animism – Mitchell Pluto

Maps of Transformation by Tim White

Ancestor, February 2024. Cardboard, feathers and found materials.

We live inside a culture whose overriding goal is to keep us distracted, afraid, addicted and constantly triggered and disconnected from our authentic selves.

Snakes, ladders and chaos Tim White August 2025. Acrylic paint, oil pastel and paint marker on industrial paper

Art is an antidote, a map guiding us to an authentic lived experiences and a life-affirming revolutionary principle.

John Trudell, North American Indigenous activist, declared, ‘When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art’. In this context, of what therapist and medical doctor, Gabor Maté calls a ‘toxic culture’ the need for truth is critical and urgent.

The idea that art and poetry, and all the rich diverse forms of expression which connect us to each other can immunize us against the malignant virus of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy is deeply appealing. That this wisdom comes from the deep spring of Indigenous knowledge and resistance, and despite the ongoing depredations of colonialism, is compelling.

The broken bits of the world I collect and use: the scraps of paper, plastic and metal, the discarded and rejected materials are clues and tools helping me puzzle my way out of the colonial-capitalist labyrinth. They are medicines too, the materia of transmutation, which once distilled provide essential healing and deepened connection with the biosphere and all it nurtures.

As African American feminist bell hooks writes, ‘The moment we choose to love we begin to move against oppression’. This process of resistance, of healing through love, is an essential part of overthrowing the dismal and diminished life the masters of misery want to force on us. And it is from this love, from the sources within our imagination and in solidarity with others we can assemble a ‘new world inside the shell of the old’.

For me, the found and discarded objects and materials used in my art carry a promise and reminder of profound possibilities subsumed in everyday life beyond the superficial substitutions of a hollowed-out AI virtuality. That even everyday junk and detritus call out to be up-cycled and politicised demanding a place as emblems of a transformed future, and are always on hand as building blocks for a new world, is a source of joy and inspiration.

Listen like a rock. Sculpture and collage

©Tim White, November 2025

cultivation phases of the basal ganglia and paleomammalian soul

the psychic robot, how our animal selves passed through the portions of different brain territories. the snakes, the monkey scribe, and now the circuit board advisory city-state. clay tablets as a big golem, ideas as ghosts informing the brain

Hunter of Images and Energies the Art of Miguel Ángel Huerta Zuñiga

In 2009 I started a correspondence with Chilean painter and Surrealist Miguel Ángel Huerta Zuñiga. When I first saw his work I was surprised he was expressing a deep exploration into the animistic mind like I was. Later that year in November, Miguel invited me to join El Umbral Secreto the first Surrealist Exhibition in Latin America since 1940. Over the years we have continue to be very good friends. I wanted to share some of Miguel’s work. I also asked him a few questions that would balance his image with word.

Do you think a computer will organize our experience for us?

I don’t think so and I hope it is not so, otherwise our particularity of being part of the cosmos will have been lost

Have you experienced synchronicity?

On some occasions I have felt synchronicity, but I am not very sure that’s what it was.

What do you think the future holds for handmade art ? Do you think the image on the screen will replace the object?

I believe and hope that technology will not replace painting and sculpture because the feeling that the artist creates in talismans, in objects of power lead to another reality and that link with the cosmos will be lost.

To what extent do you think our brain will merge with a simulated or fabricated imitation of reality?

I worry that our brains will merge with faux simulated or fabricated reality. I think our relationship with the cosmos would be lost

**Miguel Ángel Huerta Zuñiga, Chilean Painter**

Why I’m Interested in Voodoo

The Crossroads, a cosmogram that encourages foresight and safe travel. a study of the vèvè.
12inx12in acrylic, chalk paint and collage

Written by Mitchell Pluto© May, 28, 2021

In Milo Rigaud’s Secrets of Voodoo he describes the les lois ‘the laws’ as intermediaries between human beings and the cosmic source. These unseen constitutional agents are waves known as Loas who superintend the pattern of the world. During ritual and geometric drumming initiates tune into a loa and a transmission ‘mounts’ a recipient, known as ‘cheval’ which means horse. From the outside the person is possessed or entranced-from the word entrance. Similar to an artist being a cheval ridden by inspiration (in spirit). The psychic transit arrives, stays and expires while vertical lines are cross bounded by horizontal lines producing a square (or diamond) that channels (even generates) cosmic awareness into a personal experience.

