Karin Valis

From Lord Shiva’s Tandava to the multidimensional vector space of Word Embeddings used in the state-of-the-art generative AI models, the divine essence of language unravels. The dance of creation continues, inside the boney rigs of A100 industrial-grade GPUs into realms we are just beginning to imagine.

In this talk, we first look at the parallels between Sanskrit and Ancient Hebrew and the belief they are the basic building blocks of the universe. Then we try to conceptualise the creation process as a mixing of primal energies in multidimensional coordinate systems, and at the end, we look at the problem of word embeddings used to encode language in large language models such as GPT. What parallels can we find between the naming magick, sacred alphabets and computational intelligence?

Karin Valis is a Berlin-based machine learning engineer and writer with a deep passion for everything occult and weird. Her work focuses mainly on combining technology with the esoteric, with projects such as Tarot of the Latent Spaces (visual extraction of the Major Arcana Archetypes) and Cellulare (a tool for exploring digital non-ordinary reality for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies Europe). She co-hosted workshops, talks and panel discussions such as
Arana in the Feed (Uroboros 2021), Language in the Age of AI: Deciphering Voynich Manuscript (Trans-States 2022) and Remembering Our Future: Shamanism, Oracles and AI (NYU Shanghai 2022). She writes Mercurial Minutes and hosts monthly meetings of the occult and technology enthusiasts Gnostic Technology.