In 2021, the artist Alice Bucknell produced a website/artwork titled New Mystics. Taking its foundation from Bucknell’s own engagement with esoteric and hi-tech frameworks, New Mystics consists of numerous critical texts focusing on various artists, all of whom with practices that explore alternative beliefs, occult histories, and systems of magic. Important here is to understand that these practices revisit non- or anti-Enlightenment concepts as some kind of retreat into irrationality but often situate esoterica in correspondence with advanced technologies as a means for reflecting and opposing a present defined by environmental collapse and the march of illiberal politics.

Relinquishing the supposed benefits of critical distance, Bucknell’s writings on these artists collected in New Mystics also comment, by extension, on her own practice. More crucially, however, Bucknell is seeking a writerly mode adequate to its object; an object freighted with complex esoteric histories. This paper proposes that Bucknell’s experimental deployment of multiple “voices”—Bucknell’s, statements from the artists discussed, and Language AI GPT-3—communing as if gathered in séance is an attempt to disclose the unknown subtending each artwork. Could it be through such a strategy, in which writing becomes divination rather than commentary, that a genuine reciprocity between artwork and art writing be envisaged? New Mystics, with its polyphonic interplay of manifold human non-human subjectivities can serve as a model for another kind of art writing or criticism, one that is, at bottom, a sympathetic art practice as much as commentary on such practices.