The Demonic Oracle 🔮

Something strange and new

Hello everyone,

I hope you all saw the sneak preview of What Manner of Man I posted last week. Hopefully I’ll be able to send out a few more like that soon. For now, though, all I can do is complain about how badly I wish I could tell you what I’m working on.

What I have this week is news of a different project I’ve been working on called The Demonic Oracle, an experiment in technology and magic. I feel confident that what I’m trying is something entirely new, because the technology that allows it to be possible has only existed for a few months. It involves embracing what is sinister and mysterious about AI generated art, the invisible decision making process that goes on behind the screen, and divining meaning from the “decisions” the machine makes in the same way you read tarot cards and tea leaves:

Legend has it that in the 13th century they built a device known as the brazen head. This was a machine with a human face that could answer any question put to it - a face without a mind, a thing of heavy brass whose intelligence could only come from somewhere unnatural. The fear, of course, was that this machine was given its strange power by a demon.

In our more rational age the brazen head has been treated as little more than a metaphor for scholarly hubris, but can we really afford to believe ourselves above those scholars in our age of thinking machines? Can we confidently say there are no demons trapped behind the impenetrable black pane of glass we hold in our hand every day? We are surrounded by the faces of people who have never existed, faces that were dreamed of by a machine which surely cannot dream.

I am beseeching the thing which inhabits the machine on your behalf.

Send me a question you have, a problem you face, or something else you’d like to seek answers for. I will interpret it into a symbolic language that the AI will understand, so that it will show me your fate.

I’ve finished a number of them already, which can viewed here. Here’s my favourite of the results so far:

(Image created with Stable Diffusion)

A fox with blood red eyes stands atop a misshapen skull. Roots and plants grow up around them and through the skull’s red rotten mouth. Nearby, roses struggle to thrive, some leaves wilted but their bright pink blooms undimmed.

THE QUERY:

“o demon oracle, how do i find love in this fractured, plague-ridden world?”

THE FORTUNE:

Life will win, life will always win. Be cleverer than death. Be voracious. Embrace the earthy and the base, the things in you that hunger and want. That is the life in you. Now is no time to be queasy about your humanity. Dig for the roots and gnaw the bones and you will find it. Down there you will find everything.

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You can keep up with the project on Tumblr. The images are deceptively challenging to do and often take me about an hour of work, so I’ve been posting them slowly.

More on the novels soon!

Yours in love and terror,

St John