Breaking Open the New Sensorium

Media, Magick, and the Rewiring of Power

Marcel Duchamp’s Rotorelief (1935)

Spinning optical disc designed to hypnotize the eye and dissolve ordinary perception.

Composite of Trump’s tweets rendered as glitchy glyphs, (2025)

1. Introduction

One afternoon in 1935 Marcel Duchamp dropped a spinning cardboard disc he called a Rotorelief onto a phonograph turntable and watched the flat rings bloom into impossible depth. A joke, a toy, and a prophecy, the disc proved that perception is not an innocent window but a programmable device. Today the same principle governs public life. Every subway ride, scroll session, and doom-doom-doom tap of the thumb immerses us in a giant Rotorelief made of screens, feeds, and algorithmic playlists.

The point isn’t that the feed is evil; it’s that it functions as a programmable altar. Every thumb-flick completes a mudra, every on-screen glyph a vow. Treat the phone as mere information conduit and the battle is already lost. Awareness of the ritual frame is the price of psychic autonomy.

This essay traces how we arrived at that altar and what it will take to navigate the new sensorium with clear sight and conscious intent.

"Program or be programmed."- Douglas Rushkoff

2. Hidden Lineage: Crowley → Peale → McLuhan

Together these three figures outline a covert curriculum:

Reality is plastic (Crowley).
Mind is the molding tool (Peale).
Media supply the mold (McLuhan).

Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus
In April 1904, honeymooning in Cairo, English occultist Aleister Crowley claimed to receive a channeled text announcing the dawn of the Aeon of Horus—a civilizational phase ruled not by paternal law (Osiris) or maternal grace (Isis) but by unbridled individual will. Crowley’s mantra, “Do what thou wilt,” reframed reality as plastic awaiting the focused intention of the mage. Magick, he insisted, is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Private presses, traveling lectures, and his short-lived but influential journal The Equinox spread the credo through bohemian London and, via émigré disciples, to Greenwich Village and Hollywood. Also known as The Great Beast/666.

Welcome to the Electric Sensorium
Canada’s Marshall McLuhan supplied the wiring diagram. In 1964’s Understanding Media he argued that technologies are not neutral pipelines for content but active sculptors of cognition. Print trained Western minds to think step-by-step; radio liquefied time into simultaneous acoustic space; television fused eye and ear into a single “cool” field that invited audience participation. “The medium is the massage,” he quipped, because each new apparatus kneads fresh grooves into the nervous system. McLuhan’s ideas diffused through avant-garde art magazines, ad-agency white papers, and late-night NBC talk shows, preparing culture to see media themselves as agents.

Folk Magick in a Sunday Suit
Across the Atlantic, Manhattan minister Norman Vincent Peale filed off the pagan edges and repackaged the same principle for middle-class Protestants. His 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking promised that vivid mental pictures, spoken affirmations, and unwavering belief could secure promotions, marriages, and healed bodies. Peale’s radio show, syndicated column, and Reader’s Digest condensations reached twenty million listeners a week—mass folk-magick disguised as self-help. Corporate seminars, Amway rallies, and Pentecostal revivals still echo his formulas, proving how thoroughly the spell took.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). An English occultist and writer

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), Canadian media theorist

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) An American minister and author

3 · Case Study: Trump the Unconscious Adept

Donald Trump never cracked Magick in Theory and Practice, yet he executed its lessons on the largest stage in the world. Long before politics he mastered televised kayfabe on The Apprentice, oscillating between caring mentor and merciless judge. Viewers learned to accept contradiction as entertainment. When he launched his 2016 campaign the skill set scaled seamlessly: he could be a born-again Christian, a casino mogul, and a blue-collar hero in the same rally because modern media reward vibe over consistency.w sensorium selects performers who collapse ideology into pure vibe and feed it back faster than reason can catch up.

“We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity.”

― Daniel Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

Expressionist Disorientation: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

A vector collection of bespoke chaos sigils from Pinterest—sleek, minimalist designs made for rapid viral sharing and personal adaptation.

4. What Exactly Is the New Sensorium?

Firmware-Upgrade History

For five centuries the West ran on Gutenberg OS: linear rows of black symbols marching across white paper. Radio appended an audio layer that could speak to millions at once—Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats felt like private reassurance in an age of bank runs and breadlines. Television added immersive sight-sound simultaneity. The internet merged every sense, made every receiver a broadcaster, and strapped the whole device to our palms.

Qualities of the Current Field

Non-linear montage – links and swipes outrun ordered chapters.

Affective primacy – we feel before we fact-check.

Imagistic shorthand – one meme can outgun a thousand-word brief.

Participatory recursion – every act of viewing is an act of broadcasting.

Algorithmic curation – opaque loops trap users in bespoke fun-house mirrors.

AI-Generated “Moments” and Synthetic Sense

Large language and image models now churn out infinite remix fodder: auto-deep-faked celebrity endorsements, AI dreamscapes of utopia, and campaign ads that A/B-test a hundred micro-variations overnight.

Reality has become probabilistic, a best-guess hallucination refreshed every scroll. The sensorium is no longer merely electric; it is adaptive, predictive, and hallucinogenic.

Implications & Counter-Spells

Spell-Checking as Media Literacy

Traditional literacy asks, Is the claim true? Sensorial literacy adds What archetype is being invoked? How does my body feel right now? Activists run workshops where students pause videos every 30 seconds, label the emotional payload, and guess the intended behavioural trigger.

Coda: The Rotorelief Revisited

Duchamp’s disc fooled the eye yet demanded physical proximity; you could step away. Today’s feeds wrap the planet, and disconnecting can cost social, economic, even romantic opportunity. Still, the principle endures: perception is programmable.

Who programs it is the ethical question. We can outsource the playlist to profit-seeking algorithms or pick up the record ourselves. Awareness is the first counter-spell; deliberate composition is the next. Every share, remix, or silence is a stroke of the stylus; choose the groove wisely. A starter kit of counter-spell resources—Douglas Rushkoff's work such as "Program or be Programmed", Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and Daniel Pinchbeck's "Breaking Open the Head" offer reliable compass points from the not so distant past for immediate future. The work is ongoing, but the turntable is already spinning in ways we can barely begin to comprehend. Welcome to the new sensorium.

[1] [2] Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village | LivingInternet

https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_mcluhan.htm

[3] [4] [5] [26] Aeon (Thelema) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_(Thelema)

[6] [7] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] RealityTVHacker (1).pdf

file://file-GNGnnz4V1VERhkUNQjFqkF

[8] [9] [10] The Power of Positive Thinking - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking

TOPY Band Portrait

A black-and-white snapshot of T.O.P.Y. affiliates performing “psychic phenomena,” blending performance art, occult ritual, and communal sensory play.

TOPY Modern Flyer (c. 2018)

A hand-cut collage flyer for a Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth gathering, channeling punk-DIY ritual and the networked chaos ethos.

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