Project Name
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Claves Angelicae

Project statement (blurb)
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Claves Angelicae is an installation and procedural system that enables a participant to inscribe a magical Word onto the Ethereum network. 

Project statement (short)
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Claves Angelicæ is a procedure for constructing, enciphering, and casting a magical Word onto the Ethereum network. After the transaction is verified it is parsed and passed into a sigil generating algorithm and an inked paper talisman is drawn by a machine as a token of their spell.

Project statement (long)
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Claves Angelicæ is an installation and procedural system that enables a participant to inscribe a magical Word onto the Ethereum network. 

The seven step process is designed to collect and transmute the participants’ input data into an encrypted message. For the participant to cast their Word they must transmit Ether to a preselected set of charities. Once the spell has been cast and verified by the consensus pool, the transaction signature’s hash is returned, parsed, and passed into a sigil generating algorithm. The participant receives an inked paper talisman authored by an mechanical drawing machine as a tokenized sigil of their spell.

Cryptography and magic have a deep, intertwined history dating back to the origins of writing. During the European dark ages monastic sects bore the responsibility of keeping the rites of the sacred ancient mystery cults of Egypt and Greece intact. However, in doing so they ran the risk of being burned at the stake for committing crimes of heresy. Some of them developed cryptographic systems to encode these secrets into their manuscripts. It was not only the monks working with ciphers but also natural magicians and occultists. The latter groups weren’t only using cryptography to obfuscate sensitive information, but also to devise keys and linguistic frameworks for communicating into the Ethereal realms. By devising new linguistic schemata these magicians believed that they could access the preternatural realms outside the worlds they were exploring in their scientific pursuits. Although the blockchain space is largely secularized, the principles of the Ethereum network is a manifest dream of the ancient magi. Magicians are the original cipherpunks. Solidity, Serpent, LLL are grimoires (Latin ‘grammaire’) or books of magical grammar. Smart contracts are daemons invoked to enact our Will. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are archons governing and managing resources from the Ether. Pentacles are cryptographic tokens for binding daemons and storing value. Magical codes of ethics are emblematized in protocol authorship. Salt, one of the alchemical primes, is also used in cryptography where it serves as random data that is used as an additional input to a one-way function that ‘hashes’ the Word. Sigils are graphical databases used for storing enciphered information.

For common parlance let’s define what a sigil is: the encoding of desire or intent into a symbol. The Latin sigillum, means ‘seal’, though it may also be related to the Hebrew הלוגס  (segula meaning ‘word, action, or talisman’). A few examples of sigils are Johannes Trithemius’ experiments in ‘Steganographia’, Giordano Bruno’s mnemonic devices, and John Dee’s Sigillum Dei Aemaeth.

Centralized authorities and trusted-third parties (churches & banks) shape our cultures into monotheistic tendencies (e.g. "In God We Trust") where priests or bankers arbitrate and broker access to the value system. Whereas decentralized systems allow for a plurality of deities to inhabit the Ether and entrust magicians to enact their Will without permission.

Link
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https://claves-angelicae.github.io/dossier/

Assets
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https://github.com/claves-angelicae/dossier/archive/master.zip

Video
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https://vimeo.com/271507433

Created By
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Cullen Miller
http://pointlinesurface.com
@cullenmiller (twitter/instagram)
Cullen Miller works in the substratum of aesthetics. Typified by dematerialization, his practice is often intangible or invisible and is characterized by and embodied in systems, music composition, emergence, and philosophy. His interests are expressed through open-ended, temporal models rather than encapsulated into monistic objects. His work tends to resist reductive constraints and tends to be experiential - using relationships and networks to unmask behaviors latent within his systems. By leveraging parametric and cybernetic processes his installations and performances resemble 'tuned' physics flowing through sets of rules. What emerges from the environments rarely have identical outcomes but, instead, are defined by a set of properties that generated by complex webs of feedback.

Gabriel Dunne
http://gabrieldunne.com
@gabrieldunne (twitter/instagram)
Gabriel Dunne's work represents his continuous exploration of visual, audible, and physical frequencies of natural and technological perceptual and imperceptible realities. His process utilizes design, music, sound, architecture, and materiality. Other facets of his practice synthesize and integrate structures and rhythms of the natural world. His work ranges from custom software and hardware systems, performance tools, and physical installations and public intervention. 

Credits
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Creation, Design, Development, Programming: Gabriel Dunne & Cullen Miller
UX Programmer: Harvey Moon
Documentation: Eric Fernandez
Created with: Ethereum, Solidity, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, TouchDesigner, Leap Motion, EMSL AxiDrawV3

Artist Group Bio 
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Gabriel Dunne and Cullen Miller are collaborators often found working within the confines of art. Respectively drawing from their backgrounds in design and music composition their practice is an assemblage of various forms of media finding mutuality in a search for the Outside. 

Their projects and performances are typified by creating technical systems that defy bounded rationality. Their work probes into subconscious immaterial processes by leveraging computational materials as a vehicle into complexity. Their aesthetics are typically not constrained by a controlled practice but, rather, tend to be emergent unknowns retrieved from systems. Rather than setting forth to construct a preordained form their practice typically involves tending generative machine processes as a way of excavating ideas from the Outside.