Versorgerin: Your project began in 2021 with the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos' space-tourism rocket, New Shepard. You address space billionaires as figures who accumulate immoral wealth, adopt fascist ideologies from science fiction novels, and leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake. You also specifically refer to a ‘New Space’ and a ‘billionaire colonialist/ecocidal industrial complex’. Could you outline this a little, and also explain the theory behind your references? I'll quote two titles you refer to: ‘The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space’ by Deondre Smiles and ‘Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race’ by Mary-Jane Rubenstein.
David Benqué & Lucile Olympe Haute: The 'New Space' industry refers to the capitalist boom that was triggered by the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act passed under Obama's USA. This law basically gave US citizens and companies free reign over the "exploration" of space for commercial purposes. Everything from launch vehicles to asteroid mining was declared up for grabs by commercial interests, all while retreating state investments.
»Bind Billionaires who fly to the upper sky from coming back to earth«: bindloareswhfytupkmcg. (Foto: MFRU31)
The works by Smiles and Rubenstein frame the US space race as continuation of colonial histories and patterns, underpinned by religious ideology. One of the most obvious examples of this is "manifest destiny", the idea that the westward settler colonial expansion in the US was answering to the will of God, justifying land theft and genocide. Trump mobilised this term a few times, notably again in his 2025 inauguration speech while talking about colonising Mars.
Another key thinker in this story is Gerard K. O'Neill, responsible for the 1970's vision of space faring. While the American frontier eventually ran out of westward space to colonise, O'Neill turned its direction upwards, to the stars. His work includes the 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space as well as famous illustrations of liveable space station replicating American suburbia landscapes. Jeff Bezos studied with O'Neill at Princeton, making his blend of physics and colonial vision a very influential component of today's space billionaire imaginary.
Versorgerin: With ‘Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires,’ you also refer to a text by Paris Marx: ‘Leave the Billionaires in Space.’ The message is clear: evil must be banished in order to mobilise the forces of good. You have developed a sequence of rituals and procedures between occultism and technology that works with elements of conspiratorial meetings, spells, curses, sigils and, ultimately, an art installation – it is, I quote, ‘a teleperformance based on chaos magick and sigils, two modern traditions of magic that are characterized (...) by their orientation towards producing effects’. In Maribor, in the exhibition space of a church, a laser continuously drew various sigils of magical spells such as ‘Bind Billionaires who fly to the upper sky from coming back to earth’ or ‘Defund Starlink’. So the project was constantly haunting and conjuring. How do magic and technology interact here? Where do you see yourselves between art, cyber witches or even the ‘esoteric ecotechnics’ in the title of the MFRU31 festival?
David Benqué & Lucile Olympe Haute: We were delighted with the opportunity to develop the project into an exhibition piece. Maribor was our first time using a laser, and we have the MFRU curators Lara Mejač and Davide Bevilacqua to thank for this. The laser in the exhibition space was continually drawing a selection of sigils from past séances. It's important to note that we don't consider these to have powers on their own, they were like blank bullets, or actually more like a model made for exhibition purposes. The actual ritual that takes place must involve people collectively writing the sigil first, and then charging it through the launching procedure for it to have any effect. The whole ritual is built to channel a collective intention towards the expression and manifestation of a goal, so this must involve people. We could hold a Sigil Séance drawing on the sand with a stick, while the fanciest laser in the world could not manifest anything without people. The technology we use is quite basic, a web page and a javaScript library called Yjs normally used for collaborative text editing. Our page basically does two things: make people who are connected visible to each other, and update the sigil in real-time for everyone. It's a simple custom-built online venue to host this particular teleperformance ritual.
Versorgerin: It is obvious that your work is not escapist, but rather very political. This is fuelled, so to speak, by shared rituals, sigils, ciphers and scripts. What can be said about this from a historical perspective? Critically, one could also speak here of a pre-modern era – or a ‘power of the powerless’. How do magic and a certain surrealism become self-empowerment and protest? And can we also speak of a more feminist form of protest here?
