“…if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face…

‘I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever... I have broken the wall…’”

— Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Nicola McEvoy is a transdisciplinary artist, working predominantly with digital and analogue video. Her practice-based research investigates the liquid materiality of CRT TV, and how it can be appropriated as an instrument of magick in a practice that she calls ‘Television Alchemy’. Following the radical approach of chaos magicians, she is interested in how critical theory can inform magical systems that aim to disrupt the hegemony of capitalist realism — unveiling esoteric realities and alternative modes of being: divine, feminine, disruptive. At the thresholds of consciousness mercurial revolution takes place.

Haunted. We are. In this reality, shaped by the symbolic order of capitalism, the ghost of a maternal surface emerges when we sleep; the original screen that covers the void upon which reality is structured. Sleep is a desire to regress to this infantile state, but dream is the subject’s attempt to stop the breaks, glitches and slippages into the realm of becoming.

In this practice-based thesis, I explore the similarities between the structure upon which the ‘white wall’ of the ‘faciality machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari) is scribed, and the ‘dream screen’ (Lewin) in which moving-image is projected. This ontological deconstruction provides a magickal apparatus that transforms CRT TV into a techno-neoshamanic medium. Generating new cosmogonies, like pirate TV stations, to access alternative modes of being and relating.

Using an auto-ethnographic methodology, my life as a disgruntled barista is transfigured into liquid ‘probe head’ disseminator, as I explore the cavity of the mouth as the site of dream. Divining ghosts of the feminine to disrupt the capitalist regime.

Key Words | probe heads, chaos magick, feminism, hauntology, ontology, psychedelics

In this section, I will introduce the underlying theory of my practice, and why I see potential in CRT TV as both an instrument of magick and a ‘probe head’ — at a transdisciplinary juncture between chaos magick and critical theory that I call ‘theory magick’.

‘Television Alchemy’ uses decolonial-feminist-anti-capitalist theory as a working magickal praxis. At first, it may be somewhat strange that my occult practice is primarily concerned with capitalist ontology. My time working as a barista for several years sucked me into the delusional worldview of capitalism; seeing customers perform a collective madness that bends reality under their induced egomania, entranced by the spell of capitalism and its ‘faciality’ machine. The power dynamic between them and I rewrote consensus reality, as I was subsumed by their perceived hierarchy over me. Trapped in the crystallised psychosis, like a mosquito fossilised in amber, I became paralysed by the sticky, all-encompassing monstrosity of capitalism. Breaking free became imperative to my continuing existence. The ‘ontological insecurity’ that I felt became the driving force of my practice. I consider ‘Television Alchemy’ to be some form of techno-neoshamanism, as transformative processes of ‘Self’ — reclaimed from the subjectifying machine of capitalism.

After an accidental spillage of water over a felt tip pen drawing, CRT TV became central to my practice. The chromatography of the black ink reminded me of the glassy, analogue texture of old TVs. During this time, I was interested in ‘Jungian alchemy’, and journeying through the ‘Self’ using symbols and archetypes of the ‘collective unconscious’. There were unpacked, hidden expressions of television that I felt a need to unveil, away from cynical associations with subliminal messaging and control.

On an intuitive level, I began to experience CRT TV as something liquid. The occult physicality of analogue TV is made up of energy waves: televisions receive radio waves which are then amplified and converted into electron beams, that strike the phosphorescent surface of CRTs and are emitted as light waves. Undulating through a liquid network of ‘watery’ bodies, on a quantum scale it is an ocean of frequencies translated into differing intensities traversing different surfaces.

Corresponding to the sea, albeit in an abstract, occult materiality, it appeared to me that CRT TV was also analogous to the unconscious mind (suggestive of why it is a great subliminal mediator). In his work on the collective unconscious, Jung says, “the sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives” (1959, 177). It often appears in global mythology as the primordial unknown. This convinced me that it could be repurposed as an instrument of magick, the entheogenic kind, that can access the suppressed parts of consciousness. Marie Louise von Franz expands Jungian alchemy, by calling it an act of subconscious knowing. Overwhelmed by inner concepts of signs and imagery, man expels an innate symbol system into the material world where they bind representation to something concrete through ritual practice. She postulates that the intrinsic knowledge of the subconscious may lie in the possibility of it having an interconnectivity with unknown realities, or perhaps the subconscious itself has a material aspect. Through ‘Television Alchemy’, I explore this materiality as something liquid and becoming.

