Sultry whirlwinds, rocks and donkeys, 820 steps above, the rustle of rye, silvery shivers of moonlight. Heading up to Saint Bartholomew’s church on Alicudi at this time of year is risky business: scuba divers drown, fishermen’s boats never return, tourists fall to their deaths. Craggy coastline dissipates under a flattened mountain top; the ruins of an old church are lit up bruise-blue by a full moon that slips out of the clouds. Looking out over the horizon, saturated with oceanic feeling, there you see them: the Maiara witches, returning from Palermo and the mainland with satchels stuffed with treats. Mirrored in the water, their skin is translucent, their hair phosphorescent. You look down at your outstretched hands over the knife’s edge of the cliffside and you too are glowing, flecks of freckles like stardust from fungal rye, in your bread, your milk, your blood, nourishing a lost magic—

Tai Shani works in the sticky space between myth and history, where the unknowability of the past gives way to a multiplicity of potential realities. Research into a women’s commune in the suburbs of Rome morphed into the artist’s discovery of Alicudi and its psychedelic entanglement with ergot: the small volcanic island, situated within the Aeolian archipelago off of Sicily, believes itself to have been poisoned with fungus-contaminated rye for the last 450 years. Though the climatic conditions to sustain this psychoactive fungus are incredibly particular – and in all likelihood, the self-contained society wasn’t tripping on ergot-laced grains since its establishment in the 1500s – the story is sewn deep into the cultural consciousness of the island. How do these speculative mythologies crystallize, and to what end?

“What I liked about these stories is that while everywhere else in Europe thinks of the witch as porous to evil, a wrecker of civilization,” reflects Shani, “but in the Aeolian Islands, this character is the total opposite. I was interested in how the witch in this shared and extended fantasy became this sort of socialist figure.”

Shani’s fascination with the self-seeded mythology of Alicudi and its relationship to the psychedelic experience, alternative histories of witchcraft, and the materiality of altered states of consciousness, like the fungal spores of this devil rye – so named for the way purple-black fungal shoots grow out from the infected rye plant like horns – ultimately coagulated into The Neon Hieroglyph (2021). Split into nine loose episodes that are bookended by a hallucinogenic introductory animation, the fractured narrative fluctuates from macro to micro-focus, migrating from past to future, from molecular to interstellar. At the root of these hazy, incandescent episodes is an interest in the affective dimensions of the psychedelic experience – as a kind of porosity that splits open the self, abstracts language, and claws at a sensory intelligence of a universal awareness – and the latent political power of that feeling. ‘This feeling of being one with the external world as a whole exists in both psychoanalysis and philosophical-esoteric-mystical writing,” Shani suggests. “The Neon Hieroglyph was trying to create a communist affect by talking about psychedelic experiences or certain kind of senses that happen during them.”

A psychedelic tone runs through The Neon Hieroglyph – dilated and wonderous, the universe marveling at itself. Episode four hones in close on a CGI eye crying pixelated tears. Clusters of stars shimmer in the sticky substrate of the iris: “we are lifted and stirred by a motion that animates all things,” reflects the narrator. “Within that motion, we touch and are touched by a harmony in which nothing is out of step.”

The next episode, loosely formed around a moment in The Eleusinian Mysteries where Persephone enters the underworld, has us doing the opposite: hovering, disembodied, up a flight of stairs within an empty suburban home. Entering a cobalt-carpeted bedroom washed in light, we inch closer to its single window. The camera pans outdoors to reveal an undulating trippy greenscape, which slowly inverts itself; zooming out, the swaying grass slowly morphs into the lips of the narrator, whose ego splits and melts into a CGI overlay of itself, eventually eclipsed by her digital avatar.

Sensory excess is woven into the work, from its cosmic 3D-generated imagery to the shining, shuddering face of its AI-altered narrator/protagonist, who perpetually slips between real and digital personas. But the most arresting aspect of the work is Shani’s writing – The Neon Hieroglyph is principally a project of language, and a push to move beyond it. In thinking through the limits and ecstasy of words, Shani cites multiple overlapping references – from Jackie Wang’s idea of the Oceanic Feeling as communist affect, to Maurice Blanchot’s essay, “From Dread to Language” – and the poststructuralist feminist idea of “écriture feminine” – coined by Helene Cixous in the 80s as a project of writing excess into the world.

“It’s true that there’s a process of neutralization and diminishing of language,” says Shani. “But there’s also an opening up: writing can take a chaotic idea, or idea of affect, and opens it into a shared space of words. In my writing, words become portals or wormholes. It’s a different economy of words. In The Neon Hieroglyph I use Baroque lists of strange materials and colors – hearing them puts you in an affective and unfamiliar territory.””

It’s said that within medieval Europe, when a large majority of the population was illiterate, people would flood the churches: not just to admire the light-washed stained-glass windows, or marvel at the cosmic curvature of the navel, but to listen to the Mass sermon – delivered in Latin – of which they couldn’t understand a word. The sound of scripture was ecstatic, hallucinogenic – the language of the gods – holy enough to get high in a cloud of unknowing.

“For every inscribed mythology, there’s a lost one as well,” says Shani. “How would you talk about the world if all you ever knew was the psychedelic experience?”

Watching The Neon Hieroglyph, there are moments where the vivid vocabularies deployed by Shani give way to a diffuse sort of affect, something that hovers low on the horizon. Language flows in and flows out like the tide, cycling through you like phases of the moon, and you fall out of it a little, away from conscious earshot. The words dilate and peel away from their meaning; in other words, you become something like those churchgoers mid-rapture, or fumbling in conversation mid-trip. You become translucent. Language passes through you and other things enter the foreground – such as the voice of the transfiguring narrator: a kind of futuristic, placeless accent built through AI.

In The Neon Hieroglyph, the actor Molly Moody became an organic algorithm filter that snubbed out bits of her natural accent. Adding other accents – American, Scottish – to other words, it becomes this completely untraceable voice – a kind of futuristic speech, an amalgamation of different tongues, existing in this threshold space that’s both alienating and arresting.

The Neon Hieroglyph is not Shani’s first experiment with AI to weird the world of her work. DC: Semiramis (2019) – a monumental, five-year undertaking inspired by an experimental proto-feminist text from the 15th century – imagines a speculative city of women heralded over by AI characters. One sequence of DC’s episodic narrative is told by an AI situated at the end of the universe, known as Mnemesoid. As the world’s non-hierarchical disembodied historical data aggregate, Mnemesoid allows users to replay her synthesized historical memories from any perspective: human, animal, amoeba, object. Another episode presents Psy Chic Anem One: a time-traveling AI with no body but an interface, an open-source oracle from the “anarchical beyond” that’s partially inspired by Shani’s interest in web-based oracle systems, from the Online Oracle of Delphi to Free Tarot and I-Ching. In another episode, a therapeutic AI harvests human genomic data to generate empathy faculties.

Spanning writing, performance, film, and a quasi-utopian, postmodern architectural installation of pastel hues and organic forms, DC merges physical and digital affect through these imagined AI systems, which try to reproduce or express the stickiest sort of feelings –profound self-consciousness, grief, fear, pain – that, in Shani’s words, “sit beyond the threshold of language”. Infusing AI with human subjectivities may be the highest desire of Silicon Valley circuits – a stab at anthropomorphism meant to soothe fears of an algorithmic takeover, known as the “manufactured normalcy field”– but what if this relationship was inverted, or the hierarchy flattened? How could AI expand or complicate not just the idea of being human, but embodiment and its political affect?