Lantern Slides, by Clement Lindley Wragge.
The term occult often conjures ideas of esoteric arts belonging in secret societies who guard hidden knowledge or indulge in explorations of mysterious supernatural forces. However, for this year’s theme we turn towards the occult not as grandiose mysteries to be solved, but as practices of attunement to what has been obscured, hidden within us or secreted away. While there are many kinds of hidden knowledge, there is a difference between the gatekeeping practiced by cabals that exoticize and obfuscate knowledge, and the safekeeping practiced by those who have had to cover over their knowledge to protect it from extraction and corruption. The first encloses powers of knowledge to make them inaccessible to others; the second acts to safeguard what is precious and vulnerable.
We thus understand the occult as that which has been obscured but never entirely forgotten. These are the suppressed and ostracized practices, embodied intuitions, residuesand premonitions that circulate beneath dominant infrastructures, that flicker at the edges of data and reason.
As our bodies are weighed under the unbearable force of the world, of information, can we turn to bodily answers for the questions we refuse to abandon? Can we tune into our inner authority – knowledge that is always-already collective and porous: to what we shed, what we secrete, and what we secret away? Instead of strategic foresight and machine-assisted predictions, we might turn to premonitions as ways of being in touch with knowledge that is incomplete but comes to us through where and when we are,whom we are with, what we metabolize together. This requires developing a sense of receptivity rather than responsiveness, sensing what is just out of reach, rather than how we can adapt to false inevitabilities.
The occult works against the grain of enlightenment by also reminding us that not everything must be revealed; what is unknown is not an object to possess, a property yet to be claimed. We might leave things hidden under the snow, as Le Guin’s explorers do on their expedition to Le Sur, making lasting impressions that they keep within them.
The occult lies within the stories we have been telling ourselves and others, as well as the stories we have been omitting telling. These stories are knowledge, and they are powerful in the same way that touch is powerful. They leave an imprint on the things we create and those we have not yet created. One has to look at the dark side of the moon, too. This is where the sparks and treasures are sometimes hidden.
The occulted invites us to dwell with what is not yet formed, with what must remain in shadow to grow. To draw these forms of knowing from the shadows, we express this year’s theme as an internal dialogue, a conversation with ourselves. What begins as a doubting voice in our heads, internalized second guessing, shifts and transmutes from doubt that destabilizes, to uncertainties we can dwell within. We do so to re-cognize our inner forms of authority that are rooted in collective knowing. This dialogue emergedthrough shared presence with questions that haunt us at the start of 2026. We iterated multiple sessions of automatic writing to capture the questions on our minds, latergathering these together to note connections, and then formatting these thoughts through responsive re-reading and revising.
Inquiry: How do you know?
I don’t know.
Inquiry: How do you know?
Because language is insufficient, but we are not in pursuit of language as understanding, as mastery, but perhaps of poetry, poetry as a theory of the possible world.
I’m drawn to the idea of a body void of signifiers, a body without words. And yet, we carry them, their weight.
Inquiry: How do you know?
I start from the nose. I follow the scent and see where it leads. I find it with my hands, and it’s my fingertip that reads. And when that is not enough, here I come, bare feet; it’sthe ground underneath, rough and brown: I keep my breath and make no sound. My ears extend into my whole skin, and laying on the wet and dark soil, I listen to it preach.
Inquiry: How do you know?
Because of touch, because of feeling. Because the body responds, it answers. Aggressively human. Respond, from the root spondere – to promise. To respond is also to create a tether, a commitment, a form of solidarity.
Inquiry: How do you know?
I stay with the water, over and over, returning to the same shore, see what’s changed, what’s more. Uncertain, I swim in it and try to ask where it comes from? When was it? I stay with the echoes of the many pasts and many dwellings encoded; once again, it’s still water.
Inquiry: How do you know?
I know what I must unknow. I think about the idea of fugitivity, escape, sabotage (JAYWALKING THROUGH CYBERSPACE!) and how moten and harney write “fuck the future of the university, no promises from the university, no demands on the university, just the presence of our practice in love and battle, in and through its ruins, on the other side of its dying gasps and last words.”
The university made corporeal, dissolvable, mortal.
Orbiting around an extract I read about human residue, how socialist ideals were intimately tied to eugenics, how they believed that the successful realisation of an efficient welfare society depended on the elimination of the ‘unfit’, the ‘feeble minded’ and those on the social margins, the so called ‘residuum’. What knowledge can be found in those offcuts, from the dregs and dredges? Where we are told not to go, where nothing can be found.
Inquiry: How do you know?
With you, because no one knows alone. We know together, and we keep this knowledge safe from those who would seek to destroy and distort. We preserve and destruct creatively.
What are digital and physical security practices? Data, memories, stories – what is the feel of privacy? Does it feel like a lock, a container? For whom is privacy a sealable parameter and for whom is containment a myth, porosity a premise for existence?
The body as a kind of anti-evidence: what José Esteban Muñoz calls queer ephemera – refusing logics of surveillance, rigor and proof, to become something that might evaporate at the touch of those who seek to destroy it. We secrete residues. We secret away.
Inquiry: How do you know?
With approaches we co-develop to address what is bothering us, to circumvent the barriers and borders that do not allow us to move and dance freely, to breathe in and out from deep inside our lungs to outer space.
Inquiry: How do you know?
If you really need to know, I sometimes go to her, and she might tell. My grandma shows me with her hands what she learned long ago, secrets of women and land. Sheltered inside her inner tears, old friendships with the rot and the grown.
Inquiry: How do you know?
We know what we treasure. We treasure the trust we build. We treasure time, the time we are so desperately trying to carve out, through slowing down. The humble capacities of what our bodies and collective efforts can produce – a potentially sustaining network of channeling what remains yet unknown, and that which we aim to inquire together, in bright and dark spaces: in the things they told us constitute knowledge, and in others, that which we feel and know is knowledge, but have not been allowed to trust as such.
Inquiry: How do you know?
Because as we work together, we find ways to inhabit the shared space of our laboratory in ways that grant us a sense of collectivity, that enshrine collectivity as a gift not a property or a virtue. We dismantle the commodification of collective knowing that reduces it to merely a matter of resources. We are cautious around grandiose calls to build the digital commons or knowledge infrastructures of the future, knowing these are often merely new forms of enclosure. Even many of the infrastructures we sustain are well past their expiration date, due for planned obsolescence. We resist these concoctions, daily imbibed, that turn us into commodities, resources that deplete, that can no longer give back. We question the means and modes through which we assemble, recalling that to collect is a craft. What we collect is what we want to preserve and pass down to future crafters and technologists.
Inquiry: How do you know?
Because we are each a universe. We cannot know by being in service of inquiry that claims to only be achieved when we assemble ourselves as parts of a grand instrument. Before we collect and assemble, we already know. But we may need help remembering how we became individuals in the first place, so that we can assemble ourselves as many humble, human, and bodily capacities to touch and know the unseen.
We come together to learn how to tune our own instruments, to tune into our humble capacities to know, the ones that broaden the very horizons of our sense of self, the one that is full and replete with knowledge. We tap into our inner authority, knowing that is always-already collective.
Brief Epilogue
We question the means and modes though which we assemble. When we encounter knowledge, it might be “partial” but is it “in pieces”? Is it broken? Is our job to assemble a puzzle? Or is our job to shed the skin of universalizing vision to find knowledge through relationality with the world and with others. We are already porous: a leaky collective that will embrace the joys and pains of resistance. Our aggressively human ways of knowing are slow, humble capacities of transceiving.
END Transmission – Simona, Vasiliki, Maya, & Marisa (on behalf of ETHOS Lab)