Plants That Sing is a video response to the text ‘The Language of Plants’ in Pharmako-AI by K. Allado-McDowell (2021), which speaks of the revolutionary potential of ayahuasca.
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Ayahuasca is sometimes called the “television of the jungle” because of its ability to make one feel totally removed from the phenomenal world. My interest in psychedelic consciousness is in how it opens up other frequencies of perception that are filtered out for a particular mode of survival, like tuning into a pirate TV station from a distant land. In a TED Talk, Anil Seth stated, “if hallucination is kind of an uncontrolled perception, then a perception is a controlled hallucination”. Consensus hallucination is called reality.

It is not hard, then, to see a dominant reality-system situated on top. Federico Campagna uses the term cosmogony to describe reality as an attempt to order chaos. “A reality-system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age.” (2018, 5) He calls the current form ‘Technic’, encapsulating the logic of modernity, and suggests that one of its main characteristics is that it disintegrates reality. Technic’s principle of ‘absolute language’ impoverishes our existential experience as we fall into nihilism. “God is dead”, as Nietzsche said! However, to the hopeless souls Campagna offers a solution — toggle the reality-settings to the ‘magical mode’.

The ‘Magic’ reality-system is a therapeutic refuge from the crisis of reality that is symptomatic of Technic. Campagna prescribes it as a modification for those defeated by the past and the present. If all perception is hallucination, and in turn so is reality, then Magic encourages an alternative ‘illusion’ or model to live by. It should be understood, though, that magic and the occult are not antithetical to modernity, as Campagna himself uses the term Magic to capture a sense of imaginative living to subdue nihilism.

In my rendering of ‘hauntology’, Magic acts as a reality-switch technology that breaks from the ontological programming of capitalism. Myth as a form of Magic is ever changing through the ages, adapting to the contemporary culture. It at once contains elements of consistency without becoming obsolete. Seemingly constant archetypes have been perpetuated since the dawn of culture, but as abstract patterns they shape shift, making myth a worthy challenger of capitalism and its seizing of the past, present and future. Societies have always used myth as parables, to inspire ways of living, of becoming.

If we liken consensus reality, as defined by capitalism, to state TV, then magical ontology is a pirate station. It authors its own programming, similar to Édouard Glissant’s ‘opacity’ (1990), which is a reclamation of identity for the marginalised through self-definition, away from colonial description. ‘Opacity’ acts against the reductions of marginalisation and challenges the hierarchal social model that is produced by the normalisation of a particular subject. ‘Opacities’ converge and weave fabrics, like the structure of the rhizome that maps out an entanglement of relations. Through this entanglement there is a mutuality that undermines the production of desire in social organisation. Identities are both unified and differentiated without being alienated or assigned value.

Producing one’s own ‘opacity’ is a mythopoesis of the Self. In the context of art production, this can be aligned with Simon O’Sullivan’s ‘myth science’ (2016) which sees contemporary art practice as a kind of fictioning of reality, constituting its own worlds through the production of autonomous myths, coding and semiotics. He frames ‘myth science’ as a ‘probe head’ that produces its own ‘coding’. We can correlate this notion of fictioning with ‘opacity’ as both delimit the parameters set up the signifying machine - as a ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari) that cracks through a system of control and shoots outward, revealing the previously unknown. From the unknown, new worlds can be constituted by art practice itself; breaking free from the totalitarian structures of the capitalist system.

‘Television Alchemy’ as a ‘probe head’ operates by authoring its own subjectivity, detached from the ‘faciality machine’. It works to remedy ‘ontological insecurity’ by instigating a techno-neoshamanic transformation to reclaim oneself from the capitalist regime. It codes its own cosmogony, in a language of intuition and resistance that struggles against the climate of nihilism; shattering the hegemony of capitalist realism to unveil occult realities and alternative ways of being, determining its own destiny in a cynical society. As myth and magic are constantly present in culture, and have been used by capitalism to propel its agenda, it can be manoeuvred against the ‘faciality machine’ as it is plugged into the same logic. Belonging to the structure of capitalism, we can turn its ghosts against it. What it thought it had captured is actually unable to be fully grasped. Myth are abstract patterns that can be coded into machinic systems, a ‘line of flight’ in an assemblage that offers a way out of self-organised systems, as it is trans-coded to cross thresholds and join paradigms. It expresses the potential of rupture in an assemblage. The breaks, glitches, and slippages of reality. Myth cannot be contained, and is able to change form. Coded into the ‘Television Alchemy’ ‘probe head’, it destabilises the present through its detachment from the capitalist regime, deterritorialising the flows of its 'desiring-machines', facilitating new becomings.