David Benqué: Yes if anything we try to counter the scorched-earth escapist ideology of space billionaires. The idea that humanity could survive on Mars, let alone thrive, is an incredible fallacy that will simply not work, but is causing real material damage right now on earth in the process. Our ritual is first and foremost a protective one, initially a type of bond that would prevent the billionaires from coming back to earth. As you know each sigil has its own payload so the specifics can vary. It's interesting you mention ‘power of the powerless’ as its also the title of the Dark Mountain article1 where we learned about Jusatsu Kito Sodan (‘Killing Curse Prayer Monk Group’), a group of monks that staged rituals to curse the owners of factories responsible for polution in 1970's Japan. This was a big inspiration for the project and also highlights some of the ethical discussions we have been having: is it right to wish for harm, or even death, to be brought to someone regardless of their negative impact on the world? If you are ready to deploy magic and take it seriously the effects might actually be manifested, and worse consequences might also be visited upon you. For the buddhist monks this is far from obvious, but Jusatsu Kito Sodan determined that the danger posed to the planet was great enough to justify cursing industrial poluters to death. Enough has been demonstrated about the toxicity of figures like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to warrant the same in my opinion, and things have only been confirmed since we started the project in 2021.
Lucile Olympe Haute: In a feminist perspective, protest and online activism is rooted in the pre-existing movement of cyberfeminism, that consists among other things to reclaim non dominant techologies. It is embodied and theorized by artists and theorists such as Cornelia Sollfrank and Constant collective in Bruxelels to name a few. Chose, use and build tools to shape human organization to shape tools to shape human organization.
Versorgerin: Last question: Behind the project is sigil-séance.diagram.institute. What does the institute do? What are its next projects? And: What are your next projects as artists and authors?
David Benqué: The Institute absorbs whoever it comes in contact with into its bureaucratic structure. Lucile is now the High Priestess for Chaos Magick and if you are not careful you too will be given a title and merged into the organigram. More seriously the Institute is the research vessel that I created after finishing my PhD in 2020 to continue the work and expand its reach. My thesis work was about using diagrams as a language to engage critically with algorithmic prediction, since then I have broadened this practice as deploying the language of diagrams to read existing systems (algorithmic, technical, political) and to write new ones in the form of publications, software, visualisations, etc. see https://diagram.institute for more projects and news. At the moment I am thinking about how to set up a collaborative mapping environment to draw oppressive systems collectively, I dream of setting up Diagramstagram which would be a diagrams-only social media platform on the fediverse, and I think a lot about the Luddites and how to mobilise this imaginary in an art and design context assaulted by AI. For the Sigil Séance we are planning to keep iterating on the format as we host more and more editions of the ritual.
--------------------------------------------
The interview was conducted by Tanja Brandmayr.
David Benqué is an artist, designer and researcher from Paris France, currently living and working in Cork Ireland. Since his PhD at the Royal College of Art in London UK (2020) he operates as the Institute of Diagram Studies.
https://diagram.institute
Lucile Olympe Haute is an artist, lecturer in design at Nîmes University (FR) and associate researcher at École des arts décoratifs of Paris (FR).
lucilehaute.fr
--------------------------------------------
The Sigil Séance application has been presented and exhibited at various locations, including the Radical Futures Conference 2024 at University College Cork, the Mardi de la Générale 2024 seminar in Paris, the exhibition ‘Casting a Spell in Computational Regimes’ curated by Arianna Forte 2024 at SomoS Arts in Berlin, and the International Festival for Computer Art ‘Esoteric Ecotechnics’ 2025 in Maribor. The Sigil Séance application is now available for testing. You can send your feedback by email or register your interest in future séance sessions at the following address: sigil-seance@diagram.institute.
MFRU31 took place in Maribor from 26.09.-05.10.2025
A text by David Benqué & Lucile Olympe Haute about ‘Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires’ can be found here: https://asapjournal.com/cluster/algorithms-and-the-occult/