancipation and technical sustainability) and empowerment processes. Her recent work involves symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts.
David Benqué (alias The Institute of Diagram Studies) is a designer and researcher from Paris France, currently living and working in Cork Ireland. Since his PhD at the Royal College of Art in London UK (2020) he operates as the Institute of Diagram Studies. This independent structure for research and creative practice stretches from graphic design to software development and media theory. The institute deploys the language of diagrams to read existing systems (algorithmic, technical, political) and to write new interventions in the form of publications, software, visualisations, and more.
