The Project
Occultism & Body Politics in the Cyber-Space, and the New Age movement
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The website: "Heaven16: A sanctuary" was created as a final project for the class "Writing a Contemporary History of the Occult" at Sciences Po (Institut d'études politiques de Paris). It discusses the neo-futuristic ontology of the cyberspace, and its bio-political dimension. Visualized through its influence by the New Age, the cyberspace has been a breeding ground for new -if not radical- ontological understandings of the cyberfrontier. The concept of human nature is fully questioned by the emergence of the Android and the Cyborg, as the energy of the body, and that of the binary world, as code language, which speaks through non-epistolic and non-narrated unmediated speech, are being interchanged and mutually enchained through the endless and synergetic realms of the Internet.
​At its roots , the project is an exploration of how neo-occultism and neo-paganism have directly influenced the creation of the Internet, and how they are now existing within the system and metaphysical ontology of the cyberspace. It is an interactive and auto-didactic work that leads the reader with the help of a point-and-click sequence game through the New-Ageist phenomenology of the digital cyberfrontier. An unmediated and non-delegated narrative transforms the reader’s own digital device into a meta-rhetorical and meta-artisitc
Research & cyber philosophers have shown that “The New Age'', as a new religious movement of the 60s and 70s, had a direct influence on the creation of the internet. At its core however, New Ageism and the cyberspace have an inherent link to Nazi philosophy and science, prompting it to be a safehaven for right-wing esotericism. The website takes a satirical approach to how the contradictory . Drawing form Adorno’s understanding of the occult, it translates the Frankfurt-School’s thinker’s ideas into the modernity of a post-internet setting, fusing it with the cyber poetry of the late 20th century and early 21st century. With multimedia aspects the website spins a loose network of narratives that the reader/recipient has to puzzle together through their own interaction & association chains. The work does not provide a clear narrative nor correct order of understanding, but can be generally summarized as follows:
On the ruins of Berlin, a divine cyber goddess is translating the minds of the worthy into transcendentally conscious code. With their minds caught in the binary, the goddess’s followers learn that even the new digital sanctuary remains a human purgatory; the body , the mind, and the poison are being cleansed. A new cyber-polis of pure minds, “bodies without organs” is emerging
The work is drawing from many thinkers’ conceptualisations of the occult, cyber- and techno-frontier in a post-information-age paradigm. It places the human body as a product of a Deleuzian control (body-)regime within a neo-fascist and post-occult reality that expresses itself through code. At its central core are the neo-fascist and Nazi-esoteric origins of the New Age movemtn, which has been dominanting the cyberspace since the 90s.
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