In a 1933 campaign by Plew Television, early commercialised TV sets were pitched as “the fantastic dream of ancient witches who were burnt for their dreaming”. Before film technologies, we had only experienced moving-image in our dreams. According to Robert Eberwein, we perceive film upon the same psychic structure as dream. He builds upon a heritage of dream theory by Otto Isakower, Bertram Lewin, René Spitz and Freud. It begins with the ‘Isakower phenomenon’, which hypothesises that during hypnogogic states of consciousness we perceive a tactile sensation of an oral mass, like the mother’s breast, as a remnant of infancy. Embarrassingly, I have sometimes awoken from a dream to find myself suckling on air.

Lewin first hypothesised the dream screen after a patient reported that she had lost her dream, it had rolled up and away from her. Isakower had already described a hypnagogic ‘surface’ at the beginning of sleep that unfolds from an oral mass and merges with the dreamer. Iterating this, Lewin suggested that, “when one falls asleep, the breast is taken into one’s perceptual world: it approaches flatness…” expanding that, “when one wakes up it disappears, reversing the events of its entrance" (1946, 421). This flattened perceptual surface is what Lewin calls the dream screen, a surface upon which dream appears to be projected; the blank background present throughout the dream though not necessarily noticed, like old film leader added to the head and tail of a movie reel.

It is important to reflect on Lacan’s ‘Imaginary order’, prior to ‘mirror stage’, when the infant is under four months of age. This is the pre-Ego state where the infant does not demarcate itself from the world that surrounds them. In the world of images, pre-lingual acquisition — the Imaginary, the infant feels a complete sense of unity. The mother’s breast is not yet perceived as separate from themselves. Before the perception of their specular image (the body object seen in the ‘mirror’ outside of self) and preceding language that delimits “I” from “You”, the infant lacked the necessary psychic registers to feel isolated. At mirror stage comes the ‘Symbolic order’, where subjectivity is acquired, shaped by the signifiers and words of the communal — “the name of the Father” (or “no of the Father”), coded rules enforced by social institution. In the company of Others, the infant is alone.

According to Freud, the purpose of sleep is to enact the desire to reunite with the mother. He said a wish to sleep is the motivation of dream-making. The Images of dream act out neuroses after Symbolic meaning becomes attached. To Freud and other psychoanalysts, the unconscious is a theatre, and the stage show acts out the drama of Oedipus. But for schizonalysts Deleuze and Guattari, the spectacle of Oedipus is the effect of social repression on ‘desiring-production’. They instead suggest that the unconscious is “productive”, like a factory of ‘desiring-machines’ that makes cuts and flows. In relation to capitalism, your unconscious is colonised by advertisements, reproducing the image world created by capitalism’s desiring-machines, capitalist reality. The desire to return to the mother dream screen is to restore to factory settings. Bertram Lewin states that, “the intruding preconscious or unconscious wishes that threaten to wake the sleeper form the visual contents, and lose their place in the sleeper’s ego by being projected on to or before the dream screen” (1946, 433). The true wish of the adult-infant is to experience the blank dream screen of oral satiety; the babe sleeps after getting its fill of the breast. In the form of oneness with the mother, it is a wish to be eaten up, a wish for death. It is a schizophrenic process of Ego-loss, the ‘body without organs’, that scratches the plane of immanence. Of this voyage of losing the Ego, Deleuze and Guattari remarked that one might say, “I had existed since the very beginning… from the lowest form of life [the body without organs] to the present time, …I was looking… — not looking so much as just feeling — ahead of me was lying the most horrific journey” (1972, 84). The Symbolic of dreams safeguards from the total destruction of reality, and the dreamer attempts to resist as the true desire is to desire not. The dream screen catches the Ego so one may not fall into oblivion.

