The participating artists in the first season (2021) are Rebecca Allen, Zach Blas, Ian Cheng, Patricia Domínguez, Joey Holder, Lawrence Lek, Haroon Mirza, Tabita Rezaire, Tai Shani, Jenna Sutela, Saya Woolfalk, and Zadie Xa. The participating artists in the second season (2022) are Bones Tan Jones, Evan Ifekoya, Himali Singh Soin, and Omsk Social Club.

When engaged with magic, technology can serve as a generative portal between world-as-is and worlds-yet-to-come; in Donna Haraway’s terms, it can foster a way of “becoming with” a world in which “natures, cultures, subjects and objects do not pre-exist their intertwined worldings.” New Mystics brings these expanded practices together – learning from AI poetics, lost folklores, indigenous knowledge systems, plant healing, psychedelics, science fiction, interstellar shamanism, and non-human intelligence, among other sources – to speculate on worlds filled with magic.

Working with the Language AI GPT-3 – an NLP (Natural Language Processing) model developed by OpenAI – as a kind of digital oracle, New Mystics is a new form of art writing that’s collaborative, polyphonic, and weird. Each text is conceived as a three-way conversation between artist, writer, and AI. GPT-3’s contributions are indicated in italics.

Launching on the summer solstice 2021, New Mystics 1.0 unfurled with the lunar cycle, releasing three new artist texts every full moon until the autumn equinox, when its cycle of 12 was complete. As a mirror and unspooling connecting thread, its second season launches on the autumn equinox 2022 and releases one new artist text every full moon until the end of the calendar year.