The Technomancer

(Mixed Media/Cyanotype by Nick Norris)

It’s rough moving through the foot traffic in the Embarcadero. Crowds amass among each of the tables set out in the market. Bodies brush up against me. The mindset I’ve gained from being homeless in these streets fears for the final five dollars in my pocket. I pull through the crowd, pushing through a couple of congested pockets of people.

After dipping into the entrance of an alley, I see an unassuming man against the wall, behind a table. Laid atop the table are pieces of machinery and various parts of electronics. There’s a hard disk drive with eldritch sygaldry carved into its body. Gold fills the grooved patterns of these unfamiliar symbols. I pick up a motherboard beside it. The image of the Vitruvian Man man stretches its limbs across the entire back of it. There’s no trace of paint or polymer raising against the surface to make the image.

“What is this?” I ask.

The man gives the smallest of bows so that layers of warm clothing bundled around his body and face only slightly shifts. “I am a technomancer, young man,” he responds. “I craft working machine parts with occult art. In each piece, I program spells within the data.”

I couldn’t afford to purchase his art back then, but the idea of technomancers in the world is a fascinating mystery. I made the cyanotype The Technomancer as a fantasy of the technomancer’s work gone haywire:

In a remote area, a computer sits sinisterly in the middle of an empty basement. The screen is inert until lines of lit text pierce through the darkness of the screen. An arcane symbol appears as the SPELL.BIOS initiates. The event produces enough energy to pull massive coils from the walls and the ground into massive tentacles. They begin to wrap around the monitor and the table it sits on top like a predator coiling around its prey.