NFT series 5: Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari on piece “Sigils of Sacred Magia”
Watch my interview with Berlin-based composer Bnaya Halperin Kaddari on his NFT piece “Sigils of Sacred Magia”. In this piece, he explores the fuzzy line between technology and magic. The work consists of five magic word squares that form words when read horizontally or vertically. Each square links to a sound file chanting spells taken from a 15th-century Kabbalah book. According to the book, each spell is meant to give you coins in times of trouble. There are five different rarities: gold, silver, small silver, copper, and dust. Every time you load the file, it is ‘summoned’ from across the IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) network. With every scan, IPFS stores the file physically closer to the listener to optimize the network, closing the spell’s looping relationship between incanting a thing and creating it in the world.
Watch my interview:
Links to the “Sigils of Sacred Magia”:
Online exhibition page
OpenSea Collection page
Photo of “Sigils of Sacred Magia”:
Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari is a composer and artist, working across a broad spectrum of practices to embody and re-ritualize ways of sounding as an alternative mode of being. Exploring a plethora of artistic strategies that span from instrumental, electro-acoustic, scored, or improvised music, through instrument making and sound installation, to video and somatic work, his work attempts to navigate the physical, political and spiritual turbulences of our world. Trained as a wind player, he studied composition, musicology, and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his master's in composition at the Hochschüle for Music, Theater and Media, Hannover. Between 2016–2018 he was a fellow at the Berlin Center of Advanced Studies of the University of the Arts Berlin and is currently a doctorate student at Goldsmiths College London.
