<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Thanks
for the intro Margaretha, and hello and thanks to everyone else participating
in this series of conversations; especially the first two weeks’ worth of
contributors for offering such a wealth of ideas and threads to follow.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">About
a year and half ago, I had been asked to write a very short piece about magic
for the Wattis Institute of the Arts in San Francisco. Every year, the Wattis hosts
a reading group that focuses on the work of a single visual artist; that year
it had been Seth Price and I had been invited to be a participant in that
particular reading group. Because Price had referenced an interest in magic in
some of his writing (without really elucidating what this meant for him), the
Wattis staff had asked me if I’d write something about magic, as they had
(mistakenly) acquired the impression this was something I was knowledgeable
about. I’m not sure if this is really true; for the most part, my knowledge and
thinking around magic has been shaped by a lifetime of reading science fiction,
fantasy, and supernatural literature. I bring all this up mostly just to give
some sense of how I’m coming to this conversation, I guess. I do have an
abiding interest in the idea of magic and the ways it gets defined, and I think
that it continues to play an enormous and complicated role in how we imagine
and construct the world around us. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">The
piece I wrote for the Wattis was fairly superficial, but the argument I was essentially
making was that magic is just a kind of technology. I wouldn’t even call it a
precursor to technology; I think it’s just a different approach to similar
ends. And perhaps it’s not even really that different, or at least maybe not in
the ways we think. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Of
course I’m using both terms in pretty broad senses; when I talk about magic, I’m
using the term to encompass a vast and rich array of practices spanning
thousands of years and many different cultures. When I’m talking about
technology, I mean any kind of system, methodology, or techniques—which after
all, is more or less the definition of technology. So <i>already</i>, magic and
technology feel tethered together, because whatever kind of magical practice
you might be engaging with, be it Wicca, or hoodoo, or the Tarot, or ceremonial magic, you are always working with techniques and
methodologies. From this standpoint, I would argue, language itself is a technology, maybe the ur-technology, since it facilitates all others. But
language is also the ur-form of magic, since all magic involves language: speaking,
utterances, naming, binding. Language is the first magic, because it captures
aspects of the world and binds them, shapes them, separates them into forms: <i>tree,
wind, water, sky, bird, person</i>. Essential to much magical practice is
knowing something’s name. To name a thing, to speak it, is to wield it. To know
the name of something is to know its <i>properties</i>, and through this
knowledge, these properties may be put to use, to shape and effect outcomes. Of
course, shaping and effecting outcomes is also very much the concern of
technology…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">I’m
currently writing this from Western Massachusetts, where I relocated last year
after two and half decades in the Bay Area. I’m out here to help manage two old
industrial buildings I co-own with a friend, and to put some
distance between myself and the increasingly dystopian/apocalyptic feeling I
had been experiencing in Northern California in recent years. This morning I was out on the roof, cutting up
sections of old asphalt roofing after having had a section of the roof replaced.
The sheets were incredibly heavy and unwieldy, coated with masses of cracked and fissured
tar probably 5 decades old. The surfaces called to mind the hides of primordial saurian leviathans, or the blasted surfaces of dead planets seen from some automated orbiting satellite.
The sections, flaking and crumbling, still had the acrid tang of bitumen, the hardened sludge of eons-dead life compressed into a hydrocarbon-rich ooze. I find myself
thinking about petroleum a lot lately, about the incomprehensible array of
stuff we produce from it, and how all these materials are rapidly rendering the
planet increasingly inhospitable for human life. For me, it is the essence of
the science fictional to contemplate the fact that our entire world runs on
energy and materials produced from a black, gooey slime made of plants and
animals that died hundreds of millions of years ago. But it also makes me think
of magic, specifically necromancy: the summoning up of the dead to serve our
needs. Black magic, indeed. But the magic circle is broken; the spell is
totally out of control; the unleashed energy of the dead is now reclaiming the
earth, returning it to a climate more suitable for itself…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Thinking
about petroleum makes me think about time, deep time, geologic time, cosmologic
time. I think about the way science enables us to be aware of events on these time
scales, but that doesn’t mean we can really comprehend them. Even a couple
hundred years is hard to <i>really</i> take a hold of; let alone a million...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">There’s
a sub-sub-genre of science fiction that’s known as The Dying Earth, after a
collection of stories and novels written between 1950 and the 70s by the late,
ultra-prolific author Jack Vance; other entries in the genre include John M.
