Tomorrow is a Season: Search-Play-See

- The seer cannot help but see: has to look; has to look at it again.
- I looked into the bowl and saw a woman crawling towards a rock. A second account saw her crawling from all directions. It was the looking again that did it.

The translation of a search into a message requires communicating with demons. In other words, to transform an act of searching into a figure of speech is to enchant the play between demons and angels, the servers and security guards, the data centre and broke code. Every calculation is a mini monstrosity: strange things seen via strange means.

To conjure a set of possible tomorrows via data, scatters every algorithmic future into many, creating a billion altgenres of seasons: the next day’s birthdays and the next.

- I measure and calculate an imaginary state.
- I pieced together a story from old TV shows and was sure of the year of the next war.
- I spent a spell between covers and counted all the due babies and all the dead dogs.

Holly Pester is a poet, writer and researcher. This text is the second instalment of a series of ‘magical correspondences’ with MAP’s archive of past issues and content. Each instalment will be a projection that stories imagined potential from the archive data. Read Pester’s introduction here, the first instalment, ‘The Confessional Reading Group’, here, and the second instalment, ‘Choral’, here.

See also:
MAP Screen: The Anthropology Effect by Karen Cunningham
Notes on Contemporary Art and Anthropology: Part 2, Conjuring the State by Angela McClanahan
In the Shadow of the Hand: Object 6a by Virginia Hutchison and Sarah Forrest
In the Shadow of the Hand: Object 8 by Virginia Hutchison