Ideomotoric Programming and Code as Psychodelic Practice was a talk given at the Heretical Sound Sythesis conference at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in 2019.

Contemporary capitalism has cultivated programming as an ultimate rational process, prioritizing predictability and constrained paths. We currently live with the narrowest possible interpretation of a practice that begain in the 1840’s / 1940’s as cybernetic, machine-extended thinking - a transcendental machinery to hoist the thinking of its wielder above the plane of brute calculation and remainder-carrying. It is no suprise that the initial explosion that produced the current era of silicon valley computing was at one point inextricably entangled with the psychedelic-transcendent investigations of 1970’s west coast United States. But as the LSD and ketamine faded from the bloodstream of Mondo 2000 and Wired donned it’s wifi-linked wearable capitalo-armor, programming too armored itself against it’s more wild psychedelic and transcendent potentials. However, the echoes of another history still exist: the business of programming can be a ladder we can cast aside once climbed - as we were trained in design patterns, we can retrain ourselves in unconscious patternless exploration.

This session will envision a practice of ideomotoric programming to synthesize sound - an arational practice with an immaterial result, where the psychadelics of sound feed-back to form a circuit with the code that produced it. As automatic writing connects with immaterial spirits - can we use automatic programming to produce sound that unhinges us, opens us to the voices of ghosts of our other histories? Is it possible to tunnel through programming-as-logistics to rediscover a programming-as-heightened-thought?