An experience of film is once removed from sleeper and its dream. The dream screen is essential to the process that allows us to be unified with our perceptions, and the cinematic screen acts a prosthesis of the mother’s breast. Encompassing the viewer, it is the most important prosthesis created by humanity as it brings one into the field of perceptions: the mother, a primordial landscape of sensing. Robert Eberwein says that this allows representations on the film screen to be taken in as dream, by reconciling us with infant perception, it breaks down the sense of alienation from the cinematic screen object. The external world is consumed by the oral world remnant of infancy, where the distinctions between inner and outer are not well defined. It could be said that we eat moving-image, bringing us closer to the earliest sense of reality, where the mother’s breast is cloaked over nothingness, and the mouth’s cavity like a black hole leading to singularity.

René Spitz questioned whether it is actually the face, experienced as indivisible from the breast (the breast-face), which is the dream screen. The infant does not distinguish itself from its environment, forming the lips-breast-face oral sensing system, our most primitive system of perception. When the mother approaches, the baby perceives her face and anticipates the breast, continuing to look at her face whilst nursing. The Isakower phenomena, according to Spitz, does not represent the approaching breast, but the visually perceived human face. The infant tries to suckle on other caregivers, like the father or sibling, irregardless of the absence of breasts. I propose, then, that it is perhaps a quasi-perception of the mother from which the dream screen unfolds, the Great Mother, a divine feminine archetype that nurses us in our sleep.

Freud suggested that we dream in the mouth, as a result of the entangled perceptions of the infant. The first physical and psychic motivating force is relief from the internal stimulus of hunger. It wishes to absorb the world into itself. After being asked to consider the “oceanic feeling” by Romain Rolland, Freud explained that it is the preserved primitive Ego-feeling from infancy, which precedes the Ego up until the mother stops breastfeeding. The “oceanic feeling” describes a sense of limitlessness. We can compare it to the flattening of the world into the Great Mother dream screen, the plane of immanence.

In Lewin’s hypothesis on the dream screen, he references a patient of Victor Tausk, Natalja N, whose loss of body Ego resulted in a smoothing out of its constituent parts, including the loss of genital feeling. Tausk called it her ‘influencing machine’, a kind of schizophrenic depersonalised body that gradually lost resemblance to the constituted body. Lewin suggested that instead of a libidinal body object, it can be explained through an oral relationship with the body. The breakdown of Natalja N’s body Ego boundaries were “due to an oral ingestion of the parts, a partial autocannibalism…and the disappearance of each part of her body would mean that she had in fantasy swallowed that part” (1946, 425-426). He concluded that this resulted in the partial world destruction of the world represented by the organs, during the hypnagogic state. This process can be compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s BWO, where the body is smoothed into a plane of immanence, an embeddedness. Natalja N ingested her constituent body parts as an infantile desire to return to the Great Mother dream screen, the dawn of reality where her schizophrenic desiring-machines are limitless.

I am beginning to hypothesise that the ‘faciality machine’ hijacked the pre-Ego boundary state of the infant, and supplanted the Great Mother, the divine feminine archetype. The overcoding of the Great Mother dream screen, the most primitive of surfaces, into the ‘white wall’ of ‘faciality’ was a most successful achievement, which resulted in a new order of reality. Working to an auto-ethnographic methodology, I am now exploring the ghosts of my life as a barista, swallowed up by capitalism. The new beverage that I serve is a liquid ‘probe head’, to access the “oceanic primitive Ego feeling” of the infant, the infant as BWO before the “no of the Father”, a schizophrenic liberation of desire. As we dream in the mouth, a new ontology must fall through its point of singularity to emerge as an unfamiliar cosmos. I suggest that ‘probe heads’ must be ingested to reach full potential.

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In my research, I came across the 80s Soviet TV mystic, Allan Chumak, whose viewers at home would place glasses of water in front of their TV sets whilst he performed reiki hand gestures. The water would be ‘charged’ by Chumak so that the viewer could cure themselves of a particular ailment introduced during the episode.

Unfolding from Chumak, I invited tea researcher and ceramicist, Yinchen Li to collaborate on a novel tea ceremony called Witcha (2023) that explores the liquid, healing property of TV that emanates through the screen. It was presented as a video and ceramic installation at Cooke Latham Gallery. The tea served on opening night was charged by the oozing transmissions of ‘Television Alchemy’ to heighten the feeling of connection between people in the alienating culture of capitalism. Combining the theory behind our practices, we expanded upon the Taiwanese term, ‘cha shi’, or “tea setting”, a casual and intimate environment, which is opposed to bourgeois tea culture and its negation of closeness. Witcha becomes a ‘probe head’, ingested — once the frequencies hit the cup.