[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: MODERNITY'S SPELL

[Joanna Price]

There is much magic that deals with the art of follow through, that is
turning intent into will and will into action; on the other side of that
coin, there are darker arts that involve traps, prisons, gilded cages*.  *Magic
can be a simultaneously participatory and emancipatory action upon one's
environment, it allows you to change something and in doing so, it imbues
you with the fundamental knowledge that you have agency. this is innovation
and creativity. the darker side turns the magician from a participant to a
user. This is my provocative proposition: User experience (UX) is the dark
side of participant experience because the user does not have agency, he
gives it up in exchange for the gilded cage. And these are not metaphors,
so much as representations. These things aren't *like *magic, they
*are *magic. Disappointing
magic, boring magic, because it isn't miraculous and it doesn't condone the
giving up of power. I believe the impetus to use analogies and metaphors
when discussing magic is the distinctly postmodern tendency to put as much
distance between consciousness and experience as possible. But maybe it's
only disappointing and boring because we have decided that if it's real, it
must be disappointing and boring. There is no reason why we can't have
beautiful, exciting, inspiring, inclusive, exhilarating magic.
Participatory rituals. The modernization spell doesn't have to be a curse,
it just happens to feel like one with some frequency. (I may be projecting,
it's my perception that this is a common feeling)

I'm not sure how to fit in this kind of practice and to prioritize it; I'm
also not sure how to design it -- obviously cultural appropriation is a not
respectful of that culture, but it also I think necessarily weakens the
connection between intent and will, to invite in methodologies or beliefs
or props that are associated with older intents belonging to other people.
I'm super curious what people think a positive magic looks like, or good
ritual design is, in 2019.

