[-empyre-] cyber-animism

[Tamiko Thiel]

Hi Y'all,

I'm not sure at this point if I'm supposed to be 'on' this week or next 
week, but since I have some spare moments during a plane ride to compose 
an email I thought I'd fire off a couple of curve balls.

I want to pick up John Craig Freeman's ball on monuments and memorials 
in public squares, and Davin Heckman's ball on AR as 'folk practice' by 
which he meant graffiti, and throw then even further:

The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the 
first forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult 
artifacts. The perception of an entire sphere of existence surrounding 
us but invisible to those without the proper "sight" has been with us 
from the beginning and is only lacking today in atheists who don't 
believe in science. Especially in cultures with animist folk practices 
like Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism etc etc the profane world is 
still strongly augmented with saints and spirits, and the images and 
effigies that represent their presence. Plus the large number of 
nominally Protestant peoples who talk to God and believe in angels and 
aliens lead me to believe that the number of people who believe that the 
only world around us is what we see is small indeed.

My favorite book on this topic is Margaret Wertheim's "Pearly Gates of 
Cyberspace," which was written at the height of the VR and (the first) 
virtual worlds craze in the 1990s, but can be applied equally well to 
AR. We had a vast space that we could populate at will and we called it 
the heavens, until the advancing sciences drove the boundaries further 
and further back. I agree with Wertheim that this is why virtual worlds 
and AR are both so captivating, because cyberspace gives us back the 
huge canvas that we used to have - but it is blank, not populated by 
eons of cult practices or under priestly control.

Enough for one post.

Also, probably because I neglected to send in a recent bio, the one that 
was posted to the list was from over ten years ago with a broken website 
link, so here's an update with functioning link:

Tamiko Thiel (www.mission-base.com/tamiko/) is an American media artist 
based in Munich. She is developing the dramatic and poetic capabilities 
of various forms of virtual and augmented reality as a medium for 
exploring social and cultural issues, often focusing on site-specific 
works. She shows internationally at venues such as the Fondazione 
Querini Stampalia in Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 
Tokyo, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the International Center for Photography in 
New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and in London, and 
at media art festivals such as Siggraph and ISEA. Her work has been 
supported by grants from institutions like the Japan Foundation, the MIT 
Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the City of Munich, the Berlin 
Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the IBM Innovation Award. She is a co-founder 
of the Manifest.AR cyberartists group, and is spearheading the 
Manifest.AR intervention at the 2011 Venice Biennial.