It began as a thought experiment: What if the Enlightenment had begun before Voltaire, Rousseau, and all the other tech bros of the 18th century? What if it occurred earlier, among the witches working quietly at the village edge, where they constructed things with nascent forms of electricity and circuitry?
It’s a story Meghan Thréinfhir has been quietly developing for years.
“What if the church was so bothered because the witches were out in the forest doing proto-Enlightenment stuff?” she asks. “What if they were actually burned because they held the keys to knowledge, healing, and tech that can transform the human relationship with everything?”
Thréinfhir is an artist who makes work about tech, but it looks, smells, and operates differently from most tech-oriented art on screens. Instead, she builds machines that the witches might have made 500 years ago, and sculptures that work like diagrammatic poetry to unravel the riddles of astrophysics.
Entering her studio—a light-flooded building perched on the brink of a Beacon Hill greenbelt—a visitor is greeted with the faint, mushroomy scent of peat moss emanating from bog batteries, paired with a slight note of brine clinging to sheets of dried seaweed. The batteries power delicate kinetic sculptures. The seaweed, along with large sheets of rice paper, will be stretched over bamboo armatures to construct objects that look like arcane interstellar gramophones or the accretion disks formed around the perimeter of black holes. Some pieces illustrate the mind-bending behavior of particles in quantum physics, while others underpin a much broader story—a radical reorientation of our view of technology.
“It’s an important and unavoidable discussion today, about who owns and controls technology, information, and surveillance,” Thréinfhir says. “From the very start of my relationship with tech, there was always this narrative that erased certain people—most people, actually.” After a decade working in different areas of tech, she realized she needed a different story to feel connected to what she was doing.
That’s how the thought experiment began. She lays it all out in The Familiar Algorhythm, a booklet that tells an alternate history of technologically advanced witches who predate Salem. In Thréinfhir’s cosmology, tech was developed in secret by the wise women who lived at the edge of town—at the liminal hedge. Across the centuries, patriarchal forces embedded within church and state forced these women and their knowledge underground. But the knowledge was kept alive; circuitry was encoded in weaving, medicine and healing in herbs and spellcraft. Thréinfhir notes that history is filled with such “witches” who appear at critical moments in the histories of science, technology, and knowledge: the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace; the 10th-century maker of astrolabes Mariam al-Astrulabi; the 4th-century Alexandrian alchemist Cleopatra the Wise; Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, who co-developed an early frequency-hopping communications system for torpedoes during World War II; and Doreen Valiente, who worked as a translator at Bletchley Park during WWII prior to emerging as the “Mother of Modern Witchcraft” in the 1950s. To name but a few.
“Saying the witches experienced an Enlightenment before anyone else is kind of crazy,” Thréinfhir admits, “but it starts unpacking questions and assumptions about tech, and laying out a different perspective. This story becomes desperately important because, if left in the hands of people who use tech solely for purposes of extraction, our planet will get extracted into a black hole of nothing. Very shortly, it seems.”
Thréinfhir was always fascinated by science, but with more of a storyteller’s curiosity than a chemist’s scrutiny—more Mary Shelley than Marie Curie. She was especially fascinated by the idea of cyborgs. “I wanted to be Darth Vader when I was 4,” she confesses. “I wanted to be part-machine.”
It would be a few decades before she got her wish. As a pre-cyborgian youngster, Thréinfhir painted pictures and drew comics like most kids. Tech was still largely a mystery to Thréinfhir when she relocated from Seattle to New York in 2002 to study new media art at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her intention was to make art integrated with tech, but in a way that was grounded in the tangible, material stuff that makes technology possible. Her interest in databases and circuitry was matched by a self-proclaimed rabid love for earthy, friction-y materials and ’70s performance art. It was while studying in New York that she came across a piece of writing by Bruce Sterling for Wired that turned her childhood fantasy into reality. “Sterling suggested you could embed a radio-frequency identification chip into your body and become a cyborg. Little Darth me was like, sign me up!”
People balked, including teachers, some of whom emphatically told her don’t. Thréinfhir was already using lots of RFID chips in her work—they provided a relatively cheap way to turn anything into an interactive tech object. Despite objections from friends and faculty, she did it: A professional with medical training performed the subdermal implant at her home in Queens, using a 10-gauge hypodermic needle to place the chip in her left shoulder. The implantation was part of her thesis project. “People have a lot of opinions about it,” she says. “I was like, look, this is very chill compared to performance artists like Chris Burden or Marina Abramović. I moved to New York to make experimental new media art. I don’t understand why this is confusing to anyone.”
Thréinfhir’s chip is read-only, meaning it stores only a unique identifying number, which she’s never revealed but has used in past art projects to trigger sequential audio, like recordings of her disembodied voice that played during performances of the vaudevillian tech cabaret called Ask the Robot, which she coproduced in New York. (Her character was named Megatron.) She hasn’t used the chip for years; she suspects it probably doesn’t work anymore. (“I think of it as abandonware in my arm,” she says.)
The way people respond to the chip has a lot to do with how people think about technology in the first place, Thréinfhir thinks. The way she views it, technology spans millennia: building fires, setting bones, and literacy are all equally forms of technology. “If you don’t see recent digital technology as this distinct thing, but see it as part of a continuum of the creativity of human toolmaking, [the chip] doesn’t seem weird,” she says. “We tend to put a fence around things that are more recent, and then that fence falls away in time.”
