4/ Vass: Throughout history, mantras have been tools for meditation and transformation. What happens when those same repetitive structures become computational? Can technology also become a spiritual practice? @sashastiles : It absolutely is for me. I’m not religious, but I am deeply spiritual, and for me spirituality comes down to attention, presence, curiosity. Insight. That applies as much to coding and working with datasets, or entering into dialogue with a machine, as it does to dipping a brush into ink and practicing calligraphy, handling semi-precious beads, or reverently turning the pages of a book from centuries ago. We often forget that technologies are ancient. Writing is a technology. Poetry is a technology. Prayer beads are a technology. Mantras themselves are technologies: systems of repetition designed to alter attention, memory, consciousness. The desire for insight, illumination, understanding is technology’s deepest root. So much of what we’ve invented is, in one way or another, an attempt to extend what we can perceive, know, remember, imagine. To reach beyond the limits of the individual mind. I’ve been thinking about all this a lot in my recent work around Jangar, the Kalmyk-Mongolian oral epic, where I’m exploring oral poetry, mnemonic traditions, and prayer beads alongside code, encryption, and generative systems. I spent countless hours hand-coding analog binary malas as translations of what are, to me, sacred texts: bits of poetry that I come back to over and over and over again in order to find myself, to make sure I do not lose myself and my heritage and my endangered traditions. The process echoes the practice of Kalmyk women who, in the wake of Soviet religious persecution and the destruction of Buddhist temples and texts, covertly encoded prayers and sacred teachings into the patterns of prayer beads. These malas are mantras, too. And it all feels increasingly urgent and, yes, sacred to me in a world where our attention is fragmented and our minds are continually pulled in different directions. Repetition becomes a form of resistance to fragmentation. We need something we can return to, handle, hold onto. A discipline. An anchor. A root. And then there’s the paradox of repetition and individuality. We all pass through the same fundamental human experiences — being born, falling in love, losing the people we love, confronting our own mortality — but for each of us, each time, it happens as if for the first time. An experience is ancient, but our own experience is entirely new. There’s something profoundly consoling in that contradiction, and it’s inherent in the mantra. The words have been spoken before, perhaps thousands or millions of times, but the act of uttering them, reading them, receiving them is happening now, in this particular body, in this particular moment. Which is why we turn to familiar poems in times of great joy and great pain. Repetition doesn’t erase individuality; it gives individuality a pattern in which to belong. Ritual and algorithm are both structures for this kind of recognition and renewal. They establish a pattern we can return to, but returning never means arriving at precisely the same place. I think that’s part of why I’ve felt compelled to let HEART MANTRAS unfold as an ongoing series over the years. The system repeats endlessly without repeating exactly. It returns again and again without returning to the same place: recurrence without sameness. Not repetition as redundancy, but repetition as presence and attention.