K-HOLE #5

A RE POR T ON REASON
A RE POR T ON AWARENESS
A RE POR T ON DEA T H
A REPOR T ON DISAPPOI N TMEN T
A RE POR T ON NE W Y OR K
A RE POR T ON THE FU TU RE
A RE POR T ON REAL I TY
A RE POR T ON BEL IE F
A RE POR T ON FA I TH
A RE POR T ON DOU B T............
 THE LAST 100 DAYS

Things were mopey in the K-HOLE offices. Dystopia texts no

longer made Sean *zing*. Greg was depressed because he
didnt feel like there was any imagination anymore. When
Emily thought about what that meant, the only thing that came
to mind was Disneyland. Chris refused to do any client work
whatsoever. Dena had long since moved to Los Angeles.

When K-HOLE convened in 2012 to write the Brand Anxiety

Matrix, things were a little bit different. We believed that we
could get to the bottom of things by thinking. That we could
get to the truth. There was a feeling that we could decode

3
 THE LAST 100 DAYS

things as a group; that our PDFs would make us powerful;

that we could use our insights to gird ourselves against the
storms that were coming, be they social, political, ecological,
emotional, whatever. Since then, two things have become
clear. One was that the storms we predicted never came.
Rather, we woke up one day and Antarctica was warmer than
New York. The second was that the truth was not enough. It
couldnt keep Zuccotti Park open, it couldnt explain Normcore,
and it couldnt keep our friendships intact. We needed
something stronger.

We needed magic.
ECOLOGICAL,
EMOTIONAL,
WHATEVER
 C HAOS MA GI C

The fundamental element of magic is the ability to manifest or

sublimate things, whether theyre emotions, states of being,
people, or the Statue of Liberty. Magic is the art of making
things appear or disappear, out of nowhere or into the void.
This magic, the lady-in-a-box, rabbit-in-a-hat form of magic,
is predicated on two questions: where did she go? And how
did we get here? When youre a baby, things are constantly
appearing out of fucking nowhere and vanishing with no hope
of return, until at some point you learn pattern recognition.
But lets not forget that on some level believing that the sun
will rise again is rooted in magical thinking.
 CHAOS MAGIC

My ex-boyfriend used to tell me witches are real in Colombia

because everyone believes in them. Belief at an individual
level changes you, and belief at a collective level changes the
world. But if you believe something strongly enough, can you
morph the individual into the collective?

Over cheeseburgers and beer, a friend explained an idea we

were bound to ruin: Chaos Magic. On a bargain basement level,
Chaos Magic lives in the same realm as the cult of positive
thinking. But it goes beyond making mood boards of high-
end apartments youd like to will into your possession. Belief
becomes a technology that creates change.

7
Chaos Magic creates realities which are temporary and
subjective. Its not a tool for changing others its a tool for
changing yourself. You opt into whatever belief system you
think will help you reach your intended goals: Wall Streets
Confidence Fairy, your Fairy Godmother, or the Church of
Agape. Chaos Magic isnt just believing in The Secret, its
deciding to believe in The Secret to begin with. Mixing your
own Kool-Aid, deciding how strong to make it, knowing when
to drink it and when to stop, is Chaos Magic in practice. Its
radical DIY that uses reality as the only necessary operating
system. This is not to say that Kool-Aid will always take you on
the path you intended. Drink too much and you might end up
lost, alone, or dead.

8
LOST, ALONE,
OR DEAD

9
 CHAOS MAGIC

Chaos Magic is what happens after will. Its the antidote to the
tryhard problems that come with overthinking everything. If
you really want change you have to go deeper.

Like branding, Chaos Magic is mostly concerned with

inception. But where branding is about implanting ideas in the
brains of an audience, Chaos Magic is about implanting ideas
into your own. Both practices depend heavily on the creation of
sigils + mantras. There is a tight homology here:

SIGIL = LOGO
MANTRA = SLOGAN

One guide says for your magic to work, you should make a
sigil, forget about it, then stare at it at the moment of climax.
Fuck someone wearing Chanel, stare at the label while youre
cumming, and youll become Karl Lagerfeld. Chaos Magic, like
branding, is desire doomed to be commercial.

10
 CHAOS MAGIC

With respect to magic, our friends, Chronos, and God,

were going to try to avoid ruining the problem. The
fuzzy uncertainty that floats around the idea of magic
is more important than a slapdash explanation of how
magic works.

K-HOLE took a stab at answering a few questions: Do we

use magic? Do brands use magic? Does magic exist, or is
it just a placeholder for our ignorance? Are we hearing
voices, doing voices, or both?

11
 HACK YOUR
LIZARD BRAIN
 DARK AR T S C OMPE TEN C I ES

A. Founder Mode
The startup founder, the Kool-Aid mixer, poor-but-rich
(a collapsed masculine binary). Founders turn ambient anxiety
what is the future, how will we make money, whats a good
investment, etc. into specific fear in the forms of capital and
employee misery (see K-HOLE #3, the Brand Anxiety Matrix).
Founders often create real, tangible things that are worse than
the anxiety theyre responding to in the first place.

13
 DARK ARTS COMPETENCIES

B. Forecaster Mode
la Cayce Pollard, this is someone who is early on her time
signature, who can see or sense the future or correctly intuit
the knowledge of crowds. This person knows, and knows
early. She knows without knowing how she knows. This person
modulates time (see K-HOLE #2, Prolastination). But seeing
the future changing it. Networks of power and influence
remain the same.

14
 SEEING THE
FUTURE

CHANGING I T
 C. Stealth Mode
This person can disappear in America, has the ability to
modulate their visibility (see K-HOLE #1, Fragmoretation).
They hide in plain sight, behind NDAs, or by means of actual
escape. They weaponize their burnout trading in social
capital for actual control. After all, who doesnt love to be
noticed, especially when theyre missing?

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 ORACLES (OR FREE-RADI CALS)

Who was the Oracle of Delphi? What was she huffing? And why
did Aristotle believe her? In Grexit times, she still holds her
own as a riposte to the conservatism of making sense.

First of all, smart-ass, she was a group of people. Like many

occult technologies, the oracle used the alchemical quality of
group dynamics to transform inside jokes, gossip, and petty
infighting into advice fit for a king. The oracle processed
groupthink as poetry. Its pronouncements containerized
ambiguity. The oracles way of creating new things in the world
was to convert nonsense into sense.

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 ORACLES (OR FREE-RADICALS)

Collective creativity has always been a messy business.

(Maybe thats why monogamy has been around so long?)
And in the end some configurations are more stable than
others. The sturdy simplicity of two (the couple) vs. the
asymmetry of three (the thrupple) vs. the parallelism of four
(the double date) vs. the improvisation of more (the squad).

Looking around at the dynamics of contemporary art

collectives, its easy to see these relationships at play.
Collective A is stable: two symmetrically bonded pairs.
Collective B is a troublesome three one strong bond and one
molecule always bouncing in place, threatening to become a
free radical. Collective C is a little like collective D, a collection
of free radicals except without all the girls. But watch out.
Too much testosterone turns bromance into bromageddon.
 NO T REN D
FORECASTER IS
AN ISLAND ;-)
 GHOST I N G

In Los Angeles, youre always late. And youre in no position

to make demands to the Clock Winders that live in the East.
You are a perpetual late responder never the first to know,
but always on call for the aftermath. Living in constant
temporal disjunction, your days begin by checking an endlessly
scrolling inbox. Like youre at an Olive Garden being served the
bottomless bread basket from hell.

Communication breakdown happens when all of your

communication is asynchronous. You wake up to hundreds of
unread emails, 70 unread texts from group chats, a missed call
from a student debt collector, and GoDaddy.
 GHOSTING

Waking up in L.A. is a traumatic experience; its very un-chill.

The hikes, juice cleanses, B12 shots in the ass those are all
crisis management, not preventative care. But waking up in
L.A. is also a magical experience. Information comes out of the
black hat with no identifiable point of origin. It simply appears.

In L.A. you have the power to determine when youre seen by

others and when you go dark, and how intimate the settings
are when you make an appearance. Its like MTVs Unplugged
acoustic, emotional, flanked by white flowers and candles.

Moving to L.A. isnt about disappearing its about

modulating between being there and ghosting. Like the
rabbit, were not afraid of being sucked down the rabbit hole.
Were freaked out about how and when were going to get
pulled out of the void by our ears.
 THE
AUSTER I T Y OF
I MAGINAT ION
 K-HOLE OF THE FU T URE
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 CASE STUDY #1: POTTERMORE

A major side-effect of the Harry Potter franchises spell is

providing everyone with a new means of analyzing the internal
constitution of the people around them: the Sorting Hat. A
magical device that plops Hogwarts frosh into one of the four
Hogwarts Houses, the Sorting Hat answers the question everyone
has on the first day of school: who am I?

Today, everyone might intuit that Hillary is a Slytherin, that

every hero lands in Gryffindor, and that nobody in Hufflepuff and
Ravenclaw really matters. Compare this to astrology, in which
theres an objective correlation between your late autumn birth
and your predilection to hold onto grudges until you die. The
cultural power and fun of the Sorting Hat is that nobody knows
who belongs in what house for sure.

Pottermore is a complex social network-cum-roleplaying game

officially endorsed by JK Rowling. But before Pottermaniacs
can read canon unpublished H.P. lore, they must be sorted into
Hogwarts houses through a seven-question multiple-choice quiz
designed by Rowling herself. Given the choice, would you rather
chug a potion that would grant you glory, wisdom, love or power?
From a fan POV, where JK Rowlings word is tantamount to Gods,
Pottermore is divisive and has spurred its own share of identity
crises. You thought you were bound for Slytherin, but ended up
in Gryffindor. You instinctively doubt the quiz. How could it
possibly know how far you would go to make something of yourself?
How could it possibly know your sorrow?

The Sorting Hat helps us see how magic is already an organizing

principle in the world around us. Were talking about magic, not
wizardry. People believe they are Slytherin; they dont believe
they can fly on brooms.

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 CASE STUDY #2: BB GONE ROGUE

The proliferation of BB cream in the international beauty market

began with the introduction of the popular Korean product
to American audiences back in 12. Like a K-Pop band with a
multiplicity of members whose name was hard to catch (was it
Beauty Balm? Blemish Butter?) BB cream suggested a cultural
technology related to, but more advanced than the American
version. The facial equivalent of going outside without your
contacts in, BB creams promised to smear your face into a blurry
little cloud.

BB creams went viral first as premium Korean branded imports,

then as additions to every self-respecting Sephora-carried line.
Models, moms, dads and dermatologists slapped on BB cream and
were straight out the door. No single brand could take credit for
the expansion of the BB in the American landscape.

BB is a brand particle, not a brand. As a prefix, this additional

information (the mark of BB) didnt add specificity. Quite
the opposite, it added a sense of generality, a magic blur
insinuating new multi-ingredient and multi-purpose qualities to
a previously bland host product. BB signified new. BB meant:
Were not going to explain how it works.

While face creams marched down the alphabet into CC ranges,

the BB particle spread into other categories altogether,
supercharging heat-protecting blow dry serum, eye shadow,
cigarettes, and a variety of collagen-enhancing drinks.

When bb rose to prominence as a genderless form of address

equally suited to ones casual acquaintances, sex partners, and
family members, we knew it had jumped the shark. Less sexual than
babe, less intimate than baby, and shorter than bae, bb retained
a level of ambiguity akin to its creamy, facial twin. While hey
baby would certainly be crossing a line in an iMessage to your
manager, sup bb might be OK.
BIG BROTHER ,
AS ALWAYS, IS
WAT CHI NG
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 SELF -
DEST RUC T ION
V IA SUCCESS
 100 DAYS LATE R

We said we needed magic. Did we get it?

Magic is a quality of energy that has always been
palpable to me, said Emily. I believe in magic and I believe
that the important things I do are magic.
I wouldnt say that, Greg replied. I dont know if I think
magic is real. It's always beyond the way I actually rationalize
and experience the world. Im not sure Ive ever experienced it.
But the idea that its out there is interesting to me.
Sean chimed in: Magic isnt an effect. Its a way to create
change through processes that you cant entirely understand.
There are aspects of human reality we cant measure. I believe
there are supernatural things that happen.

31
At that moment, the lights flickered, and a glass of water
inexplicably shattered on the desk across the room. Everyones
phones chimed with a group text from Dena:
That moment when witches and wizards realize they
have magical powers, when the little guy disappears the zoo
glass and lets out the snake, its all because of some intense
emotional experience. Thats magic, thats when the spork
bends, when youre so in love or so upset that your emotions
affect the physical world.
The unexplainable, quipped Chris. You cant explain
something, you say its magic. Like the dog trying to keep
the fish alive. You could say its a very emotional dog, who
has a thing about fish, but the fact that its captured on
camera is magical too theres a .01% chance that its totally

32
 100 DAYS LATER

manufactured, super-advanced CGI. But Im just going to say

its magic. Those DJ sets last night were magical. The feeling
in the air and the auras were magical.
Yeah, magic means you can give yourself an opportunity
to stop analyzing things, Greg replied. Even for us how
are we going to figure out whats next? How are we going to
bend all the information at our disposal into a new truth?
Sometimes, its better to leave things alone.
Its like the game Magic: The Gathering, said Chris.
Play a certain card, and anything could happen rats, infinite
squirrels anything.
 100 DAYS LATER

We glanced around at each other with a look that was half

resignation, half relief. We were swimming in a universe
of squirrels. It felt good.
 K-HOLE IS A T REN D
FOREC AS T I N G GR OUP
FOUN DE D BY GRE G FONG,
SEAN MONAHAN, EMI LY
SE GAL, C HRIS SHE R R ON
AND DENA YAGO.

AUGUST 2015
NE W YORK &
LOS ANGELES
KHOLE .NE T
IMAGE CREDITS / p4 - John Muir Glacier via Wikipedia / p5 - Singapore Zoo via woopigsingapore.com / p6 - Clive Brunskill via tumblr.com / p7 - John Giles via
tumblr.com / p8 - Diving In High Heels via fugly.com / p12 - F-35 Helmet via lockheedmartin.com / p13 - Thomas Hoepker via tumblr.com / p14 - via instagram.
com / p15 - via tumblr.com / p16 - via blueangels.tistory.com, via tumblr.com / p17 - via tumblr.com / p18 - via teslamotors.com / p21/24
via flickr.com / p22 - Peacocks By Design via outwalkingthedog.wordpress.com / p25 - Braces by Rumi Baumann via tumblr.com, Yasuyoshi Chiba via tumblr.
com / p29 - via tumblr.com / p30 - Frozen Brainstorm by Steve Jurvetson via flickr.com, Dan Kitwood via tumblr.com / p31 - via tinyhouseblog.com, via tumblr.com