The psychic map contained within the veve’s is a cross road of any place, it is also at the same time a quantum world of everywhere. I do not practice Voodoo or any religion in a traditional process. What I notice about active practitioners in Voodoo is trance states and a deep relationship with inspiration.

Excessive emphasis on power points and direction makes space magical and useful. Realistically on a mundane level, lines retain power in structure, a sentence of words or even numbers counting paced events on a clock. The Veves in voodoo reflect such effects as points and lines being the living representation of a spirit who is a geometric being. This is not unlike other cosmograms using geometry, including the Sri Yantra, Kolams and Navajo sand painting to mention a few.

Health, abundance, growth and love are all recognized universally as good and beneficial directions for the best outcomes. Positive end results, efficiency, a management of temporal lobe quakes and a thriving neural network are in accordance to the patterns of Loas. It cannot be argued maintaining this pattern is essential to balance and living well. Magic’s best purpose is healing and restoring the incomplete.

Points and lines (or particles and waves) will appear serpentine. The serpent is an expression of a time tense, a movement of a day and night in space. Only a focusing meditating point can open an omnivoyant eye in the center square (or center diamond). Veve’s along with the crafted tiles made by Islamic artisans have fixed these particles and waves in a suspended state for us to study the hidden qualities of an interior state. In my limited personal experience spirits look more like unfolding flowers without interruption, then they look like replicas of people.

_{I intentionally borrow from authentic beliefs. I mimetically blend ideas together. My intention is not to marginalize the value of traditional Voodoo}

Hidden Folk and Special Effects of the Brain

_{Master of Reflections From my series The Hidden Folk, 12inx15in mixed media. Investigates suggestibility and sympathetic magic.}

_{The Master has a forehead of mirrors that captures the on looker. Whatever the master says changes the shape of the viewers reflection. The warden of petals regulates and enhances scent and can influence specific moods of an entire group. The Prophet of mu is the last representative of mu. a close encounter with the medium has made people become more conducive to psychic waves.}

The Poet Guillaume Apollinaire described a hidden world as Surreal. Although Surrealism became popular in the 1920’s there has always been an omnipresent clue among all cultures of a hidden world. The Icelandic phrase, huldufólk is a substitution for a name what would otherwise disrupt the hidden world and cause an encounter with it. While most of us are usually not suggestively affected by taboos there is a unique percentage of people in Iceland who do believe the hidden world is possible.

This is not far from asking someone if they believe in people from another space.

The Surrealist’s methods of accessing the subconscious were not new. Many of the techniques of surrealism rely on animism, pareidolia and apophenia.

These three special effects of our consciousness influence our beliefs and attitudes subconsciously. Animism is our oldest built in belief system. Under the suggestibility of the animistic brain every person. place or thing has spirit. This would also include power and expression as an ability to change events in an environment. As simple as sanctifying a successful hunt/crop by painting a picture of the future in the present. As animism believes that everything is an agent of expression or spirit, pareidolina impacts how one perceives this channel.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the faerie realm and what we would consider inanimate or motionless objects. Like seeing a face in a tree. Apophenia impresses upon how we organize what we perceive during pareidolina. Where as an abnormal encounter with a face in the tree that could be nothing at all, apophenia insists, sometimes obsessively, that this experience, seeing a face in the tree, means something more than it does. Apophenia places most people at risk because it can be dogmatic and unquenchable under a false conclusion.