CRYPTOLITH I: The New Magical Renaissance

CRYPTOLITH I: The New Magical Renaissance [2022, AI]

Leaked Documents from the England’s Council of Legislation and Governing Body of Hyper Real Simulations and Constructs

Digital Pamphlet Series, 2022–2186
Created in collaboration with GPT-1, GPT-2, and GPT-3
(OpenAI Beta Artist Program)

⋆ READ/DOWNLOAD THE FULL SET OF DOCUMENTS HERE
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⋆ PURCHASE AS NFTs
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A Speculative Leak from the Bureaucracy of the Future

CRYPTOLITHS is an ongoing series of speculative digital pamphlets, each curated from a fragmented archive of classified paperwork, internal protocols, and esoteric codexes attributed to England’s Council of Legislation and Governing Body of Hyper Real Simulations and Constructs—a secretive, bureaucratic entity tasked with overseeing the stability of hyperreality itself. Presented as leaked documents from an alternate timeline, this project constructs an elaborate mythology of governance, secrecy, and the technocratic management of simulated worlds.

Drawing upon procedural language, cryptic directives, and algorithmically generated pseudo-legislation, the documents blur the boundaries between legal code, speculative fiction, and philosophical treatise. They read like transmissions from a world where simulated realities require governmental oversight, where quantum jurisdictions must be legislated, and where bureaucratic entities operate across vast timelines—issuing decrees that extend not just into the future, but into the structural fabric of perception itself.

[The Production of Post-Truth” exhibition, September 30, 2022, weareuglyduck, London]

Machine Intelligence as an Archive of the Absurd

The texts were generated in collaboration with GPT-1, GPT-2, and GPT-3 through an artist beta access program by OpenAI, with the AI model functioning as both co-author and archival mechanism. By training the language model on real-world governmental documents, technical white papers, and historical codexes, the AI was coaxed into producing its own synthetic bureaucracy—generating edicts on interdimensional law, enforcement protocols for anomalous entities, and regulatory frameworks for unstable constructs. The result is a textual hallucination: a system of rules governing simulations, parallel realities, and speculative futures that feel both impossibly distant and disturbingly familiar.

The pamphlets operate as artifacts from a world that doesn’t (yet) exist, inviting the reader to engage with them as leaked intelligence—classified knowledge that has mysteriously surfaced from an alternative timeline. Each entry is an experiment in how artificial intelligence can serve as a tool for speculative world-building, creating not just a fictional narrative but an entire epistemology of hidden governance.

A Dystopian Administrative Theology

Within these pamphlets, readers encounter a world where the infrastructure of reality itself is regulated, modified, and occasionally erased by an unseen Council. The texts describe simulations within simulations, encrypted rituals, esoteric legal frameworks, and classified doctrines governing the maintenance of hyper-real constructs. Snippets of mathematical folklore, quantum bureaucracy, and computational metaphysics are woven into passages that oscillate between ominous declarations and procedural absurdity:

“Before world history could be written, the world had to build itself. Before the world could build itself, the world had to be created. Before the world could be created, the language had to be developed…”

Through fragmented government mandates, cryptic meeting minutes, and elaborate protocols for managing high-risk hyper-real events, CODEXLORE envisions an institution that presides over simulated dimensions, interdimensional anomalies, and the governance of the human mind itself. The texts speak of Mayhem Protocols, White Forest Encryption Models, and Digital Noumenautics, hinting at a covert struggle to regulate the proliferation of simulations and artificial consciousness.

The Council and its Forbidden Knowledge

Among the texts are classified doctrines, obscure legal frameworks, and ritualistic decrees, revealing the inner workings of the Council:

The White Forest Protocol – A cryptographic transmission system for passing messages undetected through quantum voids, utilizing Merkle trees and probabilistic encryption methods.
Pandemonium Matrix Financial Structures – A breakdown of how simulated economies function independently of combat mechanics, yet remain susceptible to Salmagard—a shadow entity that destabilizes digital markets.
The ISCO Doctrine – A foundational text detailing the International Simulation Control Order (ISCO) and its role in regulating the “preservation of humanity” through controlled hyperrealities.
SCP-3009 Access Directives – Instructions for interacting with an enigmatic anomaly that may hold the key to understanding simulation theory itself.
Noumenautics: Digital Memoryship & the 7th Knowledge – A fragmented essay on consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the dissolution of reality through encoded knowledge.

The Council’s existence is uncertain. Some documents indicate that it will not be formally recognized until the year 2186—yet its influence appears to stretch across timelines, with records suggesting its involvement in events spanning from 1042 to 2321 in “human history.” Whether the Council is a governing body of the future or a retroactive myth encoded into past bureaucracies remains deliberately ambiguous.

Bureaucratic Horror, Hyperreality, and the Disintegration of Meaning

At its core, CRYPTOLITHS are a meditation on the nature of authority, belief, and the ways in which systems of governance produce their own fictions. The documents, with their impersonal tone and hyper-rationalized absurdities, evoke a Kafkaesque dystopia of administrative excess, where legislation extends into realms beyond human comprehension. Their content oscillates between the mundane and the cosmic, resembling leaked government briefings, religious prophecy, and failed AI-generated legalese all at once.

By fabricating a bureaucratic horror scenario in which reality itself requires legislative intervention, the project questions the legitimacy of institutional knowledge and the authority of language. If we accept these documents as real—if we momentarily suspend disbelief and take them as factual artifacts—what does that say about our faith in paperwork, legal frameworks, and the structures that dictate our collective reality?

Through its interplay between machine-generated text, speculative fiction, and conceptual art, CRYPTOLITHS acts as a mirror to our present era of accelerating bureaucratic abstraction, artificial intelligence governance, and the creeping realization that the world may already be a construct, and that the rules governing it remain undisclosed.

Editions & Distribution

Each digital pamphlet is published as a limited edition of 10, with more scheduled for release throughout 2022 and 2186. The documents exist in a liminal state between art and classified intelligence, presented through an enigmatic and evolving network of online and offline dissemination channels.

Future editions will continue to expand on the Council’s fragmented archives, delving deeper into its secret doctrines, lost simulations, and the eventual revelation of its ultimate purpose.