Invisible Guidance: Listen & Watch

Part 3 of the Digital Oracle Deck series.

This series explores the symbols found on 42 oracle cards developed through co-creative play during the fall 2022 Image Word Mystery course. I’m taking a deep-dive into digital divination and meaning-making — sharing my work with you while I transform these cards into animated loops & audio tracks for a new kind of oracle deck.

To experience all of the original audio & animation and get invites to upcoming Image Word Mystery creative jams, consider a subscription of $6/month or $60/year. Thank you so much for supporting me & my work.

Part 1, Part 2

“Our earlier data told us that we were hearing something, but we didn’t know what. Now we know that it’s music coming from the gravitational universe…As we keep listening, we’ll likely be able to pick out notes from the instruments playing in this cosmic orchestra.” (link)

Digital Oracle Deck Part 3: Invisible Guidance

Exploring this image from the original index card deck.

In brief: The image that appears on this oracle card (which we might call “the-sphere-in-a-warping-net”) appears in every article about gravity and tries in a 2D way to show us an invisible thing— which is how objects with mass distort spacetime.

As I mulled over this symbol over the last several weeks, I was excited to read about the new research on gravitational waves in which their motion is described like that of a “choppy sea”.

Reported as information which “shatters the perception of a static universe”, I thought to myself, “Wait—Really?? Who thought the universe was static?? Absolutely nothing is static! What does that even mean??”

But though Albert Einstein first theorized in 1916 that gravitational waves exist, it wasn’t until 2015 that we were able to physically detect them, and not until last month that we got confirmation of these massively large gravitational waves knocking around every which way.

One of the things I love about science is that it’s like, “…You know, first we imagined this thing, then we went looking for what we imagined, and it’s possible one day we might find what we’re imagining! Or something else entirely!”

[We watched this documentary to brush up on our Einstein lore— I loved learning that he was inspired by the newly-invented motion picture film strip when theorizing that spacetime as a concept was “like watching the whole film at once”.]

Riding the waves…

“i am the ocean/ i am the wave” LM 2020

I was raised by surfers.

I wish everyone could learn to bodysurf when they’re young. To ride waves with your body you learn to observe the pushing and pulling rhythm of the ocean, how and when to approach her, or when and why you might not. Immersing oneself fully in that great moving body, sensing both agency and chaos, plugs you right in to the vast & interconnected power of the natural world.

The ocean is motion. And we constantly use it as a metaphor to understand our condition, bobbing on this blue pearl in space.

Considering the symbol in the context of oracle…

But what does it MEAN?

I love starting these investigations by asking myself what I think a card might be called because it instantly sets me off in twenty directions. Invisible Guidance is what I’m working with for now, but I also riffed on Unseen Forces, Causes & Effects, Grand Theories and What Pulls You In?

See how the different names change the meaning?

Motion can also really change the meaning- like I grappled with in Part 2 when adding any motion to a doorknob seemed to collapse possible interpretations into a really narrow lane. But animating this gravity net image into looping ocean-motion was fun and a perfect example of how motion can clarify and strengthen a concept rather than detract or lead the imagination too narrowly.

And of course I had to play with this idea of the “cosmic orchestra” and the “background hum” of the gravitational universe with some audio—-

So here is a 3 minute audio-visual meditation for you based on this card.

Let yourself relax into the rocking waves of the cosmos and when you’re done, decide what name you would give this audio/visual oracle card and drop it in the comments.