TULPA. SALVATION PROTOCOL

“The future wants to steal your soul and vaporize it in nanotechnics.”
— Nick Land, Cybergothic

TULPA. SALVATION PROTOCOL is an exhibition project operating at the intersection of the techno-occult and hauntological speculation, in which media are revealed as zones of obsession and spectral presence. The project brings together works that explore the ambiguity of the medium, understood both as a technological dispositif and as an oracle—an operator of divination and invocation.
If early communication theorists conceived media as an externalisation of the human, today we witness a reversal of this paradigm: it is the human who becomes an extension, or who is entirely excluded. Bot-farms embody this inversion in an exemplary manner—rows of low-cost phones, each equipped with its own SIM card, logging in, scrolling, liking, reposting, and chatting, feeding platforms with the signals they demand.
These are contemporary demons: data-formed virtual entities, semi-autonomous shadows produced by feedback loops between alienation and code. From algorithmic tulpas and haunted files to surveillance necromancy, the system functions as a host-body for circuits that replicate by consuming human presence.
In this project, the notion of the “tulpa” is taken as a symbol of mediality itself, in light of the history of the term, whose paranormal meaning represents a late and not entirely accurate reinterpretation of its original sacred dimension. The modern history of the “tulpa,” together with the connotations it has progressively accumulated, is symptomatic: it exemplifies the virulence of mass culture which, in alliance with technological progress, has generated new forms of sectarian consciousness, conspiratorial thinking, and digital tribalism. Tibetan meanings, once appropriated by the Theosophists, acquired new inflections that were later reworked and transformed by television, internet creepypasta culture, and other media.
Not by chance, one of the most pervasive narrative motifs accompanying the evolution of media is that of the cursed file: the moment in which a story’s protagonist comes into contact with a fragment of data that radically alters their existence, infecting reality like a computer virus. One might think of Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011), among many others. The idea of a porous boundary between worlds—of one realm leaking into another through reciprocal contamination—shows how the technological dispositif becomes a trap for an uncanny presence, capable of producing reversible effects on the course of events. This trope finds its roots in historical precedents such as the Jonestown tapes (1978) or the Zapruder film (1963). In these cases, the numinous charge of the recording lies in the fact that it captures an event that destabilises the very logic of recording itself. Rather than functioning as documentation, the recording retroactively transforms the event it registers, collapsing the distinction between document and occurrence.
The discovery of electrical and electromagnetic transmission, together with the development of recording techniques, unfolded in parallel with spiritualism and the re-emergence of animistic intuitions, reconfiguring the medium as an operator of action at a distance—at once physical and spectral. The belief that electromagnetic signals could carry spiritual contamination, or that spirits might speak through noise embedded in recordings, gave rise to a multiplicity of everyday techno-occult practices: from the use of aluminium foil and improvised Faraday cages to protective circuits and DIY barriers adopted by UFO believers, “electronic harassment” communities, denjiha panics, and later New Age tendencies.
These imaginaries did not remain confined to marginal or subcultural spaces. The same anxieties surrounding invisible influence and contamination were progressively absorbed and formalised by governmental institutions and security apparatuses. The media virus, as such, could not be ignored by market forces and the State: its mobilisation as a dispositif of power and a tool of management became possible insofar as both operate according to the principle of contamination. What, within the popular imaginary, appeared as possession, intrusion, or invisible manipulation found its reflection in technical and administrative apparatuses of monitoring, protection, and control. Conspiracy, in this sense, emerges not merely as a reaction to the unknown, but as an indicator of the growing power of the panopticon, sensitive to its own obscene underside.
However, any surveillance infrastructure founded on animistic fears and control protocols inevitably casts its shadow—forms of resistance and hacking ranging from artisanal jammers and pirate radio to networks granting access to “private” surveillance systems. In practice, any monitoring apparatus leaves large volumes of data exposed, vulnerable through flaws in standard firmware. The system thus reveals an ecology of fractures, in which every protocol of surveillance generates its corresponding protocol of intrusion, echoing the work of virologists attempting to develop vaccines for constantly mutating pathogens.
It is within this field of tension—between control and dispersion, protocol and intrusion—that the exhibition positions itself as a counter-operation. Protocols—cryptographic, bureaucratic, or liturgical—regulate access by codifying repetition; yet every protocol also contains seams, points at which order can be reversed or détourned. By converting the very instruments of control into sources of interruption and divergent possibility, the exhibition aims to operate as a techno-feudal antidote, situated beyond the twin logics of control and suggestion.

Text by Anastasia Pestinova