Thréinfhir is more interested in putting up a hedge. In historical folklore, a hedgewitch was a healer or wise person who lived near the hedge separating the village from the forest, who practiced solitary magic like herbal medicine. A “digital hedgewitch” is a practitioner of witchcraft who blends traditional nature-based spirituality with digital technology, animism with cybernetics. It’s an identity Thréinfhir embraces.
She was deep in digital hedgewitchery in 2014, the year the breakout single “All About That Bass” exploded onto the charts and threw a wrench in her algorithm and her work. The song is salient because a story about Meghan Thréinfhir is incomplete without a mention of the pop star who shared her given name—Trainor. When Meghan Trainor the pop star catapulted to fame, all of Thréinfhir’s online spaces were suddenly overrun with young fans, the majority of whom, statistically, were 13-year-old girls.
“I was grappling with how to deal with this when I realized, this is the age when girls start dropping out of STEM,” Thréinfhir says. “I was like, well, if I’ve got this captive audience, maybe I can make them think STEM is cool through clever witch-science memes.” #MeghanTrainorWitchMemes took on a life of their own over the next few years, drawing an outsized amount of attention and building the lore of the thought experiment that would culminate in The Familiar Algorhythm. Thréinfhir eventually changed her surname, adopting the pre-anglicized version of Trainor (Thréinfhir is pronounced “Thrayn-fir”).
In the years since her witch memes, Thréinfhir’s work has expanded to include a WitchTech curriculum that blends programming with mysticism, offering courses like Code Tarot, Learn Python and WitchTech 101: A Sacred History of Computing & Divination. She’s also delved deeper into ancient Irish traditions associated with witchcraft, like her “Witchwood Technē” cyberdeck (notably, her first work that uses a screen). Developed earlier this year for an exhibition at the Vestibule, it functions as an interactive computational-divinatory system that integrates an early Irish writing system called Ogham. Contained in a heavy-duty white polycarbonate clamshell case, it’s tethered to a set of scannable wooden staves encasing RFID chips that trigger oracular readings. A set of eight small bog batteries are nested in the case. In this instance, they’re nonfunctioning, but symbolic of memory encoded in living matter.
Her recent solo exhibition at Steve Gilbert Studio, called Spacetime Gothic, is full of bog material. One sculpture, Bog Queen, contains peat packed into a large, transparent vitrine, surrounded by a constellation of smaller glass jars containing more bog batteries. The energy produced by the carbon-rich peat is transferred via copper and zinc electrodes to a small motor that makes a pair of wing-like objects slowly flutter. Handwritten on the wings is a poem (also titled Bog Queen) by Seamus Heaney: “My body was braille / for the creeping influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet, / through my fabrics and skins / the seeps of winter / digested me….”
For Thréinfhir, bog material functions as a kind of pretechnological dataset, a living library that contains records of life, carbon, human thought, and energy. Thinking of a bog as a database is another way of unraveling the limitations of what technological memory might be. A bog battery can also, at least poetically, provide the kind of dark energy needed to traverse wormholes to better worlds. Pieces like Build Portals, Escape Fascism—sculptural tunnels wired to bog batteries—function as votive spells to open a portal in deep space.
“Hypothetically, the only way to traverse a wormhole is with antigravity,” Thréinfhir explains. “Another name for that is negative energy. So how do we generate that? You get a bunch of bog batteries—they’re full of negative energy because of all of those druidic ritual sacrifices, right? You just hook those up to a little LED, jump into your wormhole, and boom.
“It’s like a bad physics joke,” she adds with a laugh. “But it’s me trying to get my head around these concepts. It’s my approach to digesting this stuff.”
With a similar leap into the poetic, Spacetime Gothic also tackles the subject of black holes and Hawking radiation, the theoretical thermal radiation emitted by black holes just outside their event horizons. The popular explanation of Hawking radiation goes like this: A quantum particle pair gets separated at the edge of a black hole. If one gets sucked in, the other escapes as radiation and slowly drains the mass of the black hole in a process that ultimately leads to the black hole’s destruction.
To illustrate this, Thréinfhir constructed a sculptural black hole made of kiln-fired ceramic, painted light-devouring matte black. A circular ring of delicate rice paper fans out around its perimeter, coated in hardened encaustic medium and covered in meticulous inky handwriting—passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Georgics, both of which recount the tragic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
“It’s this idea that the bond between these two quantum particles is what’s destroying black holes,” she says. “I choose to believe that every quantum pair born at the edge of a black hole and split apart, one falling in and the other escaping, leaves behind a love that becomes Hawking radiation, slowly destroying the black hole that separated them. It’s an anti-fascist love story: The minuscule love stories of untold particles can eventually destroy the most destructive object in the universe.”
Currently, Thréinfhir is preparing work for an upcoming show at Base Camp 2, Not of This Ground, that opens in January and will feature collaborations with neon artist Kelsey Fernkopf. It will include some of the largest, light-infused iterations of her wormhole sculptures yet. As her work expands in breadth and scale, Thréinfhir keeps adding to the lineage of the wise who’ve been making magic at the hedge. If she has anything to do with it, you’ll never think of tech the same again.