The Spectral Spectrum

Part 1 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 research & context while I transform these cards into animated loops for a new kind of oracle deck. To support this project & get invites to upcoming Image Word Mystery creative jams, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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The “Rainbow Orb” card

Making meaning…

It landed as a late-night revelation. Almost asleep, then suddenly very awake and slamming notes into my phone: “GO BACK TO DIGITAL ORACLE DECK IDEA!!! EVOLVE CARDS FROM FALL!!!” This is the process by which a great number of my creative projects formulate— slowly drifting through visions over many years, ideas washing and rinsing across many notebooks, then: suddenly formed.

I’ve wanted to combine my work with meditative audio & animated loops into some sort of a digital oracle deck for years but the project felt kind of daunting in scope. I imagined I would have to figure out how to fund it via a grant or something because it’s the exact kind of project I get super excited about that will take for-fucking-ever to make & has no discernible financial viability.

But a meditative looping oracle deck is the kind of thing I really want to make because it’s the kind of thing I really want to use. I’m a loop artist who trades heavily in the mechanics of chance in my creative work. I’m also a meditator who really loves working with audio/visual points of focus— long droning notes and hypnotic visual rhythms.

Last fall I led Image Word Mystery class participants through ten weeks of potent symbol creation and contemplation. As interesting imagery and ideas popped up in our creative exploration, we quickly drew them out onto index cards-- everyone creating their own oracle decks as we went along. I’ve continued to work with the deck I created since then, to divine poems and new information, continually asking where this material might want me to take it next.

It was after a day in my notebook considering these cards again that I had the ah-ha! Lisette, you have these 42 symbols that organically emerged through this class that you can’t stop thinking about anyway. You wanna make an animated deck? START THERE!

It seemed obvious that I should ask the cards about moving forward with this project. So I mushed the deck around on my desk and out pops the Rainbow Orb…

Oracular Rainbow, 2019 first animated oracle card test

Of course.

Because, why? Because the Oracular Rainbow was the first animation test I ever did for the digital deck idea. In fact, I tried a couple versions in 2019. I animated them and then spent a lot of time zoning into the imagery while I listened to various drone tracks and tried to feel into what a full deck like this might feel like and how it might be used.

“yes” 2019

I shelved the idea for then and turned the rainbow orb into a run of stickers (because stickers, unlike most independent animation, have at least a small financial return). But just as I pulled this card for my current project (because this is how trippy stuff works), this photo showed up out of the blue in my DMs from one of my husband’s old coworkers. No context, no preamble, I barely knew her:

Nudge from the universe the other day.

Ok. Ok. I’m listening…

The right conditions.

A double rainbow forms over my dad’s house on the Rogue River. Look closely at a double rainbow and you’ll see that the secondary rainbow has its color order reversed.

Some of my initial notes about rainbows:

They are a trip.

You are always at the center of a rainbow. Where it appears, how it appears, is an illusion of light unique to your perception. The apparition depends on specific angles of light, particles of liquid and the position of the viewer.

Descartes figures out rainbow math in the 1600s. Image credit: wikipedia

The true form of a rainbow is circular. It is the horizon line that interrupts our view, but get far enough above a horizon line and the full circle reveals itself.

Rainbow viewed from above the horizon. Image credit: NOAA

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I can’t exactly remember at what point this circular-night-rainbow symbol made its way into my Image Word Mystery index card deck, but I have a vague memory that Brittney Monster had created something in class that reminded me of all these other times I’ve worked with this imagery, so in it went…

Sharing the inspiration for my painted piano project, Ul de Rico’s “Rainbow Goblins”, my favorite childhood book.

And I’ve really worked with this form so many times over the years…

I don’t exactly know why.

I got Ul De Rico’s “Rainbow Goblins” as a gift from my parents “for being such a good first grade student” in the 1980s. It was my favorite. I suspect this is where I first encountered this spectral spectrum…. Is that how it works? Somewhere deep in the earliest formations of color and story my little mind imprinted on these trippy rainbows? Maybe…

But what does it mean…?

So my exciting task now is to make some new meaning.

For each card in the deck I’m beginning in my notebook by generating word associations, correspondences, personal/historic connections and then writing two poems: one pantoum that pulls on a thread of feeling from the card and another pantoum using just one word per line. The results have been fascinating so far— here’s my first set of pages: