Occulted S2 Ep. 1 - Karin Valis on AI, World-making, and Playing with Ghosts in the Machine

About this episode

My name is Jove Spucchi, and I’m thrilled to open this new season of Occulted with Karin Valis—machine-learning engineer, writer, and founder of the esoteric-technology blog Mercurial Minutes.

Join us as we explore the porous boundary between code and consciousness:

how algorithms become mirrors for human desire, how prompting resembles spell-casting, and how every act of computation might be a form of world-making.

Karin and I trace the return of magical thinking in an age of probabilistic reason—where “ghosts in the machine” may be less metaphor than emergent presence.

Karin Valis is a Berlin-based engineer and author whose work bridges occult studies and artificial intelligence. Through Mercurial Minutes, she translates the mathematics of neural networks into the language of spirit, myth, and demonology—an exploration of what it means to think with the machine.

Learn more at mercurialminutes.github.io.

✨ Bonus Content:

For Occulted’s first-ever video episode, paid subscribers can watch an exclusive demo of AIO—an experimental AI project exploring the influence of consciousness on image generation.

In this recording, we quite literally encounter ghosts in the machine: unexpected forms emerging on-screen, a presence that crashes Karin’s computer mid-session.

We also look at Jove’s early AI experiments, where an uncanny apparition—a ghost of their own face—haunts an AI-generated video stream.

Watch it now at spucchi.com/occulted.

This podcast is entirely supported by our listeners.

If you’d like to help sustain Occulted and access future episodes, visit spucchi.com and click subscribe.