In his AFFIRMATIONS series, LOZANO has created a set of digital hypersigils—tools for assisting users in narcissistic-magickal transformation. After constructing a photographic collage in analogue materials, LOZANO recorded the collage’s static surface and enlivened it with overlain sound and light effects. In their digital state the videos are simply code, bits of digital language performed by the computer as a spell. These coded spells produce an immersive, pulsating environment that absorbs viewers in a continuous playback loop, reflecting the trance-like absorption of narcissistic identity formations while simultaneously working to disrupt them. By embedding audio from a narcissist’s self-help book, LOZANO’s videos both exploit and destabilize narcissistic tendencies in the viewer. The videos work on us, affect us and want to change us.

The other components of NARCISSUS RISING circle around these investigations into narcissism, magick and technology. Many of them also touch on the relations between our individual human psychologies and the communities we inhabit, especially as mediated through the cultural algorithms and codes of the Internet.

The notion of a narcissist using a self-help book is almost comical. How do these strategies for self-improvement actually reflect our own inabilities to communicate with others? After putting Louise Hay’s Affirmations into daily practice, absorbing them as one might absorb one of LOZANO’s hypersigils, Risa Puleo reflects on the problematic assumptions about the self that underlie such commercial attempts at psychological improvement.  

Building on the interrogation of self and community via the Internet, Andy Campbell poses the question “Does the Internet Have a Libido?” Setting forth his argument in the form of a manifesto, Campbell shows how the Internet’s very real corporate death drive has made the democratic ideal of information sharing a total fiction––a social Imago perpetuated by the very corporate unconscious that controls us. The only way out? Take the Internet as material and transform it. Sigilize it. Seek out its glitches and wait for its inevitable disarmament.

Reprinted are two key sources for understanding LOZANO’s own conception of magick and its power. Austin Osman Spare, the famous occultist and “humanist sorcerer” in LOZANO’s own words, was a seminal influence. An essay by Kenneth Grant sheds light on Spare’s importance to the broader culture of magick. Grant Morrison’s essay “Pop Magic!” builds on Spare’s conception of sigils and was a formative text for LOZANO.in his personal approach to magick.

NARCISSUS RISING also includes a record of a failed experiment: an attempt to exploit Google Images as a tool for automating divinatory sigils. Google, however, proved to be a formidable and fickle foe, changing the rules of the game with too much frequency to give us a clear path. The tool remains in development and we present it now as a document of future magickal possibilities.