Barbelith Underground > Temple > How the Mediamancy works ?

Wow, first post (I’ve finally stopped lurking).

I’ve been messing around with Mediamancy for about a year now. When it comes to TV my method was:

1) Forget every thing you every heard/read/thought about TV. Get in the state of mind where the only thing you see is the people. Don’t consider anyone a character… for the duration of this process they are all people.
2) Try and empathise with people. Have conversations with them in your mind. Talk to the screen if necessary.
3) Attempt to build a structure/model/reality/entity within your mind that relates to everything you see and hear without ever introducing the concept of TV (or fakery) into it. If you see someone (on TV) watching TV this means you must assume that they are following the same rules as you.
4) Skip channels whenever you feel like it. Include a wide mix of what you watch (try to avoid watching films for more than a few minutes though). Change channels during the adverts.
5) The longer you watch the better (I did about 20 hours). Drink lots of coffee. If you smoke cigarettes (I do) then smoke lots. Don’t worry about when you leave the set (for food etc...)

This is somewhat like viewing TV as a giant memepool and playing joint the dots with everything that comes to the surface (the surface being your ego?). I found this the most rewarding experience of TV that I’ve ever had. Near the end of doing this I had the most intense insight/vision where I saw that DNA could be viewed as “The Environment” and what I considered “The Environment” could be viewed as DNA. This is (obviously) a uniquely personal experience but in terms of my own life it was profound (for those in the UK this happened while watching Richard and Judy… make of that what you will!).

I also messed about with magazines (both before and after the TV thing). The whole of this process was based around creating a response/anti-dote to the magazines I read (TV guides/ life style mags/ trade papers/ free magazines based around marketing demographics). This involved taking an existing magazine (a supermarket self-promotion) and covering the entire publication with my own contents – created entirely by cutting up other magazines and sticking them over the contents of the original. This wasn’t a random cut-up but a self-directed one. I brought everything I considered bad/manipulative about magazines into my conscious and parodied it using rearrangements of the original source material (this was a recursive process – while I scanned the magazines for material to help me parody them the more I realised why I considered this necessary and the form it should take). This wasn’t a purely negative parody, some elements where more “Austin Powers” like). Deeply cynical (re)advertisements played a major part in this. So did presentation of poetry I’d previously written using cut-up images to provide a background for it. My favourite page I entitled “Celebrity Fruit and Veg” – apparently Mira Hindley likes Cabbages…

This may be an unconventional way to interpret Mediamancy, but then maybe that’s the point. I think that much of the power of the media lies in how you it “teaches” you to interpret itself. Once you start considering its language/images yours to read how you like it becomes magickal - an entity that you communicate with (rather than one that oppresses you via propaganda?). Think that depressive person on the talk show is a self-obsessed arsehole? Maybe he’s just a fiction suit designed to teach you an important lesson... Why read about Arnold Schwarzenegger and get angry about his treatment of women – instead he’s a feminist warrior turned double-agent to further there cause via grotesque exaggeration... See a cosmetics advertisement and replace it with a cute, fuzzy animal wishing it was beautiful... Find enlightenment watching day-time TV.