The ghosts in the code: feminist technowitchcraft and digital art 

LU YANG AND THE AVATAR AS DIGITAL DEITY 

Similarly, Lu Yang, based in Shanghai, creates immersive digital universes that blend Buddhist cosmology, neuroscience, and hyper-pop aesthetics. Their avatars – genderless, ecstatic, fragmented – perform a kind of techno-ritual that collapses boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the spiritual and the synthetic. Works like Delusional Mandala or DOKU: The Self do not merely aestheticize Eastern mysticism, but propose a model of the self as a continuously reincarnating data-being, animated through visual spells and algorithmic invocation. 

MAGIC AS COUNTER-TECHNOLOGY 

These practices resonate with the writings of cyberfeminist theorists like Sadie Plant and Donna Haraway, who challenged the masculinist narratives of technological progress and reclaimed the figure of the cyborg and the witch as insurgent metaphors. But the current resurgence of technowitchcraft also responds to the specific anxieties of our time: data extraction, surveillance capitalism, ecological collapse. In this context, the occult becomes not a retreat from politics but a lens to view the unseen infrastructures of power. As artist-scholar Johanna Hedva writes in Sick Woman Theory, “magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.” What if art, too, could be a form of spellcasting – against burnout, against productivity, against the violence of being quantified? 

MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI AND DIGITAL RESURRECTIONS 

This strand of practice also critiques the colonial underpinnings of so-called “universal” technologies. Morehshin Allahyari’s project She Who Sees the Unknown digitally resurrects female and queer jinns – spirits from Middle Eastern folklore – through 3D printing and storytelling. Allahyari treats the act of coding as a feminist and decolonial ritual, reviving erased mythologies and embedding them into the materiality of the digital. The archive becomes magical. The algorithm becomes a vessel for ancestral memory. 

THE GLITCH AS MAGICAL INTERRUPTION 

In contrast to Silicon Valley’s utilitarian fetish for “disruption”, these artists enact slow, speculative, often ambiguous gestures. Their practices invite us to feel, rather than just understand. They speak to a kind of epistemic pluralism – where rationality is no longer privileged, and the spiritual, the erotic, and the speculative regain their place in how we interface with machines. 

Indeed, the very notion of the “glitch” – so often interpreted as error or failure – is re-signified within these practices as a moment of rupture, a glimpse into an alternative system of meaning. In feminist technowitchcraft, the glitch is not a malfunction but a symptom of an otherwise, an ontological leakage. It is the ghost in the machine demanding to be acknowledged. 

Ultimately, these works challenge us to reconsider what it means to “know” and to “create” in the digital age. They offer not solutions, but incantations; not blueprints, but enchantments. In doing so, they perform an urgent refusal of a world in which everything must be legible, optimized, and owned. By invoking the witch, these artists do not retreat into fantasy – they invoke an embodied, mystical, radical politics that insists another techno-reality is possible.