From spectral sketches to liminal lithographs, let thy desire conjure some of the uncanniest haunts yet to be diffused from the latent plane’s entropic neither-neither aether! This is a Stable Diffusion model trained via Replicate/GitHub Dreambooth template, and focusing specifically on the early period book-illustration styles of Austin Osman Spare (training images include some of the works featured in Spare’s “Earth Inferno”, “Book of Satyrs”, “Book of Pleasure”, and “Focus of Life”, as well as a few contemporaneous pieces).

IMPORTANT: Use the pre-prompt tag “zos” (trained for 2000 steps), or/and “aos” (trained for 400 steps) for the model to work!

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE : In his youth celebrated as the next Beardsley or Watts, quickly achieving and transcending an apotheosis of Symbolist-style ink illustration and lithography, with a strong measure of the occult, Spare matured into a reclusive and under-acknowledged forebear of just about half of the twentieth century’s avant-gardes, while in select ways anticipating those of the twenty-first as well. Implementing since early youth a ceaselessly evolving mixed practice of visual creativity, experimentation, philosophical reflection, and idiosyncratic mysticism, Spare was among the first to blend formally refined skills as an illustrator and painter with the practices of a systematized, deliberate psychic automatism, thereby becoming the first to arrive at a fully fledged Surrealism, two decades or more before Breton’s trendy manifestos.

By the time Surrealism hit in the late 1920’s and the 1930’s, Spare was already artistically elsewhere (without ever fully abandoning his earlier styles), by the late 30’s having developed a practice of quasi-reproducing perspective-skewed (in his word “siderealist”) analogues of mass-produced images of celebrities and the like from magazines and posters. In this way, he was unknowingly advance-sketching a purview of Pop Art. Beyond these examples, the vast range of distinct styles emerged in Spare’s artistic practice feature advance or contemporaneous matches to just about everything under the rare sun of London (and not only), from Art Nouveau 2.0 psychedelic posters to Geiger-like horror to hyper-realist war-paintings to comic book-like art (from 60s-like stylized camp to 80s-like grittiness).

Of course, as any fan of Spare is well aware, the key to his artistic inventiveness lies in his parallel practice as a mystic philosopher, occult practitioner, as well as an author. His undoubtedly best-known and credited innovation is the sigil method, which singularly frees the creative, empirical, agnostic, and experimental elements of mystical praxis (aka “the occult”) from their perennially enforced domination by archaic belief systems, esoteric epistemes, questionable traditions, arbitrary symbolic frameworks, and other sorts of non-universally-applicable spooky dress codes uncritically adopted wholesale by all sorts of mages, witches, stock brokers, and others.

Later on, through further developments by practitioners directly indebted to Spare, the emergence of so-called “Chaos Magick” saw “Magick” becoming a shorthand for nothing more, nor less, than a sort of radically personalized experimental practice of indirectly pre-priming probabilistic causalities, typically by the means of a deliberate infusion of associatively effectuating contexts or systems (such as the “code-base” of the subconscious mind) with multimodally encoded and condensed messaging packages (such as Spare-methodolized pictoral or cryptoglyphic sigils, individually constructed letter-like glyphs encoding in their very form an active (or else dormant) subliminal trace of a source verbal messaging of intent). The parallels to inference and the like should be obvious enough. One could go on by drawing comparisons between zero-shot and “divination”, etc, but I’ll leave that up to others, for the time being. Especially since there already’s been quite a lot written (and posted!) about relevant subjects, going back to the very emergence of the internet as we know it and even further back to the hippie and punk cyberneticians of the 60s and 70s. – Intro by A.C.T. SOON® (aka Aleksey Calvin) LINKS: One may find a sizable library of resources gathered from “chaote” or “chaoite” message boards (going back to the 80s!) at http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos_all.php

To learn more about Spare, you can find many articles and book excerpts in the above-linked library or at: http://www.austinspare.co.uk/zos.html

For a comprehensive online gallery of Spare’s artworks, particularly rich in his book illustrations, you would find that here: https://ajl.smugmug.com/AustinOsmanSpare