Prospecting Alchemy as Ludicrous Critique of Capitalist Imaginaries: A Picture-Play

This exposition plunders the iconosphere to prospect alchemy, discovering its multi-cultural histories, spiritual and scientific legacies, and diverse protagonists. It embraces the ‘ludicrous’ as a neglected register for artistic research, foregrounding visual play as both method and mode of critique.Working with montage and the ambiguity of heterogeneous images, the picture-play generates mutable semantic relations, implicitly and perhaps ironically informed by the literature of visual epistemology e.g. writing by Georges Didi-Huberman (2018), W J T Mitchell (1995; 2005) and Susan Sontag (2009). In a dialogic, process-led experiment that recycles online images, this project looks to analogue precursors such as Aby Warburg’s 1927-9 ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’, and critically extends digital database work e.g. Michael Takeo Magruder’s ‘Living Data’ with its high-end aesthetic, and Harun Farocki’s ‘operational images’ project.Collaborating as the Petra-Chymist Sisters in a wry nod to our geo-chemical patrimony, we occupy an eco-feminist position, after Carolyn Merchant (1990). This illuminates extractive capitalism’s perpetuation of alchemy as the Faustian quest for the ‘world of profit and delight’ (Marlowe 2016), which eclipses the other great work of alchemy – on spirit and soul. Pursuing a critique of accumulation, our vast digital object – which can never be seen at once – is, via Timothy Morton’s (2015; 2017) eco-logic of subscendence – less than the sum of its parts. Here form and method unite to work positively with uncertainty and against closure. Beyond this, we offer a novel, transferable method for image-centric research in the digital realm that acknowledges epistemic provisionality as both a sisterly politics and a consequence of immersion in the matter of the visual. keywords: alchemy, game as collaborative research / method, petrochemical capitalism: industrial extractivism, Faustian pact, eco-feminist critique, material and spiritual transmutations, (the metaphorical) philosopher's stone, visual epistemology, dialogic picture-play, online copy-left image-research, subscendent digital object