-Joanna

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 5:48 AM WhiteFeather <whitefeather.hunter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Such rich musings about Dying Earth, the 'whole world gone ruderal' and
> magic as forgotten technology, particularly connected to disappeared
> language systems. I enjoyed reading your words very much, Tony, and also
> contemplating the shamanism of rubble, refuse and marginal spaces of
> capitalist 'enterprise' where decay/rubbish entities cohabit with trauma
> carriers, Fabi. Can we say that in our carrier bags, we hold powerful
> transmutation artifacts brought about by traumas endured, whether personal,
> intergenerational or global/ atmospheric? Lucian, I, too, possess the
> ancestral baggage of the potato famine diaspora (Irish Canadian), which on
> one side of my family manifested as aching poverty, mental illness,
> abandoned children, alchoholism and a grandfather whose summer weekend
> pastime was scavenging the city dump for anything useful/ interesting/
> magical. As I read your segments of writing, I was also thinking of Robin
> Wall Kimmerer's graceful invitation to become indigenous to place, and how
> that invitation has been extended lovingly and directly to you by your
> partner.
>
> In reading some of the other contributions, I was immediately struck with
> one of the core ideologies, for me, of magic, witchcraft, technology and
> craft in general: political action toward flattening hierarchies. I wonder
> if a dys(u)topian future features, most prominently, the end of all
> hierarchies in its metaphorical profile--a structural collapse that erases
> all *built up *meanings of human technological accomplishments and
> manipulations embedded in language. Start-up companies and investment
> banking are reduced to faded plastic half-decimated by microbes that
> metabolize the polymerized, imprinted sigils of credit systems.
>
> I understand the magic of technology, as it is used for capitalist
> accumulation or 'state magic', as the magic of obfuscation where material
> and labour origins are neatly compartmentalized and made invisible, related
> to what you wrote, Tony: "much present technology is continually trying
> to imitate what magic looks like (or at least, what it *thinks* magic
> looks like)". Culturally, we have come to think of magic as simply an
> invisible/ intangible (disembodied) force and this seems highly
> problematic. Magic-makers are too then made invisible, and with them,
> poverty, addiction and any alternative POV. In such an instance, all anyone
> would ever know of my grandfather was the tidily branded boxes he made in
> the corrugated cardboard factory, without ever smelling the whiskey that
> put stories on his breath or feeling the freedom of ice skating around his
> scrapped together fishing shack on the frozen bay. I'll circle back to this
> below.
>
> My experiences thus far, working between craft, academic art, science
> (biotech) and magic has been one of encountering continuous tense relations
> between privileged intellectual positioning and body/material-based
> enactments - these epistemic differences are classed, and
> credentialed/accredited disproportionately in capitalistic frameworks. A
> very challenging aspect I want to highlight is hierarchical structuring
> between craft/technique/technology and institutional ideation. There is a
> wordless magic I know: onto-epistemological acts of making by hand,
> including collecting 'waste' for creative recomposition, crafting materials
> and allowing them to speak their quiet presences into being - seen,
> touched, realized. Any accompanying words are cross-lingual or poetic,
> either partially non/new-sensical/invented (a la Haraway and Barad) or
> openly interpretive in order to wedge apart the structure of literal
> language and let the magic flow through the cracks.
>
> Magic-making for me, then, is conducted instead primarily through praxis:
> with physical materials, tools and methods. Malleability is extended to our
> anatomies, to our own malleus bone reverberating on our eardrums with the
> sounds of spoken utterances. In this way, I take a feminist position
> (referencing Jane Bennett among New and/or Feminist Materialists) that
> language is haptic in origin, and material agency is what is worked with to
> make magic (magic is material) - whether black fossil ooze or fresh blood.
> Any sigils used to signify magical intentions are always dependent on the
> cooperation of their material substructures.
>
> [image: spells for cells WhiteFeather Hunter.JPG]
> Spells for cells.
>
> In my current work with tissue engineering technologies, part of my
> critique is around the obfuscation of body materials (obfuscated by
> marketing words like 'clean') and fossil fuel dependent industrial
> processes/tools. There is in fact nothing clean about acts of appropriating
> the material agency of other beings, to acquire the blood magic that is
> used to grow cells in a petri dish, no matter how sterile the biosafety
> cabinet. Obsession with purity and containment, counter or in response to
> the ruderal, demands intellectual and physical compartmentalization
> (containment, emotional asepsis) and this is first carried out on layers of
> paper with author-izations. Witchcraft would essentially resist this tricky
> spell of modernity, methinks... I see ruderal affect as ambiguous and
> contaminating, its networks are more-than-words-or-numbers communication
> technologies. Its toxin uptake and asphalt corruption is wordless. Its
> toppling of signs at the sides of roads and its imposter hormones are the
> pidgin of colonized dirt. It simply is, in action via unspoken enzymatic
> exchange, symbiosis and other responsive / interrogative gestures. Its
> *is-ness* is process rooted in being, and where magic resides.
>
> I have certainly rambled on a bit here, but I hope my weedy
> workings-through of these things can still contribute to our mutual
> development of what feels like a very important and gorgeous conversation!
>
> WhiteFeather
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 10:36 PM Anthony Discenza <adiscenza at cca.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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 *already*, 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: *tree, wind, water, sky, bird, person*.
>> 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 *properties*, 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…
>>
>>
>>
>> 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…
>>
>>
>>
>> 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 *really* take a
>> hold of; let alone a million...
>>
>>
>> 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 *Viriconium* stories and
>> Gene Wolfe’s epic mind-fucking *Book of the New Sun*. 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’ *Roadside
>> Picnic). *The thing about Dying Earth stories is that their affect 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 *we are in the
>> future*. 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?)
>>
>>
>>
>> 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 *thinks* magic looks
>> like). This is the essence of the idea of interfaces being *frictionless*:
>> 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 *The Tempest.*
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks to all,
>>
>> Tony
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 1:53 PM margaretha haughwout <
>> margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Dear -empyre-
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> This week we welcome Fabi Borges, Ricardo Dominguez, Tony Discenza, and
>>> Rhonda Holberton to tell us of their ongoing work with, and thinking
>>> around, *Magic and Technology*. 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Fabi Borges (BR) she/her/hers
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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).
>>>
>>>
>>> Ricardo Dominguez (US) he/him/his
>>> 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):
>>> https://tbt.tome.press/. 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> Tony Discenza (US) he/him/his
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> Rhonda Holberton (US) she/her/hers
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> --
>>> beforebefore.net
>>> --
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> --
>
> WhiteFeather Hunter
>
> *Transdisciplinary Artist*
> www.whitefeatherhunter.ca
>
> *Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow*
> / *Australian Government International RTP Scholar */ *UWA Postgraduate
> Scholar*
> University of Western Australia, School of Design/ SymbioticA Centre of
> Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences
> whitefeather.hunter at research.uwa.edu.au
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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