Cryptogamaechrome or Three Electromagnetic Devices for Synthetic Telepathy

model of Franz Mesmer’s baquet, model of William Tiller’s unimprinted electronic device, model of ODINI malware, Faraday cage, Dell Optiplex, Raspberry Pi, magnetometer, EMF Meter, tripod, cordage

5.0 x 5.0 x 3.5 ft.

2023—shown at UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, 2024

The piece situates three models of historical devices that harness electromagnetism for synthetic telepathy in feedback with one another. 

Franz Mesmer’s baquet (lit., “tub”) is the earliest such device: an 18th century capacitor for human-to-human telepathy. Mesmer theorized a universal magnetic fluid energy that permeates all animate and inanimate objects (flutbartkeiten, "floodability"), which he called animal magnetism. Designed as a giant, interactive leyden jar (a contemporary invention by Benjamin Franklin), the baquet leveraged "magnetic rapport" to ostensibly heal physical ailments and conduct thought transmission between patients. Mesmer attracted a large following, notably from German Idealist philosophers---perhaps the most outspoken was Johann Fichte, who re-interpreted the universal magnetic fluid as "subtle matter," denoting a substance that mediates the transcendental and the material.

William Tiller’s unimprinted electronic device (UED) facilitates telepathy between a human and a random-access memory (RAM) chip and, subsequently, between a human and its general environment. Tiller believed that "subtle energy" (not unlike Fichte's "subtle matter") could be controllably dispersed into an environment through "intention host devices" for "space conditioning" the world. In his second White Paper on applied psychoenergetics, Tiller provides a circuit diagram for an "unimprinted electronic device," which becomes an "intention host device" after its RAM is imprinted via meditative intention from a few highly experienced meditators. Once the device is powered, the RAM somehow radiates this particular intentional power of subtle energy into the environment. The Central Intelligence Agency had Tiller’s device on file as part of its psychic research program, Project Stargate, in the 1970's.

First published in 2018 on arXiv by members of the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, as "ODINI: Escaping Sensitive Data from Faraday-Caged, Air-Gapped Computers via Magnetic Fields," ODINI malware frequency modulates the CPU of a Faraday-caged computer--in this case, a Dell Optiplex--with such low frequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) that the typically EMF-resistant barrier of the Faraday cage, a critical and increasingly insufficient cybersecurity measure, is surpassed as information encrypted in < 50 Hertz is transmitted across the air gap to the receiving computer (in this case, a Raspberry Pi): computer-to-computer telepathy. In this piece, each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a particular frequency, and the letters are sent in random order to the Raspberry Pi from the Dell Optiplex.

"Cryptogamaechrome" is a neologism combining cryptochrome (lit., "hidden color") and cryptogam (lit., "hidden reproduction"). Cryptochromes are proteins that are responsible for biomagnetism in many species; and they were first discovered through blue light studies on cryptogamic organisms.