Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I summon, in the computer, unknown powers. Every time my body uses the devices that bring me closer to and irreversibly separate me from the machine, a strange, almost improbable communication takes place: the machine's song translated so that I can sing it too. Software, and even some parts of hardware, such as the mouse, the screen or the keyboard, allow us to communicate with a computational entity that we not only do not understand, but can never fully comprehend. In advanced magic, one can cast or receive a spell and know the words (software), even repeat them, and also know the instruments through which the spell operates: the wand, the cauldron, the runes (hardware). But what happens when those elements combine, before the incantation arises, is something far beyond us, in a dimension without language.
We are familiar with the term ‘black box’ from aviation: that box which is also called ‘flight recorder’ and which records what happens on each trip made by the aircraft in which it rests, hidden. However, a second meaning of black box comes from systems science, engineering and computer science and begins to appear in the first half of the 20th century, becoming more precisely defined in the 1960s by the theoretical work of several academics. One of them was the physicist and philosopher of science Mario Bunge, who in 1963 published in the journal Philosophy of Science his article A General Black Box Theory, in which he defines the idea of the black box as ‘a fiction representing a set of concrete systems on which stimuli S impinge and from which reactions R emerge. The constitution and structure of the box are totally irrelevant to the approach under consideration, which is purely external or phenomenological’. That is: if I can figure out how to get the what I want, it doesn't matter what process happens with my back to my ability to understand it. Although it is an abstract metaphor, it is primarily about trust: I know that when I ask text-to-image artificial intelligence to produce an image of a blue pomeranian dog wearing a suit and having a coffee at the door of a Balenciaga store while waiting for his owner to come back it is capable of producing it, but I don't know how it happened. And even if I understand the general procedures, the number of variables that combine and the reasons why they do so are beyond my ability to calculate, to memorise and to logically combine an infinite number of variants.
The black box theory encourages us, as long as we get what we ask for, not to ask any more questions about how it happens. This is, on the one hand, logical, since it is impossible, from human cognition, to house in the same mental image all the processes that must occur at the same time for this result to emerge as an invocation when I write a certain spell, the magic words we now call prompt. When I get a picture, a video or a response from the machine it is because I have been able to arrange the right words in the right order. The promptwith which we communicate our wants and needs to artificial intelligence is an equivalent to the solution of the riddle that a sphinx asks you to solve, or the magic words that bring plants, animals and the dead back to life. How the sphinx opens the door or how it brings life back to the inert we will never know. It is enough to get the words right. To relate to technology is to accept darkness, a necessary process in the face of any machine, but also in the face of any living body. We just have to wait for our eyes to get used to it and safely enter the night.
However, there is something in this resignation to not understanding that should be dangerous for us. Because the black box today is the size of a suitcase, but perhaps in a short time it will take on the immense size of the Kaaba and become a mysterious, colossal, opaque cube around which we circle in an attempt to understand its mystery. The black box has something of danger, a horror story, a curse and a tomb. But what if we thought of the black box as a little piece of night inside the machines? What if we surrendered to the fact that there is, not only in computing but in almost all phenomena, a moment when we blink and lose a sliver of information that we would not be able to understand anyway? Because there is always something incomprehensible and fascinating in chemical reaction, in natural processes, in the properties of objects and the way they react when they are related. There is something atavistic and magical in an explosion, in a walking robot, in the fermentation of bread dough or in childbirth. They are all things of the same order: they harbour within them a moment in which consciousness reaches its horizon and cannot see beyond it. Even in science, which we endow with an objectivity and a capacity to know everything about the world, there are certain lullabies to put logic and reason to sleep. In the words of the physicist Jorge Wagensberg in an interview with the Catalan magazine (Pausa.) in 1991: all kinds of knowledge are a fiction more or less approximate to reality. Nothing in this world can be totally looked at and understood, from all its angles, at the same time. The objective, the truth, as in Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, is a cubist phenomenon, impossible to attain. And this is not negative. What is negative is that the general attitude towards technology tends to lock us into a binary system of thinking: either it is totally impossible to understand technology, or it is totally possible. Either it controls us and is to be feared, or I am totally in control of it and am a superior being. In both cases, as in everything that prompts us to make a binary choice, we are wrong. Both positions are uncertain.
The algorithm imitates chance, serendipity, in its powerful capacity to combine all the possibilities of the world. Technology does nothing that humans cannot do, but it does so at speeds and in dimensions beyond human capacity or knowledge. The feeling we have on the Internet that ‘magical’ things happen has to do with an entity that leaves little to chance: the algorithm. The feeling of powerful destiny when the scroll shows us something we felt we should know, something that fits our interests at the time, has nothing to do with a supernatural will that wants to show you things in the world when you need them most, but with thousands of combinations of content according to the trace you leave on the Internet. The more you use the Internet, the more accurate the algorithm will be at putting in front of you just what you need, or what you will need from then on. This almost predictive quality of users' desires or needs does give the algorithm a certain supernatural power, but this has to do with the systematic analysis at every instant of the interaction with the machine and its network, which would be impossible for the capabilities of an ordinary human being. We must ask ourselves the following question: if we were attentive to everything around us, and the interactions of each element with another, would we also be able to guess the future, to anticipate? Isn't intuition that sort of organic algorithm that lives in us silenced by the speed of the present?
Magic is only magic to the outsider. Like a card trick: there is a complex and marvellous technique that is imperceptible to us and over which the immense light of magic rises. But magic has masters. Magic has books. It is memorised and repeated until it is perfected and the spell happens. As Marcel Mauss writes in A General Theory of Magic (1972) ‘magic is linked to science in the same way as to technology. It is not only a practical art, but also a storehouse of ideas. It attaches great importance to knowledge, one of its main sources’(p.143). This definition offers an antidote to helplessness in the face of technological complexity, because magic is anything that accumulates learning and can be transmitted and learned. In books of incantations come words made into formulas, prompts and algorithms that, when they come out of our mouths, change the world, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. If we do not learn these technological spells, if we do not at least take an interest in how they shape our existence, these digital spells will not only change the world: they will change us. That is why, like the magic apprentice in the fairy tales, what the world needs from us is the will to learn, to know more. The darkness of a process can only be overcome through curiosity, which can open the doors and windows of our world and make it bigger, fill it with air and light. Anyone who sits in a classroom, in front of a book, even in front of a Youtube tutorial, with enough diligence, will one day be able to see how the strange words are ordered under his wishes and the machine obeys. Anyone who sits in front of a spell book and studies will, in time, be able to enunciate a spell that illuminates their path and that of others: in a world where light is needed more than ever, that is revolutionary.
– Mayte Gómez Molina. mmmad Festival 2025
MMMAD is a non-profit project whose aim is to exhibit, disseminate and think about digital creation. Focused on the intersection between digital culture and public space, it transforms Madrid into the inter-national capital of digital art during the month of May since 2020, with a programme consisting of exhibitions, installations, calls, workshops and meetings throughout the city every year.
This is what previous editions were like:
This is what previous editions were like:
MMMAD 2023
MMMAD 2022
MMMAD 2021