Interview with Ángel Azamar, P–OST, Nijmegen, Netherlands October 2022

Could you tell us a bit about the Kabbalistic Futurism project? What brought you to work with ideas, visions, and methodologies of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah?

I have been interested in the idea of the Kabbalah and its mysteries since my teens, but accessing the actual texts seemed to be forbidden until you were over 40, and there was no internet. I guess to go right back to my childhood in the 1960s, my family was a member of a reform synagogue in London and although I was never convinced by the normative idea of the 'belief in God' I was inspired by the sermons of the holocaust survivor rabbi Hugo Gryn which were more philosophy than anything else. He was also refreshingly philosophical about the idea of believing in God, there was no talk of a man in the sky or even of a more abstract figure or force of some sort. Later in my teens and early 20s I read various books which discussed the Kabbalah and also gave interesting examples of the use of gematria (Hebrew numerology), in Jewish texts. I came to understand quite early on, also through hebrew classes and membership of a jewish youth group, that the stories and rules of Judaism were there to protect the deeper analyses, experiences and ethical debates, and a way of passing these on through generations.

Further reading on the subject was illuminating because it became apparent that within the Kabbalah and its interpretations are ideas relating to areas that people might consider to be within the realms of current science. The Jewish mystics of the Middle Ages described the birth of the universe in ways that correspond to phenomena that scientists are now theorising, in particular the Big Bang and black holes as well as ideas of quantum theory, dark matter and dark energy, which in science are still far from conclusive. The Kabbalists also wanted to discover a 'unified theory of everything', just as many physicists do today.

I am interested in the idea that these areas of Kabbalah and scientific cosmology might be capable of informing each other in their search for the underlying nature of reality, just as I feel that experimenting with thinking like an artist could have a positive effect on scientists. I have been working with scientists at CERN in Geneva for about four years now, since 2018, and have carried out several projects with this hope at the back of my mind.

It saddens me that there is so much binary thinking in the world; God or no God, science or religion, with human or non-human being the latest. I feel it would help things a lot if we all grasped that everything is connected, and of course this is not a new idea. Even the word 'belief' implies a binary with non-belief and the word is inappropriate in the question, 'do you believe in God?' because it serves to maintain a binary mode of understanding.

I had started the project Kabbalistic Futurism in 2021 while I was finishing Technoshamanic Systems: New Cosmological Models for Survival. The name Technoshamanic was connected to ideas of Technoshamanism, an evolving movement embracing science/technology and spirituality as a holistic way forward, an area my own work had been engaged in since the 1980s, but I began to think that the term shamanic might be too specifically fixed in people's minds in relation to ideas of the traditional shamanic practices of non-western cultures. Aware that within my own Jewish culture there was already a tradition that embraced science and spirituality, one which I had already drawn upon in previous works, it felt necessary to try and work with it more specifically. So I had the idea to make a kind of reinvented or alternative contemporary Kabbalah – for everyone not only Jews – to encourage a more currently engaged analysis towards transcendent and transformative visions and ideas for a better planetary future.

Could you tell us specifically about the Kabbalistic Manuscripts series and what drew you to the use of the tree of life as a formal link for these works? What attracts you to watercolour, drawing, and poetry in the Kabbalistic Manuscripts as tools to critically engage with the technological and cultural dynamics of the digital realm?

The section called Kabbalistic Manuscripts is at the centre of the work and comprises a series of 46 tree of life watercolour on paper works. The series contains one long text which is divided between the 46 works, each section or verse filling the interstitial spaces within each tree of life, just as text has been inserted into tree of life drawings historically.

Illustrations of many such historical works are included in the book, 'The Kabbalistic Tree' by J. H. Chajes (2022) (which also includes the history of the internet diagram from my project HEXEN 2.0 (2009-11)).

“Ilanot—parchment sheets presenting the Kabbalistic “tree of life”—have been at the center of Jewish mystical practice for the past seven hundred years. Written by leading ilanot expert J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree is a comprehensive illustrated history of these arboreal “maps of God.” “
Penn state university press, Pennsylvania, USA

The circles on the tree of life, the Sephirot, are according to J. H. Chajes the skeleton keys that unlock all of reality. The Sephirot visualise abstract relations, they should not be taken literally but are symbols of a spiritual reality beyond normal consciousness.

The language of the Zohar (The Book of Radiance), the canonical text of Kabbalah, is poetic, full of neologisms and multiple connotations. In the sixteenth century a new Kabbalistic era was opened through the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572), and the transition this generated, from medieval (“classical”) to early modern (“Lurianic”) Kabbalah, can be compared, according to Chajes, to that from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.

Tree of life drawings embody pathways to new dimensions of perception and being in the world. Evidently it is through drawing and text, rather than for example psychoactive plants or drugs, that the Kabbalist is able to reach altered states of consciousness.

In your work, there is a constant preoccupation to find links between new technologies and alternative belief systems such as occultism, magic, and spirituality. How do you think Kabbalah and Artificial Intelligence dialogue with each other in our current social and political context? How do you connect the mystical potential of the Kabbalah to your practice of speculative futurism and storytelling?

Yes I am always working with these combined subjects, and this is because I have a holistic drive to work with the natural connectiveness of everything in the universe and look at the larger picture, as a methodology to foster understanding and ideally to help the world, and to personally avoid the reductivist tendencies inherent in many other fields. This is something art can do. This is one reason it should not be harnessed within institutionalised academic models of research.

The text I have written in the Kabbalistic Futurism/Manuscripts is not about finding links between Kabbalah and Artificial Intelligence, because virtually everything can always already be found in or interpreted from Kabbalistic texts.
Here is an example of text from the Zohar:

...But an innovated word of wisdom ascends and settles on the head of Tsaddiq, Righteous One – Vitality of the Worlds. From there, it flies and soars through 70,000 worlds, ascending to the Ancient of Days. All the words of the Ancient of Days are words of wisdom, conveying supernal, concealed mysteries. When that secret word of wisdom, innovated here, ascends, it joins those words of the Ancient of Days. Along with them, it ascends and descends, entering eighteen hidden worlds, which no eye has seen...

Kabbalistic Futurism is about creating a 21st century work that is intended to be spiritual, cosmological and political at the same time. It includes fantastical projections for and poetic imaginings of technologies like AI, of current scientific theories of and questions about the cosmos, and also of possible alternative social and regenerative architectural systems, which inserted into the diagrammatic structures of the Kabbalistic tree of life might encourage or enable positive transformative visions for the future.

Other works within Kabbalistic Futurism, the Kabbalistic Architectures; pavilions, space stations, museums and garden designs, can be seen both as potential physical models and abstractions. The Kabbalistic Algorithms can likewise be seen as abstract, or can be imagined in the mind of the viewer as embodying actual algorithms operating within ethical systems of infinite relationships on earth and outer space.

What does the process of mending history and memory entail and why is it important to you?

What is important is mending things now and for the future. I guess the key is something like Tikkun Olam, which in Hebrew means repairing the world.

The Kabbalists, unlike philosophers, always saw the human being as an active party in the improvement of the cosmos. But it wasn’t until Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, known as “the Ari,” the greatest of the Kabbalists, that the idea of Tikkun came to the foreground. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2614791/jewish/Tikkun-Olam-A-Brief-History.htm