Harrison’s phantasmagoric </span><i style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Viriconium</i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> stories and Gene Wolfe’s epic mind-fucking
</span><i style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Book of the New Sun</i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">. Dying Earth stories are usually set millions, even
tens of millions of years in the future. Earth is usually on its last legs; the
sun is getting larger and redder; the world itself has gone ruderal, having
endured the rise and fall of thousands upon thousands of civilizations—some hyper-technologic;
others barely out of the bronze age. In Dying Earth literature, the planet is portrayed as an
endless garden of ruins filled with the residue of countless civilizations that
no one remembers. Among these ruins lie artifacts with incomprehensible properties—some
the product of past super-technology, some of alien origin, some possibly magical,
although the difference, really, is meaningless; no one really knows what any
of this junk was originally for, how it works, or what bizarre hazards its use
may pose (somewhat like the depiction of the Zone in the Strugatsky Brothers’ </span><i style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Roadside
Picnic). </i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">The thing about Dying Earth stories is that their </span>affect<span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> is much
more similar to fantasy than science fiction—they tend to feel like sword and
sorcery stories on the surface, but the reader is always being reminded, in
both subtle and sometimes overt ways that </span><i style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">we are in the future</i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">. And it
is this far future setting that makes these stories inherently science fiction.
(If, as Ursula Le Guin says, the future in science fiction is always a metaphor, it's worth pondering what sort of metaphor might be at play in these kinds of stories?)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">But
I guess the Dying Earth is on my mind for a lot of reasons....but also because it’s a form that takes Arthur C.
Clarke’s famous dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic” and runs full tilt with it. Clarke's observation has always felt intrinsically right; it isn’t hard to
see that the technological and the magical are always running into each other, in large part because they share similar goals. Certainly , much present technology is continually
trying to imitate what magic looks like
(or at least, what it <i>thinks</i> magic looks like). This is the essence of
the idea of interfaces being <i>frictionless</i>: they are meant to resemble
the operations of magic (or again, at least the mainstream misprision of
magic), to allow us to feel like some eldritch mage, summoning up goods and
services out of the aether, commanding invisible spirits to do our bidding, like
Ariel in <i>The Tempest.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><i><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Well,
I sat down to just write some brief notes to get things rolling, and I see now
I’ve written over 1300 words. I was going to try and get back to the idea of the magic circle somehow...but perhaps I’ll just stop right here and see what
everyone else has to say.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Thanks
to all,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Franklin Gothic Book",sans-serif">Tony</span></p></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 1:53 PM margaretha haughwout <<a href="mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout@gmail.com">margaretha.anne.haughwout@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<div dir="ltr">Dear -empyre-<br><br>Many thanks to the Week 2 participants -- Ciclón, Lucia, Lucian, WhiteFeather, and Estephania -- We had a sluggish start to the week due to some technical hurdles, so I'm hoping Week 2 discussants will want to continue the conversation on the existing threads as we move into Week 3, MODERNITY'S SPELL.<br><br>This week we welcome Fabi Borges, Ricardo Dominguez, Tony Discenza, and Rhonda Holberton to tell us of their ongoing work with, and thinking around, <i>Magic and Technology</i>. The title MODERNITY'S SPELL is meant to invite thinking around how the joint projects of science, state, and market invoke ways of knowing (and dreaming) that seem, at first blush, entirely counter to that of magic, or as operating to deligtimize magical practice -- but over time may be seen as (often disempowering) spells of their own. This may be a thread you all will want to pick up, but you may have your own approach to the week too.<br><br><div>I am excited to learn more about Ricardo's take on Zapatista and Mayan technology, Fabi's approach to how 'we' may all be dreaming the same dream within Modernity, and Tony and Rhonda's thoughts on ways that technology and magic may not be all that different -- and what the implications of this is in capitalism. And all the things I haven't thought of, that has made this month so rich so far.<br></div><div><br></div><div>...