Metric Mysticism: A Troll’s Tale is a lecture-performance turned multimedia installation that gazes into the crystal balls of Silicon Valley and charts the transmutation of big data into a magical substance that predicts—and polices—the future.
The installation features a three-channel video essay comprised of computer graphics, found visual material, and a stereo sound design, within a mystical chamber. Invoked by a fluorescent sigil on the floor, the lecturer, a troll who lives in an undersea cave off the shores of Silicon Beach, California, appears within a suspended, circular black mirror to share a presentation on his computer’s dual-screen display. An illuminated black-mirror plinth within the sigil bears chunks of polycrystalline silicon—the troll’s scrying stones.
Focusing on the appropriation of mysticism and magic by Silicon Valley corporations and governmental surveillance agencies alike, Metric Mysticism: A Troll’s Tale suggests that the crystal ball, a transparent device for seeing into the future, is paradigmatic of the ways in which tech entrepreneurs imagine and utilize data science. The artwork names this “metric mysticism.” While mystical practices utilize numerology to reach the divine, “metric” indicates a replacement of the divine with data. In metric mysticism, data is recast as metaphysical truth.
The troll identifies Palantir Technologies as at the forefront of metric mysticism. Co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp, the controversial data analytics company appropriates the palantiri, fictional all-seeing crystal balls used by wizards in The Lord of the Rings as devices for remote communication and surveillance. Serving both corporate clients and military and police agencies, Palantir envisions their AI-driven surveillance platforms and predictive policing software as magical, obscuring the real material and social conditions of these technologies. Through the palantir, data becomes a new absolute, determining the future and how it should be controlled.
The artwork proposes the 16th-century occultist and mathematician John Dee as an antecedent for a new kind of mediatic mogul, epitomized by Thiel and Karp. Dee served as Queen Elizabeth I’s royal advisor and alchemical conjurer, using his crystal ball and obsidian scrying mirror in the service of empire. Thought to be the original 007, he was known to carry out acts of surveillance on her behalf. Dee’s fusion of the spiritual, mathematical, and imperial is now exemplified by Palantir Technologies and its rendering of data-mining software and predictive policing systems as technologies of mystical divination.
Metric Mysticism: A Troll’s Tale unites different understandings of the figure of the troll: the earthy creatures of fantasy and folklore must avoid the sunlight or turn to stone, and in internet culture, trolls are provocateurs whose mischief, whether benign or malignant, is enabled by their online anonymity. This troll’s act of trolling–delivering his lecture–renders him vulnerable to light. His cave has been damaged by the TGN-Pacific submarine telecommunications cable, exposing him to both the informatic light of fiber optics and rays from the sun. Over time, his computer threatens to deteriorate in the subaquatic heat and his skin transforms into polycrystalline silicon, a mutation that clarifies light as an informatic vector of domination and annihilation.
The troll’s concluding provocation invites us to gaze into a piece of silicon, joining in an antithetical scrying practice with the material that physically constitutes the fantasies of metric mysticism, which through its lack of transparency indicates that any mediation of the future is itself opaque.
Credits
- Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
- Architect and Designer: Scott Kepford
- Acrylic Fabrication: Preston Displays
- Vinyl Fabrication: Decently Exposed
- Video Editor: Martin Gajc
- Computer Graphics: Harry Sanderson
- Sound Design: Tom Sedgwick and Ben Hurd
- Composer: xin
- Voice-over Audio Production: Toast + Jam
- Media Researcher: Talia Golland
- Production Assistant: Audrey Ammann
- Special Thanks: Amy Hale, Miriam Kelly, Shelley McSpedden, and Samantha Vawdrey