Pedro Gossler’s Ooze is a video work that is, to say the least, a little strange. It jumps headlong into a series of vignettes, each rendered with the type of ‘amateur’ aesthetic that only someone truly adept can pull off, and which at first come across as mere stream of consciousness musings with an online bent. Odd anecdotes, consisting of slime tutorial wisdom, haunted security cameras and arcane screensavers. And while this surface reading isn’t incorrect, it is all these things, over time (and ideally, repeat viewings) a more cohesive thread connecting its strange tales starts to come into focus. More than simply anecdotes from a digital age, Ooze presents a type of online folk wisdom; an attempt, grown piecemeal from tidbits of third and fourth hand stories, to arrive at a deeper material understanding of the new, very online world that we find ourselves in.

And not merely folk wisdom, which seeks to understand, but a type of folk magic as well, which seeks to give entry and influence. A folk magic of the internet age. Not the extremely 90s ‘Techno Paganism’ variety, which simply cut and pasted pre-existing occult practices into the digital medium, but rather a holistic, ground-up reinvention of the occult; grown organically out of the new social and material realities of the contemporary network. A new, arcane folk understanding of the digital, born of and for those spaces which are now the most pervasive environment, the closest thing to a ‘nature,’ that entire generations have experienced.

Ooze’s esoteric musings promise the viewer soft powers over this new nature; modes of activity which can be used to sway the near infinite chaos of the net towards beneficial ends. Spells, in other words. Not the precise, wizardly type of spells which have come to dominate popular culture, which have clear mechanical operations and reproducible effects. This form of ‘magic,’ the form which exists within Dungeons and Dragons and TERF boarding schools, is clinical and scientific; an obvious byproduct of age-of-reason industrial thinking. Instead, Gossler’s piece speaks to a much older, more subtle form. If you do or think or say the right thing, at the right time, and in the right way, somewhere down the line the scales will be tipped subtly in your favour. If you can entreat the right entities, their boon will be placed upon you. It is sympathetic magic; like for like, similarity and contagion.

An internet magic for those of us who aren’t born to wealth and power; those who are subject to contemporary conditions without holding sway over them, or immunity to their ravages. And while none of the ‘spells’ presented in Ooze are literally true, (sorry to disappoint) they do speak truthfully to the conditions of our time. Folk magic, as a cultural practice, is a subversion of accepted forms of knowing, accepted hierarchies of power and influence; and the current rise of various forms of digital occultism show us that for all the technology and knowledge that has been made available to the common people, it has not in the least empowered them. We are every bit as hemmed in by the dominant structure as our pre-industrial ancestors, still just as beholden to exploitative power structures ruled by a tiny minority. So why would we not make use of those ancestors’ tools of subversion?

You can limit what we have, but not what we do with it, not what it teaches us. This is the heart of folk magic, and the heart of Ooze.

Maybe.

I think.

Everything above, ultimately, is merely my own best attempt at ascribing a distinct meaning to Gossler’s work, which, as its name implies, is shifting and uncontrollable. An attempt, in words, to systemize what I have seen into something invocable if not necessarily understandable. A spell, essentially. A spell for understanding Ooze. And while I cannot say with any confidence that this attempt has succeeded, or even that I would like it to succeed, to legitimately define Ooze’s shifting and viscous rendition of an internet beyond quotidian classification and the arcane manipulation thereof, I can say that the attempt feels in keeping with the work.

There are ways of both being and knowing which cannot be rectified with the dominant systems of categorization and control. And well for us all that they can’t be, as it is within these zones of ambiguity that alternate, more radical modes are given life. And so I suggest that you all experience Goosler’s strange magic for yourselves. But when you do, make your best effort to sit within its shifting, amorphous nature, and the potentials represented therein. Devise your own folkways, your own spells, for understanding it and the aspects of the contemporary world which it speaks to. Embrace the Ooze.