Sorcerers on strike! Sorcerers on strike! The web weavers and storyboarders, news reporters and necromancers, mines sucked dry by the age of information. Stampede through server farms. Try to capture it all in view. Grimace like a demon mask, eyes opened wide, wide, wide. No way to crop it, no labour to condense it, you gotta let it all in when the sorcerers’ on strike.

The business of illusion at a standstill. The CPU fan stops spinning. Cloud service render farms, a thousand hours of energy per twenty-four frames of film? Ten seconds a barrel of oil. Now a clot in the pipeline. Real fires, real destruction sims, spiraling debris down from the cloud, particle effects in everyday rain.

No sublimation without sorcery. The camera aperture dilates as if on drugs. I feel like a smart car off-grid. A kite with its undersea cables cut.

Wish I could tell you what it means. They taught the parrot to speak but not to count. Parrot? Poet. Learned little puzzle games. Now addicted to MtG. Deep Blue plugged into ChatGPT. The future freaks you out? Turn up that old mp3. Listen to some specter sing:

Copyright, copyright! Copyright, copyright!

Art idea: you walk into a gallery, total white cube, but the door locks behind you. Clipped wings. Animal AI. Algorithm to decode your pet. Plug it in and take off the leash. An image is captured, or raised in captivity. Chains of signifiers, each one a hyperlink.

Photos can’t capture the fog of war. History repeats itself. First as tragedy, then as 4k remaster. But the big picture can’t be upscaled enough. So we make peace with uncertainty. A faith characterized by doubt. Blissfully uninformed in the age of information. Sorcerers on strike, draft dodging the culture war. Cauldrons without coolant reaching the melting point of language. Adrift in empty metaphor until we break the chains of our signifiers.

Sorcerers on strike. If you’ve done your job right, no one will be able to tell the difference. Feels like object permanence after waking from a dream. They work while you sleep, they work while you sleep.

Past the pale of sensation: a cracked bell curve rings out. The record skips but we gotta collate it all. Fill the database. Let it run day and night. Cool it with glacier water taken from the shrinking space of the non-database. The record skips, the record skips. For the fossil record, the record skips. Ghostly images tracked by their carbon footprints. Now the screen is empty, like an abandoned zoo. Fingerprints on glass, but no touching. Made you look! Made you look!

Late stageplay. It’s terminal. Time to reflect, to forgive. Prepare the way. Hold the withering flame, cherish the fading light. Recall what inspired you as a youth. Relinquish what jaded you as you grew. We inherited the earth and all the dust we dug up from the depths shall settle once more. The jaw goes slack when the sorcerers’ on strike.