Alchemy emblems & circuits: how to transform schematics into cosmologies & old emblems into function circuits?
Alchemy emblems just like circuit schematics represent something important about the relation between human, cosmic and mineral scales: a challenge of connecting electrons with human needs through electronic products based on electric circuits and on the other side, a challenge to realize your full potential as a human being and a mirror of God by working on the Magnum Opus and helping nature perfect the matter. Comparing and confronting these images and visions enables us to understand the different ontologies and values, but also ideals of knowledgeable and action: we try and fail to read the old emblems as sketches and prototypes and transforms present circuits into more aesthetic representations celebrating the relation between scales.
We started by showing different types of representations of scales in alchemy: Ashmole’s and Nazari’s dragons and animal-planet hybrids, Mylii and Mayer’s pregnant men and earth with emphasis on landscapes, Rosarium philosophici erotic and gender-oriented representations of the 3-7-12 transformations, Libavius and Barlet’s athanors (fournu cosmique) with complex connections. Instruments, human figures, animals, symbols everything can trigger rich erotic, political, industrial and cosmological forces that oppose our present divisions between disciplines and “concerns”. The final emblem is something between Morton’s hyperobject, Latour’s actor network, it is a moral and aesthetic matter.
We transferred various ideas and strategies on how to make the circuit on the emblem on a copper tape to “silk-screen” the design. Some retraced the curves and turned some of them into connections between the components strategically placed on the eyes of the dragons or some important points of the emblems. Others’ duplicated the curves as a parasitic structure on the top of the image. Our simple lickometer circuit, which asks the human to close the circuit used only three componets, which could be mapped to the alchemist triads: transistor as a type of mercury amplifying or switching the forces, LED as sulfur and image of light and perfection and a battery, which is the earth and the salt we need to transform into something spiritual as light... we could have spend more time rethinking the materials, which make the components: gallium, germanium or tin in the transistor etc., but everyone got more excited with the prospect with illuminating the emblem with a circuit rather than rethinking some deep connection between what we do with the minerals in the past and present.
Once the parasitic circuit is printed & cut it has to be transfered with a tape, an alchemist would see this techniques as symbolic, as dividing and mixing the ingredients and then multiplying. It would be fun to describe the circuit making as some 7 stage process from the black to the golden phase, concept to functional circuit.
There are two interesting differences to notice when you compare emblems and circuits: the idea of transformation and change in the 16th century is very moral concept of improving the creation and the sublunar imperfection, while now is just about balancing inputs and outputs in a cybernetic system. However, the idea of evolution as a way how inorganic nature becomes organic and creates complex organisms shares some of the obsessions with making the minerals and planets part of the human body and some story of complexity, the circuits nowadays enable us to have cities and global connection turning everything into an image of a child nourished by the forces of nature into something we can’t completely comprehend today. In the past and in the present our minerals are part of some cosmic drama of new and more complex life systems and transcending the material into more social etc. units.