<br></div><br>Fabi Borges (BR) she/her/hers<br>Fabiane M. Borges: Acts at the intersection between clinic, art and technology. She works as a Psychologist (in person and online) and as an essayist, having written and organized publications between academic journals, collections and personal books. She articulates two international networks/festivals: Technoshamanism (technology & ancestry) and Intergalactic Commune (art & space sciences). Since July 2019, she organizes SACIE (Subjectivity, Art and Space Sciences) a research program and artistic residencies in the Brazilian space program (INPE), where she develops a series of activities focused on Space Culture. She is the organizer of Extremophilia magazine, launched in 2018.<br><br>Some of her actions have been supported by institutions such as Goethe Institute, SESC, MAC, MAST, MAR, Museum of Tomorrow, Valongo Observatory, Ibirapuera Planetarium, Nucleus of Arts and New Organisms PPGAV / UFRJ - (Brazil), Center for Contemporary Art (Ecuador), Aarhus University - Department of Information Studies & Digital Design (Denmark), STWST / Ars Electronica (Austria), SenseLab Concordia University (Canada), XenoEntities (Germany), Transmediale (Germany), Grow Tottenham, Si Shang Art Museum (China), etc. She lives in São Paulo in a collective house that plants organic, organizes parties, concerts, meetings, workshops, etc (Casa Japuanga, SP).<br><br><br>Ricardo Dominguez (US) he/him/his<br>Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. In 2007 Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab with Brett Stalbaum, micha cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand initiated the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a geo-poetic cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Anza-Borrego desert at the edge of the U.S. and Mexico border): <a href="https://tbt.tome.press/" target="_blank">https://tbt.tome.press/</a>. The project was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It was also funded by CALIT2 and the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and international venues. The project was also under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010, UCSD, UC Office of the President, the FBI's U.S. Cyber-terrorist Division and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the UCSD, a Hellman Fellow, a Society for the Humanities Fellow (Cornell University), a Rockefeller Arts & Humanities Fellow (Bellagio Center, Italy) and a Principal Investigator at CALIT2/QI at UCSD.<br><br><br>Tony Discenza (US) he/him/his<br>Anthony Discenza is an interdisciplinary artist whose work subverts the production and distribution systems of mass media and the narratives it generates. In the late 1990s, Discenza began investigating the omnipresence of mediated imagery in contemporary life, using destructive processing of appropriated TV and film to create a series of immersive, projection-based works that amplify the affective space produced by these avenues of mass culture. This inquiry has expanded to include explorations of the relationships between textual, auditory, and visual systems of representation, in projects that have taken the form of street signage, digital photography, audio, sculptural installations, and writing.<br><br>Deeply influenced by speculative fiction, Discenza’s practice frequently employs descriptive language, incomplete or fragmentary information, and unreliable narrative to direct viewers towards absent or imagined experiences. Over the past several years, his focus has turned towards various production systems of cinema as well as the problematic conditions of artistic practice; interwoven with these investigations is an increasing use of parafictional gestures that situate projects in a zone of ambiguity and play. In 2018, Discenza completed a large-scale commission for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, working in collaboration with sound designers Gary Rydstrom and Josh Gold of Skywalker Sound to create a sonic re-imaging of a lost science fiction screenplay from the 1980s.<br><br>Discenza’s work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, V-A-C Foundation, the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, MOCA Cleveland, Objectif Exhibitions, the Wattis Institute for the Contemporary Arts, the Getty Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. His work is held in the collections of Kadist Foundation, SFMOMA, and the Berkeley Art Museum. He currently splits his time between Massachusetts, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.<br><br><br>Rhonda Holberton (US) she/her/hers<br>Rhonda Holberton holds a MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from California College of the Arts. Her multimedia installations make use of digital and interactive technologies integrated into traditional methods of art production. In 2014 Holberton was a CAMAC Artist in Residence at Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and was awarded a Fondation Ténot Fellowship, Paris. Her work is included in the collection of SFMoMA and the McEvoy Foundation and has been exhibited at CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, FIFI Projects Mexico City; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF; Berkeley Art Center; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Holberton taught experimental media at Stanford University from 2015-2017 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at San Jose State University. She lives and works in Oakland.<br><br><br>...<br><br>--<br><a href="http://beforebefore.net" target="_blank">beforebefore.net</a><br>--</div>
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